By Hank Marquis

FOUND: The Missing Link to Digital Employee Satisfaction!

Image Credit: pexels.com/@joey-kyber-31917

Psychometrics are the missing link in digital employee experience. They measure perceptions, expectations, and the emotional side of service quality — the elements operational metrics can’t capture. With psychometrics, you learn not just what happened, but what it meant to the people who experienced it.

A complete understanding of digital employee experience requires both sides of the story: the producer view, which is operational, and the consumer view, which is psychometric. Without both, IT often ends up relying on assumptions rather than reality.

For those of us who built careers inside IT, it’s easy to hold on to old habits. We trust the dashboards, the uptime numbers, the throughput charts. But none of those reveal how employees experience the service. That’s the old, pre-digital way of thinking.

Choose to progress.

If the old approach isn’t telling you what you need to know, doubling down on it won’t help. Instead, switching to the perspective of today’s digital employee — someone working hybrid, mobile, and deeply dependent on the digital workplace — is essential. Their expectations shape their perceptions, and their perceptions shape the experience.

Many IT teams still rely on legacy proxies like NPS (released in 2010), CES (2003), or CSAT (1980!) They have their place, but none of them fully explain dissatisfaction. True understanding comes from measuring the full perception–expectation relationship over time, not isolated survey clicks.

Old habits are comfortable, but they no longer match the complexity of modern digital work. Operational monitoring alone can’t capture how people feel about reliability, clarity, responsiveness, or trust. The psychological and experiential side matters — and it has been missing for far too long.

Here’s a 5-point plan to modernize how you understand digital employee experience:

• Understand digital experience humanistically, using modern service-experience psychometrics that move beyond satisfaction alone and toward true quality of experience.
• Train IT leaders to interpret psychometric evidence. Use NPS, CES, and CSAT as helpful proxies, but rely on proper experience measurement to understand dissatisfaction and quality.
• Shift perspectives to the consumer — today’s digital employee — to understand what they expect and how they perceive the service over time.
• Expand beyond operational monitoring to include the human side of service, creating feedback loops that keep experience within the acceptable zone of tolerance.
• Regularly collect experience feedback from employees across the entire service, not just isolated transactions.

This psychometric approach is a core part of Completely Satisfied. It is also a foundational layer inside Hailee’s workgroup digital twin, which models employee perceptions, expectations, tolerance, and experience quality in a way that operational tools alone cannot. Doing this manually takes interviews, surveys, coding, segmentation, and weeks of interpretation. Hailee applies the same structure automatically, making the emotional and experiential side of service visible instead of hidden.

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

— END —