Employee Satisfaction and Enterprise Digital Transformation —— Empirical Evidence from the “Top 100 Employers of the Year in China”

In recent years, against the backdrop of the rapid development of innovative information technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, quantum computing platforms, blockchain, and 5G communication technologies, digital technology has become the core engine driving the high-quality development of the economy. In this paper, we study the impact of employee satisfaction on the digital transformation of enterprises by using the data of listed companies from 2011 to 2023 and the “Top 100 Best Employers of the Year in China” jointly released by Zhaopin and Peking University's Center for Social Research. The study finds that employee satisfaction has a positive impact on enterprise digital transformation, and this conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. The facilitating effect of employee satisfaction on enterprise digital transformation is more obvious in the high-tech industry group and the labor-intensive company group. Mechanism analysis shows that the degree of enterprise digital transformation is increased because the improvement of employee satisfaction can reduce the external financing constraints of the enterprise, improve the enterprise's risk-bearing ability and labor investment efficiency, and the above results are consistent with the enterprise's choice to work for the long-term value of the enterprise by improving employee satisfaction and at the same time improving the enterprise's productivity and financial performance, realizing the risk-bearing of the employees and the enterprise, alleviating the financing constraints, and then the above results are consistent with the logic of promoting enterprise digital transformation. This conclusion provides a theoretical basis for enterprises to re-appreciate the importance of employee satisfaction and the potential value of human capital, and also has certain significance in guiding enterprises to improve the degree of digital transformation.