Burn Out Resignation of Skilled Staff

Burnout corrodes the quality of service to shoppers, and quality of service is essential to your profitability. Both the owner/operator and the retailing staff are at risk for burnout. Not surprisingly, researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and University of Hong Kong conclude that a significant cause of retailing staff burnout is the owner/operator herself or himself being burned out. Protect your business by heading off burnout in yourself.
     Organizational psychologists see the hallmarks of burnout as feelings of exhaustion, suspiciousness about the intentions of others, and doubts about the effectiveness of one’s own efforts on the job. Conscientious employees are at especially high risk for burnout. They end up resigning themselves to doing lower quality work than they believe they’re capable of doing and perhaps resigning from their employment. You don’t want to lose the contributions of your hard-working employees. Protect your business by heading off burnout in your staff.
     The findings of the Hong Kong researchers support the following as techniques to use:

• Tell yourself and your staff how you are doing. Encourage shoppers to give you feedback. Use a positive frame like, “In what ways might we do even better?,” rather than a negative frame like, “What do you dislike about our store?” From your knowledge as a retailing professional, carve out time each workday to assess your business performance, and at least once each week, give performance feedback—or have a supervisor give performance feedback—to each staff member.
• Remind yourself and your staff of the importance of the work you do. Shoppers are more likely to complain about flawed service than to praise skilled service. As a result, retailers can too easily forget that skilled service does make a difference in attracting and keeping customers.
• Rearrange job duties so people have new responsibilities. The researchers found that variety energizes burned-out staff by giving them a fresh perspective. Changes also relieve staff from the sorts of tasks most likely to cause burnout.
• To the degree that you can, allow each staff member to serve the customer throughout the purchase process. Organizational psychologists refer to this as “task identity.” By identifying with the complete task, the retail worker enhances identification with the shopper as a complete person rather than as a list of impersonal steps. One aspect of this is empowering employees to make decisions in areas associated with burnout. Handling complaints is one such area.

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