Proceed to Protect Your Staff from Insults

When frontline store employees are bombarded with verbal aggression from shoppers—shoppers who are feeling frustrated and those who are just being mean—we require that the employees refrain from firing right back. Far from surprising are the findings by University of Macau researchers that this restriction generates employee anger and that the anger corrodes store profitability. When under high stress, people fight or flee. Here, fight takes the form of active sabotage of the business’s standards and flight takes the form of ignoring even respectful customer requests.
     What the Macau studies do add to our knowledge is a way managers can ease this fight-or-flight anger: Maintain procedures and procedural justice for handling jaycustomer behavior. In the studies, procedural justice was measured by answers to questions about how store management handles employee concerns in general. Among the survey items were, “Have you been able to express your views and feelings?,” “Have procedures been applied consistently?,” “Have procedures upheld ethical standards?,” and “Have you been able to appeal an outcome?”
     When perceptions were of higher procedural justice, shoppers’ verbal aggression toward store staff was less likely to cause anger and the sabotage of good shopper service. It’s in the interest of management, then, to maintain excellent procedural justice. The pressure to do so, and to support employees with decisive action, became even greater when expectations for enforcement of mask requirements due to the COVID-19 pandemic were implemented. The risks grew to include physical and well as psychological damage to employees from aggressive consumers who refused to cover their faces. Anger and rigidity from both sides set off explosions.
     Store employees should also receive procedural justice when the rudeness comes from the bosses themselves. A supervisor reprimanding in front of a complaining customer the employee responsible for the shortfall may be intending to demonstrate respect for the customer. But this message is severely undercut by the failure of the manager to show respect to the salesperson in front of the customer. Guilt and shame are powerful emotions which can lead to dysfunctional consequences
     It’s best you not be harsh even when in private. Psychologists at New York University and University of Tulsa estimated that about 70% of retail employees do less well when more emphasis is placed on fixing the blame for the problem than on fixing the problem. Hold employees responsible, but fix the problem instead of fixing the blame.

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