Initiate Personal Initiative in FLEs

To be fully effective, frontline employees must identify customer needs. Studies at Monash University and Swinburne University of Technology find that FTEs—those staff in the store sales area or serving a shopper remotely—also need personal initiative. This means them being willing to move beyond their routine job duties in order to address otherwise unanticipated problems arising during retail transactions.
     An organizational environment supporting risk taking and learning from errors facilitates personal initiative. The research shows how a pair of individual attitudes also is important. One of the pair is called deep acting. It was demonstrated in the studies with high self-ratings on items like, “I try to actually experience the emotions that I must show.” At the other end of this dimension is surface acting, assessed by items like, “I must pretend to have the emotions I need to display for my job.” Going beyond routine job duties adds to the already considerable mental exhaustion arising from frontline work. Deep acting aligns emotions with values, easing the exhaustion.
     The other individual attitude dimension which supports personal initiative is called “prove orientation.” It was demonstrated with high self-rating on items like, “I enjoy it when others at work are aware of how well I am doing.” The opposite here is avoid orientation, demonstrated by agreement with items like, “I prefer to avoid situations at work where I might perform poorly.” People who regularly exercise personal initiative seek opportunities to demonstrate their abilities and accomplishments to others.
     Based on their own findings and those of others, the Monash and Swinburne researchers advocate placing in FTE positions people with personal initiative to a greater extent than they advocate cultivating personal initiative in FTEs who lack it. Persuading an employee at any level—not just FTEs—to even recognize an initiative deficiency in any sort of job duties—not just retail transactions—can be challenging.
     An email exchange I had with Nora Silver, now a professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, about this challenge yielded an illustrative anecdote. Nora described a conversation with a woman she supervised: “In the employee’s annual review, I told her the program she ran had been exactly the same for a number of years and that I'd like her to take more initiative to improve it. Her immediate response to me? ‘Just tell me what to do about it, and I’ll do it.’”

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