It takes more than a pizza party to prevent employee burnout.

You’ve probably seen it happen before, by the time the holiday season arrives, retail employees are already feeling burned out, stresses are high, and some team members aren’t even able to fully enjoy their holiday season. That doesn’t have to be the case this year. As more about the causes of employee burnout are brought to light, there are better strategies to mitigate them and even reverse the effects. But something as simple as a company holiday party isn’t likely to do the trick. Read on to learn a little more about the causes of employee burnout, what you can do to prevent it, and even warning signs that some of your team members may be on a path to burnout.

Top Causes of Employee Burnout

While the root cause of employee burnout is often tracked back to mismanagement, a recent Gallup poll found that there are a variety of key reasons employees experience burnout. They can apply to any business and any industry, but in the retail industry, these can be especially pervasive.

Unfair Treatment at Work

While perks for high performers are a great incentive, do your best as a leader or manager to keep those as bonuses and keep all else equal among your team members. Whether it’s scheduling shifts, honoring time off requests, or even scheduling meeting times, each employee should be treated equally to promote an atmosphere of open communication and trust. 

Unmanageable Workload

As a people manager with bosses and bills of your own to answer to, it’s important to stay an advocate for your team. The pressures and expectations from upper management can pile on, but your employees rely on you to stand up for them. You trust them to work their best, and they need to be able to trust you to act in their best interests.

Lack of Role Clarity

Especially during the busy holiday shopping season, it can be easy for smaller tasks to slip through the delegation cracks. Keeping your team on the same page about each of their individual responsibilities keeps clarity among the team, and ensures an even split of the workload.

Lack of Communication

Absent managers, or leaders who spend all their time behind a computer desk instead of face to face with their team, can build up roadblocks in communication. These can build up slowly over time too, so make it a point to check in with each individual member of your team regularly.

Unreasonable Deadlines and Timelines

Always be aware of the aggressive deadlines facing your team members. It’s important to keep priorities in order, and as the leader of your team, it’s your job to ensure that employees can properly prioritize their tasks and limit overwhelming workloads.

The Best Ways to Prevent Burnout

Once you have a solid understanding of what can lead to burnout, it makes it much easier to take proactive steps to prevent it from happening in the first place. Burnout itself causes poor performance on the job, but the same Gallup study found that it also poses risks to the employees themselves. Exhaustion not only puts them at higher risk for workplace injuries, but burnout also makes employees 13% less confident in their performance and 63% more likely to take a sick day. If prevention is worth a pound of cure, then it’s worth the time to implement these strategies into your existing managerial style. 

Be Mindful When Scheduling

Scheduling is a challenge for any industry, but retail has unique obstacles. In many cases, your employees don’t have free and open availability to plot them in any recurring order. Instead, there are outside work conflicts to manage, multiple shifts to cover, shift and weekly workload requests, as well as vacations and holiday time. Some things that you can do involve honoring these schedules as best you can. Try to avoid scheduling the same employee to close one day and open the next, which can negatively impact their work/life balance and hinder their ability to return to work rested. 

Speak openly about schedule changes, or even better, allow your team members to swap shifts without getting managerial permission to do so. This gives your team more control over their schedule and lets them know you trust each employee to get coverage for shifts they may have conflicts with. If you’ve established clear role definitions within your team, they’ll be equipped to confirm who is the right fit for swapping shifts, and it also takes the task of shift swapping off your plate.

Try to keep your employees’ schedules as consistent as possible. A recent study of retail employees found that stable scheduling led to increased productivity, and even a 7% increase in sales. Not only does this provide reliable stability for employees in an industry not known for having it, but it also promotes a better work/life balance for each of your team members. Implementing a digital solution like timesheet templates can not only make scheduling easier for you, it can give your team access to their schedule anytime for better flexibility.

Build Trust and Foster Communication

Open communication is key, and while it’s important for every manager in every industry, retail communication around the holiday shopping season is especially important. By building an atmosphere of open communication you’ll be better able to prevent burnout, and have a well-built rapport with your team members to see the signs of burnout early enough to take action. Better communication can help prevent scheduling mishaps, facilitate a better shopping experience for your customers, encourage the team to stay healthy, and keep you in the know about anyone who has important events or time off requests coming up. Digital communication tools like messaging apps can be a beneficial resource that gives your employees a specific place to communicate with you, even when you’re not there in person.

As a people manager, with metrics of your own and leadership to impress, it’s important to let your team know you’re a trusted resource at work. Whether it’s providing detailed training for employees looking to expand their skillsets, implementing new solutions like digital invoices to ease workload burdens, or standing up for your employees in stakeholder meetings, being a manager is a heavy responsibility — don’t take it lightly. Just as you wanted a manager to stand by your side in your early working days, try to channel that energy into being a trusted leader for your employees.

Listen to and Appreciate Your Team

Listening and appreciation go a long way in retail. One of the top reasons that employees leave their jobs is due to a lack of communication and a feeling of not being listened to about their overall job satisfaction. What started as the adage of “people don’t leave companies, they leave managers”, has become people moving away from uninvolved management and the lackluster culture that created a space for those managers to stay in charge. While company culture overall is a big part of keeping employees engaged, fulfilled, and happy in their work, the simple act of listening to your team members as individuals can play a key role in preventing burnout and lowering your turnover rate.

Appreciation doesn’t have to come in the form of grand bonuses, or even the (now joked about) company pizza party. Those are great ways to show appreciation for your team! But they aren’t the only ways. Small, meaningful rewards tailored to your team shows that you not only appreciate them and their work but also know them as an individual. Even the act of saying “thank you” on a regular basis can be enough to keep your employees feeling appreciated and respected.

Encourage Your Employees to Have Healthy Habits

You’re only their manager while they’re on the clock, but never forget that your team is made up of people with their own lives, their own stressors, and their own coping mechanisms. Try to encourage your team to stay active and healthy, even if that means encouraging a team-building hike or nature walk. Look for group volunteer opportunities and see if your team is interested in doing it together, finding ways to give back to your community as a group can foster feelings of well-being and build better camaraderie between your employees. 

Don’t just promote healthier physical activities, promote healthy mindsets too. While it may be tempting to badmouth customers in some cases, try to limit that activity, and keep negative talk about the work environment to a minimum. Do your best to lead from a place of empathy and understanding, for your team members and your customers, and realize that not everyone shows up as their best self every day. However, there is a fine line between being empathetic to an angry customer and standing up for one of your employees when a customer’s frustration gets out of hand. Your customers should be a priority, but never at the expense of the respect of your employees or yourself.

Preemptive Action Against Burnout Symptoms

Burnout isn’t unmanageable, but it takes connecting with and keeping an eye on your team, and in some cases even adjusting your management style, to prevent and reverse its effects. There are several key indicators that burnout may be approaching for your team, but you’ll need to know your team well enough to see the warning signs:

• Exhaustion

• Frequent workplace mistakes

• Illnesses

• Depression

• Fatigue and irritability

• Feelings of being ineffective or unimportant

If you’ve already built an atmosphere of open communication in your workplace, then you will see when these symptoms start to creep in and you can take action. Keep in mind that these indicators aren’t exclusive, and burnout can show up in different ways for different people. Your best line of defense for retail burnout is going to be checking in with your team, ensuring they’re aware of burnout and the dangers of it, and building relationships with your employees for them to feel safe addressing any concerns with you.

About GoFormz

GoFormz is the digital forms solution for retail outlets everywhere. We believe that everyone should be able to fill out their forms online and deliver products and services that redefine how people and businesses collect and process information. Whether you need to convert PDFs to fillable forms for online orders, or easily track inventory and shipments with signature forms, GoFormz brings all your data into a single, actionable place. Let GoFormz capture, digitize, and send your data wherever you need it to streamline all aspects of your business.