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How Can Retailers Take Toxic Behavior Out of The Workplace?
Recent McKinsey research finds that companies are increasingly offering yoga classes, meditation app subscriptions, well-being days, and training on time management to counter all-time high rates of employee burnout. These steps are all well and good, but to address the issue, companies need to deal with toxic workplace behavior.
“Burnout is experienced by individuals, but the most powerful drivers of burnout are systemic organizational imbalances across job demands and job resources,” McKinsey wrote in the study.
Gallup’s just-released State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report found just 23 percent of workers “engaged” at work in 2022. A core reason is 44 percent experienced a lot of stress the previous day, repeating the record high in 2021 and continuing a trend of elevated stress that began almost a decade earlier. Gallup said that while external factors can influence stress, “managers play an outsized role in the stress workers feel on the job, which influences their daily stress overall.”
In a column for the Harvard Business Review, Greg McKeown, the author of “Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters,” wrote, “Despite some companies’ attempts, we can’t fix today’s burnout culture with a wellness app. What it takes, instead, is a mindset and culture shift among managers and organizations everywhere.”
He suggests managers ask employees for “85 percent” effort, encourage breaks and mandate end-of-day exits to slow the build-up of stress and exhaustion for staff. Mr. McKeown wrote, “When managers are ambiguous about the length of workdays, they risk introducing decision fatigue, diminishing returns, or even getting negative returns from their employees.”
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less,” speaking to BBC, believes the responsibility for reducing burnout needs to shift from the individual employee to the organization with an aim toward mitigation rather than eradication.
“The idea that it can be eliminated is as realistic as thinking we can solve work-life balance once and for all. Instead, we need to figure out if the sacrifices that put us at risk of burnout are worth making for the sake of our jobs and careers,” he said.
Discussion Questions
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Are wellness programs only masking the symptoms of employee burnout? What solutions do you see to reducing excessive stress, frustration and exhaustion on retail selling floors and corporate offices?
Poll
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Lisa Goller
B2B Content Strategist
Gene Detroyer
Professor, International Business, Guizhou University of Finance & Economics and University of Sanya, China.
Downward dog won’t fix bullying, unrealistic expectations or authoritarian communication. Wellness programs don’t address root causes of stress like feeling overworked, undervalued and powerless.
Evaluating leaders on their ability to keep their workers happy, healthy and productive would shift the dynamic.
Couldn’t agree more. This includes a corporate responsibility to educate leaders at all levels in developing those tools. Managing well is a talent and a skill.
Oversimplifying, but there are two types of HR leaders in retail: 1) those that enable their HR and Operations colleagues to seek to become aware of, and resolve root-cause organizational issues with training, coaching, systems, and processes, and 2) those that implement band-aid solutions and add these “tick the box” areas to their LinkedIn profiles as badges of honor. The optics can be significantly more superficially attractive in the latter, with minimal career risk.
While wellness programs are great for things like relieving stress, companies need to really focus on a mind shift on how to go to business (working 80+ hours isn’t it) and still take into consideration the associates’ work-life balance. This can be as easy as reviewing processes and having consistent, more efficient rules of how you conduct business and service your customers.
In philosophy we like to examine “prior questions” and one of the prior questions here is whether employee burnout is solely workplace related or just another symptom of a larger, broader, societal and cultural malaise.
Americans are too stressed way before they join the workforce. If you doubt this just look at the mountains of anti-anxiety and depression medications consumed every year, a good deal of them by people who haven’t graduated college yet, the rates of teen suicides, or the booming psychological services business.
We are raising generations of children like products, hoping to get them into the “best” schools, so they can get the “best” jobs — code for make the most money. But there is only so much room at the top, and less and less room in the middle. Current workers have lived through pandemics, recessions or the threat of recessions, the polarization of society, etc., etc. and wake up every day to read or hear their jobs may be eliminated by AI.
In addition, many of them were raised in an era of participation trophies and institutions which reinforced that each of them was the absolute best and brightest person on earth whose opinions should always be given equal weight to everyone else’s in the room. Of course, they have also grown up with the pressure of social media, which can destabilize even the most well balanced soul.
Now, add an actually unreasonable manager or supervisor and you have a perfect recipe for emotional collapse and burnout. The management piece can be fixed, but when it comes to the larger cultural issues, their just ain’t no app for that.
Ryan, this topic has grabbed your attention! I could write a book on every topic/cause you highlighted. But many have already had.
As you point out, this is a culture issue. It won’t be fixed anytime soon.
Ryan, this topic has grabbed your attention! I could write a book on every topic/cause you highlighted. But many have already had.
As you point out, this is a culture issue. It won’t be fixed anytime soon.
Gene, sadly I’m afraid you are right.
Google famously encourages other than job-oriented activities. Everything from fitness to mental health to child care to free lunch. Their 10% free time program has given employees a sense of purpose and proved valuable to the company itself.
Sadly, I have found toxic behavior in and out of work is becoming common and acceptable in our culture. Values have changed over the past decades. According to a recent WSJ poll, Americans place more importance now on money than patriotism, religious faith, and having children. A careful look at that poll raises questions of its own. Once communal values go out the window, toxic behavior replaces them.
Google famously encourages other than job-oriented activities. Everything from fitness to mental health to child care to free lunch. Their 10% free time program has given employees a sense of purpose and proved valuable to the company itself.
Sadly, I have found toxic behavior in and out of work is becoming common and acceptable in our culture. Values have changed over the past decades. According to a recent WSJ poll, Americans place more importance now on money than patriotism, religious faith, and having children. A careful look at that poll raises questions of its own. Once communal values go out the window, toxic behavior replaces them.
Gene, couldn’t agree more. This is a deeply-rooted problem.
If store associates “feel” overworked you can run all the “Wellness Wednesday” programs and others you want-no amount of Yoga or quiet time is going to fix that. You need to get to the root of the issue.
If one has a well balanced life, stress, frustration and exhaustion take a much smaller place in one’s psyche. So many of us do not have that, which just makes work issues (and the stresses that come with them) that much more amplified.
In this job market (very fluid, relatively straightforward to get another position elsewhere) workers can vote with their feet and go somewhere else.
One final thought-putting the entire onus on the organization is incorrect. The individual needs to take some if not all of the ownership for how they feel, period. Putting that on the organization, or the government, or anywhere other than the “person in the mirror” is misguided. Own it.
At the store level, the large workload coupled with the lack of enough talent results in days of backload of work and never-ending commitments. Without margin to have fun in the store and take an extra minute or two with a customer to listen, connect and help the overall work experience at retail can be depressing.
Retailers should think about the workload and find ways to simplify the projects at the store and automate when possible. Having extra margin allows for the manager to check in and have real conversations to coach and support the team versus only having short daily task-oriented meetings that do little for morale or professional satisfaction.
Wellness programs do not address the root cause of live stresses, job pressures or bad behavior from customers, colleagues or business partners. Sadly, wellness programs will do little to help store associates who are faced with these issues day-in-day-out.
Wellness programs are wonderful but they are also the equivalent of buying high absorption towels instead of fixing a leaking bucket..
Gallop has stated something which most know but systemically overlook in employee stress and burnout: the role of the manager. Please stop with these manager trainings that do more to indemnify the manager than hold the manager accountable for their actions.
The truth is, bad managers are protected, often by the very people who put them in place– least they appear to have made a bad decision themselves. Unless there is something egregious and the manager is literally caught in the act, the everyday subtleties in a managers feeback and actions that cause stress and burnout are largely ignored in favor of a free meditation app.
As long as employers think the burnout problem sits with employees instead of managers and an organizational culture that supports, conceals, defends and worse, ignores a management style that perpetuates burnout, this problem will only get worse.
When I think of “toxic” workplaces, I think about environments with harmful gossip, non-transparency from management, bad bosses, and sometimes, bad people working there.
I believe the most common toxicity stems from bad bosses, secrets, and non-transparency. In workplaces with good bosses, openness, and where people are treated with genuine respect, employees don’t complain about long hours or hard work. In many cases, they enjoy being at work. It’s true.