Suffering from burnout and low engagement, frontline workers face unique challenges, says academic

Frontline workers around Australia are feeling gloomy, according to a recent survey from Qualtrics.

They are less engaged than the average employee (63% versus 65%), less inclined to agree they are paid fairly (55% versus 61%) and less intent on staying in their job (48% versus 52%).

The results mirror the grim lot of frontline workers overseas, going on a survey by UKG which found 75% feel burnt out and 62% say interactions with people at work have worsened their mental health.

Frontline workers may be wearing a smile, but the nature of their work means they can’t show how they really feel – and that is part of the problem, said Carol Gill, associate professor of organisational behaviour at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne.

The ‘emotional labour’ of frontline work

“When you’re on the front line, there are ‘display rules’, so you need to smile even though you might be feeling frustrated and angry,” Gill said.

This form of “emotional labour” – displaying emotions at odds with how you feel – can involve “surface acting”, which takes a lot of energy and leads to burnout, or “deep acting”, where a person will become convinced they genuinely feel the feelings they are meant to display.

Deep acting, she said, leads to much less burnout.

“They do that through a cognitive process where they say to themselves: ‘I’m being helpful, this is meaningful,’ so they talk themselves into having alignment [with a customer].”

Supervisors of frontline workers can make a difference, she said, by employing some “leader-member exchange” skills to lift workers’ satisfaction and engagement levels.

“Leaders will often divide employees into in-groups and out-groups, and the in-group members get a lot of benefits from the leader,” Gill said. “The leader will give them good performance reviews and tell other people they’re great workers. If an employee has that backup, it’s like a stress buffer.”

Unconscious bias a brake on performance

The trick is to make sure no-one’s in the out-group. That is the very hard part, as leaders’ biases may be uncomfortable for them to recognise.

“If we become aware of our biases, when a bias surfaces we say to ourselves ‘Oh, that’s a bias,’ and then we behave in a more appropriate way,” Gill said. “It’s about leaders who are able to be open to difference and diversity and get over their bias.”

The UKG report included some positive news: 67% of frontline employees said they are treated with respect at work and 61% said their feedback on the work experience usually brings about change.

The best rewards can cost nothing, and they cut burnout

HR can make a difference by looking into unconscious bias training, if they haven’t already done so, and in training leaders on how to talk to employees — including the very important area of recognition systems.

“You can reward people financially, but recognition is just as important as tangible rewards,” Gill said, “where a supervisor will say, ‘I know that was a tricky situation, but you handled it really well.’ Those sorts of comments are very helpful to employees getting resource to go back into the fray.”

There are three fundamental human needs, she said: autonomy, “so you feel some sense of control”; competence, “so you feel you have mastery”; and relatedness, “the feeling of being connected”.

HR can work to satisfy these needs by:

• installing good leaders, who promote autonomy among workers
• training frontline workers effectively, which leads to competence and lower stress
• promoting relatedness, through leader-member exchange skills.

“If people’s needs are met, they are less likely to be stressed and disengaged,” Gill said.

In some cases, frontline workers are less likely to be made redundant, she said.

“When you restructure an organisation, back-office workers are the most vulnerable because they’re not actually generating income or providing a direct service.”

Frontline workers at risk of burnout

Frontline work is tangible, which is why it has great appeal for social workers, for example, Gill said.

“Although it’s quite stressful they can see the end-to-end job; in the back office, sometimes you don’t see the impact of what you do, whereas frontline workers see that immediately.”

As the population ages, older people may feel compelled to join the frontline workforce to keep their social skills lubricated and ward off decline.

“If I think of my situation, about when I retire, will I do academic work? Hell, no! I’ve done it for 40 years,” she said. “I probably would be more inclined to do something more menial and that feels more meaningful in terms of helping people.”