How can organisations improve wellbeing amid the busy holiday season?
As frontline employees face a myriad of challenges during the busy holiday season, employers are being encouraged to listen more to their staff and prioritise their wellbeing.
Organisations tend to "pull back on employee listening during busy times,” says one expert. This includes the holiday periods, where employers scale back on gathering employee feedback because they don't want to interrupt employees during surge times.
"It is actually during these times that they need to be listening more," says Cecelia Herbert, Qualtrics' Workplace Behavioural Scientist.
According to Herbert, many employees during the holiday season tend to be casual, temporary staff.
"So, if [employers] wait until there's a quiet part of the year, those employees may not be there to give them that feedback," she said.
Frontline teams are among the most crucial members of the workforce as they are usually the ones facing customers, but a recent Qualtrics report found that these employees are also reporting lower levels of engagement and wellbeing.
This frontline crisis could drive poor customer experience, and eventually lead to employers losing $3.8 billion in lost sales during the holiday season.
But with surge times keeping employees busy during the holiday season, the challenge now is how employers can immediately gather employee feedback and gauge wellbeing.
"This is something that we're seeing a lot of organisations struggle with," Herbert said.
But this doesn't mean it cannot be executed, she said, pointing out that there are organisations that are rethinking how to listen to employees.
"They're doing it because they're motivated, because the time that their customer data is surging and they're getting lots of feedback from customers, they're getting no feedback from employees," she said.
Organisations have long utilised traditional, and sometimes sparse, employee surveys to gather feedback and determine wellbeing in the workforce. But Herbert said these surveys need to be more dynamic and updated to make the poll more centred around the employee.
"Things like getting a text message at the end of a shift saying: 'How did you do today? Was there anything that we could have done to help you better serve your customers?'" she said. "A QR code in the break room that's just always there where they can tell you what's going on and they can provide you with that feedback when they feel like it."
Gathering feedback may also not take the form of a survey, according to Herbert.
"There needs to be a way of better listening to these employees during these busy times rather than pulling back on employee listening or not listening at all to these frontline staff. Remember that they're not in front of the computer, they're physically there, so the desktop versions of employee listening are not going to apply," she said.
The need to listen to revolutionise the way employers listen also comes as frontline teams face the risk of aggression from customers. Woolworths, a major retailer in Australia and New Zealand, unveiled last year they recorded over 3,000 acts of violence, threats, and abuse against staff in 2022-23 in Australia.
To protect their staff, the Australian retailer said they were investing in CCTV upgrades, two-way radio headsets, as well as virtual reality violence and aggression training.
Similar challenges face the frontline staff employed by Woolworths in New Zealand, where the supermarket chain revealed that physical assault against its store employees jumped 50% in the previous year.
One Woolworths outlet even had to shift its trading hours to protect its customers and employees from potential "anti-social behaviour."
The best way to protect frontline staff from aggression is preventing it from happening in the workplace.
"This requires listening. This requires actually having channels of communication open with your employees so that they can let you know and that you can take action to ensure that you're making systemic adjustments through your processes and your systems in order to provide either prevention or, of course, support in the post-scenario," Herbert said.
"So, if someone is experiencing a form of harassment or disrespect from customers or from colleagues, they need to be able to communicate with their leaders through some sort of employee feedback mechanism about these experiences and what their needs are to be supported."
