Workplace burnout has become an increasingly prevalent issue, particularly in the post-pandemic era where work expectations and employee needs are being redefined. Many individuals wear the stress and long hours culture as a badge of honor, but for most, it can be overwhelming. The perpetual feelings of exhaustion, frustration, and being undervalued can affect anyone.
But what causes burnout at work?
The Harvard Business Review has identified six key drivers that create this feeling in employees:
- Workload: The constant fear of an overwhelming workload with no time to rest, reflect, or upskill.
- Lack of control: The pressure of being on call 24/7 and the inability to prioritize tasks independently, as daily priorities change based on management preferences.
- Rewards: Evaluating whether the job rewards align with expectations and the perceived discrepancies compared to colleagues in similar roles.
- Community: Assessing team dynamics and whether teammates genuinely enjoy working together or merely tolerate each other for the paycheck.
- Fairness: Examining the fairness of reward systems, whether managers recognize and reward top performers or favoritism prevails.
- Values: The misalignment between personal values and the company's values often leads to stress. As ESG values gain importance among employees, customers, and investors, alignment is more crucial than ever.
Customer service jobs, in particular, seem to foster burnout due to the nature of the work. Just look at the average attrition rates for 2022 - this survey suggests a rate of almost 84%. A simple way to describe this is that if you have a customer service team of 100 people in January, then by the end of the year, 84 of them will have quit. Growing the team is hard when you constantly replace people just to stand still.
Many contact center employees complain of low rewards, a lack of appreciation, poor or disconnected team culture, and a lack of control over the work. One day, you are supporting a retail account, and the next day, you might be switched to a completely new area because that account is busier.
Enter GigCX - the groundbreaking solution that revolutionizes contact center recruitment and processes. With GigCX, you can exclusively engage with talent that wants to:
- work from home and will not miss the in-office work experience
- work supporting specific brands - they will often choose brands they personally love and will not work on other accounts
- work flexibly because it allows them to juggle a work/life balance more effectively
What’s the effect? A dramatic reduction in burnout and attrition. In the GigCX environment, we mostly lose advisers to other accounts or something changes in their lifestyle so they can no longer work in the same way. The idea of needing to re-hire four in every five customer service advisers yearly does not apply in the GigCX environment.
So, if you genuinely want to help your customer service team avoid burnout, why not consider giving them the GigCX option? Allow them to work for an hour, take a break, and add a few more hours. Give them control over how and when they work, and many of the burnout triggers are eliminated.