Turnover in Customer Service Roles

Employee Burnout and Job Turnover in Customer Service Roles

At the present stage of the development of society in conditions of socio-economic instability, competition in the labor market, and social stress, the requirements for the professionalism of the individual are growing. However, not all people can adapt, effectively carry out professional activities and social roles, and therefore the likelihood of developing unfavorable mental states increases. In this regard, emotional burnout and employee turnover in the service sector are becoming more acute. Ignoring this problem can lead to the fact that organizations will focus all the efforts on finding new employees and ignoring other issues of greater importance to the organization, leading to a decrease in the company’s effectiveness.

Burnout and employee turnover in the service area is a problem at the level of the industry. From the perspective of a business enterprise in the service sector, the cost of employee turnover for a company is sometimes very high. Firstly, the company incurs losses caused by the dismissal procedure, losses caused by hiring workers for a vacant workplace, the cost of training a newly hired employee (Ampomah & Cudjor, 2015). From an employee perspective, in turn, burnout can lead to decreased work motivation, decreased productivity, and layoffs, resulting in employee turnover (Wu et al., 2019). Additionally, the previously said problems shortly will be highly disastrous for enterprises operating in the service sector.

In the modern scientific community, there are several theories explaining employee burnout and employee turnover. H. Freudenberger created one of the most popular theories of burnout. According to Freudenberger’s theory, there is a clear relationship between the professional activities of healthy workers and emotional exhaustion (Fontes, 2020). Freudenberger noted that emotional exhaustion could lead to personal changes in communication with people (Fontes, 2020). Based on this, emotional burnout can entail the destruction of the employee’s professional relations and the employee’s relationship with friends and family.

When it comes to staff turnover, it can be expecting by Maslow’s theory of motivation. According to Maslow’s theory, recognition is significant for a person in work motivation and desire to improve the abilities in the workplace (Pt & Low, 2018). Service workers often do not receive enough financial and non-financial rewards, which leads to employees leaving an unfavorable workplace (Kashif et al., 2017). The problem already exists globally, as, in many countries, the service staff remains underestimated.