It's the busiest season of the year - and the most stressful. If the time between Black Friday and Christmas can make or break a store, success to a large extent depends on effective customer engagement by a motivated staff. Too often, frustrated and distracted employees deal poorly with the public and that can affect revenue. Customers are less likely to buy when the staff is clearly not having a good time. And profits can soften further when frazzled employees call in sick, leaving a skeletal staff to deal with shoppers frustrated by reduced service levels. What causes holiday stress? For starters, employees are under pressure to keep up with the season's requisite parties and shopping trips - events that need to be somehow fit into schedules already stretched by extended working hours. At the same time, a greater number of customers are clamoring for attention. And those customers, feeling pressure from their own holiday activities, tend to be less forgiving about employee errors and omissions. The result: plenty of angst. "Everything comes together to create a high level of stress in the store," says Doug Fleener, president of Dynamic Experiences Group (dynamicexperiencesgroup.com), a consultancy in Lexington, Massachusetts.
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