The various consequences :
Physical and mental health
- Fatigue and stress: long working hours, mainly on your feet, combined with irregular working hours and stressed customers, inexorably lead to physical and mental fatigue. They can also lead to sleep disorders, increasing fatigue day after day.
Family and social life
- Family and social conflicts: irregular working hours can complicate family commitments and family life in general. What’s more, the difficulty of planning events with family or friends can lead to a certain degree of social isolation.
Performance at work
- Reduced productivity: fatigue reduces the ability to concentrate, affecting the quality of work as well as productivity.
- Increased error rate: exhaustion, accumulated over long periods, can increase the risk of errors in work, which can have consequences for customer satisfaction.
Recruiting and retaining staff
- High turnover: irregular working hours can lead to job dissatisfaction and therefore higher employee turnover, increasing recruitment and training costs for employers.
- Complicated retention: in a hyper-competitive sector with a shortage of employees, it’s de facto easier for employees to move to establishments offering better conditions, particularly in terms of working hours.
What are the strategies for mitigating the above-mentioned consequences?
- Predictable scheduling: by offering more regular or predictable schedules, facilities can help employees manage their time better and reduce stress.
- More flexibility: by offering some form of flexibility in working hours, employees’ work-life balance could be greatly improved.
- By offering benefits such as bonuses or additional days off for those who work night shifts, weekends or public holidays, establishments ensure a certain degree of employee loyalty.
- Recognition of effort: by setting up reward, promotion and recognition systems for employees who take on shifts that few people want, or for those who demonstrate great flexibility in their working hours.
- Training for managers: to recognize the first signs of fatigue and stress in employees.
- Offer programs that support physical and mental health: such as gym memberships.
By implementing these methods, establishments can not only ensure the well-being of their staff, but also drastically reduce turnover, thereby also limiting recruitment costs. This should also improve customer satisfaction and ultimately boost sales – a “win-win” scenario, so to speak.
