Personal initiative: another essential for great service experience

By J. N. Halm

It is a fact that “robots” do not make for great front-line employees (FLEs)—where “robots” here means customer-facing employees who lack personal initiative. Robots here refer to those customer service employees who only do what the “book” says.

Without a doubt, personal Initiative is key. Defined as a self-starting and proactive work behaviour that overcomes barriers to achieve a goal, personal initiative can be the difference between a great customer experience and a terrible one.

Personal initiative has also been defined elsewhere as a “behaviour syndrome that results in an individual taking an active and self-starting approach to work goals and tasks and persisting in overcoming barriers and setbacks.”

In other words, it is about an employee not waiting to be told what to do. It is about an employee seeing a task and the accompanying challenges ahead and doing something about the situation. It is about an employee attempting to change his or her environment, even if just slightly.

Personal initiative, by definition, is proactive. Those who lack it are reactive. They are those whose whole lives are characterised by doing what they are told to do. They are those who easily give up in the face of difficulties, and end up reacting to environmental demands.

Employees with high levels of personal initiative have been known to possess characteristics that make them great for the job of handling customers. For instance, it is known that individuals with personal initiative tend to handle job difficulties more actively. The stress that would put other people down does not affect those with personal initiative that much.

It has been found that those with personal initiative end up becoming the Intrapreneurs of the workplace. They are more likely to develop innovative ideas or projects from within the organisation.

These individuals will take customers’ suggestions and bring them to their supervisors in the form of creative product ideas or newer service concepts. They will not complain and do nothing about the situation they are complaining. They will proffer solutions.

There is nothing more frustrating for customers than having to deal with customer service employees who will not attempt to do anything outside of the books to help a customer. Sometimes, all the customer wants to see is some effort towards resolving the problem at hand.

Front-line employees who lack initiative will not as much as even lift a finger to help. To these individuals, if the customer’s request is not in the book, then it cannot be granted. I must say, front-line employees who lack personal initiative are a danger to the fortunes of any organisation.

If personal initiative is that important, the question is, can it be taught? Why is it that two individuals with the same background and training still display two different levels of personal initiative?

An article published in the September 2021 edition of the Journal of Retailing brought to the fore the importance of personal initiative in determining the performance of customer-facing employees. The title of the report was “Matching the Personal Initiative Capabilities of FLEs to Their Self-Regulatory Processes and the Firm’s Initiative Climate”.

Using data collected from 276 FLEs and 27 supervisors across 27 branches of a large retail banking chain in Southeast Asia, the researchers argued that the approach by organisations that emphasizes direct interaction with customers, understanding their needs, and aligning quality standards to enhance customer satisfaction can all be explained by the personal initiatives of the employees.

This is understandable because no two customers are alike and no two customer requests are identical. They might be similar but not identical. Therefore, it is often very difficult to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to solving customer issues. It will take personal initiative to deal with different customers who have different requests.

The study also touched on another very important determinant of the quality of the front-line employee’s work. This is the emotional labour strategy of the employee. The emotional labour theory differentiates the regulation of emotions of the employee to meet the emotional demands of a particular role into three main types.

Genuine Acting is when an individual genuinely has the same emotion as that demanded by a role. For instance, an employee, who was already sad for whatever reason, serving a customer who has lost a loved one is a case of genuine emotions at play.

Another example is an employee who has received good news from home serving a customer who has won a huge contract. Both the employee and the customer will be genuinely happy.

Then there is Surface Acting. This is what occurs when an employee does not genuinely feel that emotion but has no choice but to still display that particular emotion. The one would therefore just put on an outward display without really meaning it.

An example is a forced grin to attempt to indicate happiness. In other words, Surface Acting is akin to faking. Unfortunately, customers can read the signs and know when a front-line employee is not being genuine about his or her feelings.

The third kind of emotional labour strategy is Deep Acting. Just as with Surface Acting, the individual in this case does not feel that particular emotion being demanded at that moment. However, rather than resorting to a fake external display, the individual will go into the deepest recesses of his or her mind for a thought that can generate the required emotion.

In other words, if you have to serve a customer who has lost a loved one and thus you need to be in a sombre mood but at that moment, you are in a happy mood, Deep Acting would mean you would think of a sad time in your life.

This will help you generate that particular emotion. Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned study concluded that individuals who engaged in Deep Acting were better performers when it came to taking personal initiatives to serve customers.

Experts have projected that the workplace of the future will demand more proactive behaviour than is currently being displayed. This is not a far-fetched concept. Think about a world where robots have become very integral to the operations of most businesses—where machines have taken over many of the routine, repetitive tasks that humans used to do.

In that world, where human strength would be needed less, it would take those with personal initiative to make a strong case for humans in the workplace. One thing personal initiative does is that it makes one a leader. Leaders are what the future workplace will need.

In this direction, there is a lot organisations must do. The findings from the earlier-mentioned study proved that it is when front-line employees are in the right roles and the work climate is permissive of personal initiative that employees can give off their best.

When the climate within the organisation encourages initiative-taking behaviours, front-line employees tend to serve customers better. For this reason, employees who take proactive steps to solve problems must be celebrated. This is one way to encourage others and to make a statement to all others that personal initiative is permissible.

Leadership also has an important role to play in ensuring that front-line employees are encouraged to take initiative. If employees are placed in the wrong positions, there is going to be a challenge with initiative-taking endeavours within the firm. Putting square pegs in round holes always results in awkward situations.

The character of the leader also affects the initiative-taking behaviours within the organisation. Leaders who prefer to micromanage, who struggle to delegate and who are afraid that their subordinates will take their shine are going to be a hindrance to personal initiative. They will hinder personal initiative rather than promote it.

It is without a doubt that businesses must begin to employ for the future. Waiting till the future before preparing for it is a sure recipe for disaster. It is important to take the initiative now!

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