The Exhaustion Tax: Why Burnout is Your Biggest Financial Leak

In tourism, we often brag about how little sleep we get during the high season. Samantha Smits explains why this 'glorified burnout' is actually an expensive operational failure. Learn how to stop paying the 'Exhaustion Tax,' why you cannot fake sincere hospitality when you are tired, and how to treat your team's energy as a professional resource.

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Transcript

Speaker 0:00

How can the guests feel happy and seen and noticed and feel like you are really making them feel whole if the people in the home are not having any energy to do so, are too tired to notice? Hi, I'm Samantha Smits, and welcome back to the Sustainability Edge, Your Tourism Podcast. No jargon, no fluff. We're breaking down sustainability and especially how to turn sustainability in a practical tool that gives you more profit, more time, stuff that's staying in a business you can be proud of. Let's get started. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Sustainability Edge, Your Tourism podcast. It's great to have you here again. And last time we did talk about your people, one of the best assets of your business, and why there is this talent leak that you spend so much effort and hiring the right people for every high season. Yet every high season, some people do go because it was too much. Today, I again will talk about people, but about the people that are staying, the team that is still hustling and going through all this craziness of the high season. But obviously, they are running on empty batteries. And you hear it all the time that there's craziness in the high season, it's excused with all, but there's the low season will be fine, we can chill, we can rest, it's part of it, it's all it's just part of it, otherwise it's not for you. Yeah, partly true that there is, of course, this big difference in high and low season, but being tight all the time and this exhaustion is also not something we should be proud about or brag about, about the amount of sleep or the amount of calls during the high season. Burnout can kind of be an operational failure because it means that the way, like we discussed last time, when people get burnt out, they leave, and the whole way that the job is designed, even in tourism, it should sustain your business and the people performing the job for you. So today I want to talk about this exhaustion and this glorified burnout and why protecting your team's energy is such a big logic in your business and also sustainability logic. So, what is this whole basically an exhaustion tax that you are paying for your employees when yourself is exhausted from all the craziness going on in such a high season? At some point, people do not think proactively anymore. People just start surviving, they just deal with whatever is thrown at them without much of a second thought. You just try to combat it and to survive it and then move on to whatever comes next. So, in this survival mode, often there is done the bare minimum just to get through it and to solve the issue, but there's no time to notice the details or the extra things that make service here being customer service so impactful and unique, and that that missing of mistakes because you're so stuck in surviving, that is leading to mistakes. It could be the wrong booking, it could be a forgotten dietary requirement at the lodge, or missed maintenance, which comes with like a broken vehicle, or a tired driver who missed something, or a mistyping between accommodations that almost have similar names. There are so many of these mistakes that are regarded as accidents, and they can be, but also often it's a direct result of a team that is pushed so hard and that's so tired that it's honestly just a humane mistake. And then very often down the line, the client usually does not have experience in working in the tourism industry, so very often they cannot imagine what all goes behind just their booking, and that they are not your only client. So for them, they just complain to the guide or to the driver or to the person from the sales representative they booked with, and then they have to call the corresponding departments. In the meantime, somehow the boss is reached out to, and like explained before, just the entire company ends up dealing with one client case that could have been prevented when the one book making the extra booking had a little bit of extra sleep, had a little bit of extra care during their job, which would have prevented them from a typo in their accommodation booking, for example. And such if you then meet the bad client that is very misunderstanding and immediately reserves to a bad review, that actually hurts your future bookings, which is a shame. And this also goes to flight bookings. With if there is a wrong passport number, it can be a big nightmare or wrong number, wrong time, it is so much. And all of these mistakes you usually pay out of your own pocket to fix it, so they are costly, but also for your actual staff to go through. So all of this altogether is quite of an expensive cost for your business, and they usually don't come with an invoice. So when you realize that exhaustion of your staff has a price tag, you have to look at how it destroys what you're trying to sell, which could be luxury, which could be adventure, some some of your core values or something unique that belongs to your business is gonna be very hard to sell if the people running behind it are absolutely exhausted. Because in tourism, yes, it may be a room, yes, it may be a vehicle or a flight or in the end, all summarized, tourism is about selling experiences and designing experiences. And if you want that experience to be a five-star rating, then there shouldn't be one star energy levels of the people delivering it. When your team is energized, fresh, feel supported, has the systems as I keep talking about, they will have the energy to notice the details of your clients and to go that extra mile, to do that extra service delivery, what makes companies so unique for someone else and what makes the client feel cared for and feel remembered. They your service people will see the guest's needs before the guest even asks, and this is where the over the positive over delivery of a service comes from. That is where actual luxury can come up without even the money, just the luxury of being seen and noticed. But when your staff is burnt out, they are just trading all their time and energy for the bare minimum, which just takes care of getting the clients from A to B without any extra care or any anything additional that makes you memorable as a business. This whole magic of hospitality that tourism is built on, it just disappears if people don't have the energy to be hospitable to one another. While you are still paying the same salaries, having the same people, you get half the value. Like, how can a guest feel happy and seen and noticed and feel like you are really making them feel home if the people in the home are not having any energy to do so, are too tired to notice. And how can you fake hospitality? I mean, I know that a lot of people are faking hospitality since it's how the whole through the industry is built on having to always smile and be happy and to be energetic, but we all can distinguish when someone is sincere. We always notice when someone is generally happy, generally happy to see you. We will always notice when something is off. And the same goes for your clients, it just makes all the difference in their experience and does their reviews and the referrals and so on, which is what makes this all such a costly important matter. And here the energy that your service delivery staff has, but also the people in the back office, it makes all the difference and it just translates to the public. So if basically staff burnout is a financial cost, how do you start to treat the energy of your employees as a professional resource? And during this podcast, I've already talked several times about the importance of tracking your resources, and in the last episode even talked about that your staff is a human resource and why that's so important. So, here again, kind of tracking their energy, not necessarily in this spreadsheet and giving them all smartwatches, but more through asking them actual questions and notice these things, it's so important and it's gonna make all the difference. Because just like pumping your borehole or running an engine all day, these things finish, and so does energy. Your team has a limited battery that will finish. And when we talk about sustainability, you're not looking to have them go all the way to the bottom and finish their entire battery just working for you. Of course, they should spend some of the energy on the work, but if they fully finish it just by working for you, at that point you can almost just give them a home and give them a bed and give them a kitchen, because that means they have nothing left to give into their actual homes, and it means that you're almost living together, which is not what it should be about, right? But that is why, for example, some accommodations they're staff watching, because it doesn't make sense for them at that point to still go home somewhere because there's no energy left anyway. So here the power of shifts comes in, obviously, if you have a 24-hour business such as an accommodation, and as mentioned in the previous episodes, the power of a checklist to keep um the details that count to have them at least listed, but also try to automate some of the office tasks that not a lot of copy-pasting workers needed. For this, you can really look into if I pronounce this correctly, Zapier. You spell it as Z-A-P-I-E-R, which can automate a lot of automatic tests, have some data copied into a sheet. Definitely look into that and be fierce about protecting breaks. Do not ever let your employees skip breaks. See it so often in tourism that it's normal. I'll just finish this other email, just do this, I'll finish this. And of course, if they're in the middle of something, yes, of course, but it is so important for them to take that break out of things, or to actually, if it's on the office, to leave the office and to have a break home and to not normalize them going over all the all the time. And when you kind of become their cheerleader as the manager or as the CEO, for them to guard their own boundaries, first of all, they'll love you, they respect you so much more because you also care about their private lives, which will actually make it more worth it for them, which links to the previous episode. But also here, it saves you that exhaustion tax cost because you are kind of also protecting a cost here by being sure that they recharge. When they recharge, they have more energy, they perform better, which means less mistakes. Again, when linking that sustainability is about durability, any business that requires your team to fully burn out just for your business to function and perform will be unsustainable. Even if you have all the solar panels you wish for, if you on the environmental side do everything perfect, if you somehow have cars that don't emit are are fully electric and electricity is coming from a good resource, you have everything in order, but your team is very exhausted, you still can be regarded as unsustainable. That's why it's such a big and broad topic, huh? So you're not a great leader when all of your team is exhausted. That doesn't show that you have a good business and that uh there's good jobs, it just means, like mentioned before, that you're inefficient. You will notice in these episodes that a lot of these things will link together. So when you start or stop paying this exhaustion tax, you will get yourself an extra margin, which basically means more money in the bank, but also happier staff and more time saved. Just too many benefits. So here, protecting your team's energy, it's not just something nice, like an extra working condition, it is a necessity. And for this episode, I focus more on the financial reason why it's so key for you. And in the last one, it was more about how it makes people even leave your business. But really, stop spending people basically, like they are a currency, but invest in them and make them happy to stay, as explained in the earlier episode. It'll pay you back so many times, and again, here it's being part of sustainability. It is such a tool that keeps your business and your people built to last. If this is some if this episode has triggered something in you, curiosity, questions, concerns, anything you're looking to discuss, do visit the show notes. You find a way to plan a call with me, you'll find a way to contact me on LinkedIn. I would love what your thoughts are. Do share them with me, and let's get the you off this exhaustion tax. Until next time. Thank you for listening, and congratulations on investing your time today to think strategically about your future, to make sure you never miss a step to understand sustainability better, how to grow your competitive edge. Follow the podcast right now, and if this was helpful, please leave a five star rating and to help other people like you to find these tools. I'm Samantha Smits, and I'll see you in the next episode.