Great service can be infectious. Keeping your best employees and empowering them to be leaders will lead to quality service that attracts happy customers.

Human resources expert Mel Kleiman has preached for years that great employees don’t quit good jobs. They quit bad managers. Retail leaders must remember that their customers aren’t the only ones who come through your organization’s door daily seeking quality service. Team members also need to be served. If they’re unhappy, they will not likely deliver great service or even stay with your company long.

Great employees stand apart from a good team. We have all gone into a store, had a great experience and wondered why the shopping experience wasn’t always this pleasant. The same can be said for bad members. Low-performing employees bring down the whole shopping experience for customers and other team members. Poor employees will bring your good people down to their level, which will have disastrous results on your sales. Furthermore, good people, by their nature, do not want to work around people that bring them down. They will look for a job whose culture fits and matches their energy and personality.

Once you have identified your top-performing employees, giving them opportunities to shine and feel valued is critical. This might involve promotions, assigning them broader authority to guide and lead others or opening up access with enhanced user permissions on the point-of-sale (POS).

For example, if trust is not a concern, you could have a high performer cover inventory reporting or oversee operations while you’re away. Empowering employees in these ways tells them their expertise is respected and makes them feel important. It boosts engagement and motivation. Employees who feel recognized for their contributions will be more likely to provide exceptional customer service and stay with the organization. Giving your best employees chances to step up shows you value their leadership.

Managing the team and difficult employees for convenience stores is just as important as managing sales. That’s why it’s important to find a way to provide uplifting service internally, even when difficult situations arise, so internal issues don’t impact store sales.

Once you start thinking differently about managing those difficult situations, everyone can be more satisfied and better served. A service culture is about taking action to create value for someone else, and that someone else can be outside or inside your chain.

With the labor market so tight, it is worth the effort to understand underperforming employees and how to lift them up to become high performers. Instead of seeing a difficult co-worker and not wanting to have anything to do with them, take a moment to think, “What does this person value? What is he not getting that he needs? What can I do now to make him better?” When this culture of service takes hold in the organization, everyone feels better and works better together.

Understanding Employees
Here are several tips for understanding your people better.

Assess each situation carefully. Is a particular employee really a bad egg, or are they simply having a bad time at home or some other personal issues impacting their work performance?

Get to know all your people and learn a little bit about them personally. As you get to know them, they will feel comfortable around you and likely to share any personal issues they have. Plus, as they get to know you and your passion for the job, you will be a good example of serving others.

Shift your perspective. Stop thinking of coworkers as difficult and start thinking about the difficulty they are experiencing and how you can serve them to resolve the situation.

Once you realize what a difficult situation means to another person, you can approach the issue more compassion, generosity, empathy and patience. This is far more effective for both parties than concluding that another person is difficult all the time or is always overreacting.

In reality, you never really know all that is going on with another person, his family’s health or his financial situation. You don’t know what happened at their home the night before. You don’t know what triggers a bad attitude, so providing some compassion could be what this employee needs to start turning things around.

Lean in and work on the problem together. “Difficult” people often behave that way because they are trying to get something they need. Often, people think the only way to get their colleagues’ attention is by outwardly showing their anger.

Good managers and leaders will address issues head on and ask employees what they can do to help them be more productive at work. Showing concern and offering solutions bring out the human element in our behavior and often allows the anger to fade. This will allow you both to work on training, problem-solving and providing the outstanding service your customers expect.

Display the right behavior. An important and lasting way to make this behavior a part of your company culture is to role model it yourself. And you can do this from any position in the organization: from the top, the middle, or the frontline. Eventually, your colleagues will see how you handle these difficult situations and how well your approach leads to positive action. They will follow your actions.

When others see that you genuinely care about them personally and professionally, a special culture of inclusion will begin to take over. As more and more people inside your organization take this approach, they will recognize this is what the culture is becoming, this is who we are as an organization. The team will see that this approach works, and everyone will want to participate.

The difficult coworkers you encounter on a given workday are people seeking attention to bigger issues. Being able to recognize and reconcile those situations internally is just as important as being able to recognize when a customer interaction has gone poorly.

When service comes from the inside, stepping up your service on the outside is easier. When that happens, everyone in the organization wins and the end result will be happier customers.

Elie Y. Katz is the president and CEO of National Retail Solutions (NRS).