Gift Shop Shirker

     Over Thanksgiving and Christmas break I usually come home and want to relax. It is a time to take a break from the hustle and bustle of my life at UVA....but that is not the case sometimes. I got home this past Thursday night, and I was greeted with the complaints of my mom's current job issues. My mom is the manager and buyer for a hospital gift shop in Atlanta. She has a total of about forty employees that rotate shifts. The goal of the gift shop is to bring a smile to people's faces and to lighten up what may be one of the worst days of their lives. 

    Linda has been working for my mom for the past three years, and my mom is getting fed up. She began to rant to me about how Linda goes on her phone, takes snacks and candy from the shop, and she shows up late to work almost every shift. My mom holds her employees to a higher standard than this. I sat in the car listening to my mom rant about her job troubles, and I knew immediately this was an example of shirking. 

    Shirking occurs when an employee or agent is not doing what they were hired to do to the best of their ability. My mom did not assign a specific output, making it hard for her to hold her employees to a specific standard. It would be easier to talk to Linda about her lack of effort if there was a tangible number of sales she needed to reach per shift. Even if it was a small number to start, it would give her a baseline of what she needs to accomplish. There was also no urgency to replace workers like Linda. If my mom had a line of people wanting to work in her shop, it would make her job easy. She could fire Linda and hire a more motivated worker. There were no alternatives to hire new employees. Shirking seems too easy in my mom's store, so I told her to lay down the law and put a number to her employees. Make them meet a benchmark, monitor them more closely, and send out a performance review form of how the employees are doing. Those were a few tips I gave her, but who knows if she will use them? I guess we will hear about Linda over Christmas break....