Emotional Labour

Some jobs have more emotional content than others. This has led to
the coining of the term “emotional labour” describing an aspect of all
of our jobs where we deal with other people’s emotions.

While most job grading methodologies do not deal with emotional
content – there seems to be a business case to say that although my work
may not require high physical content – it may require high emotional
content. It may mean that if you evaluated the emotional content of jobs
that certain of your staff are underpaid – because they simply deal with
the emotions related to your company, your products and your staff.

So ask yourself:

• Do I have an emotional side to my job?

• Is this emotional side part of what I am expected to do?

• What plans, methods and strategies have I developed to deal with
  the emotional aspect of my job?

• How often and how intense is the emotional conflicts that I have
  to deal with?

• Am I sometimes fatigued or otherwise exhausted due to this
  labour?

• What portion of my compensation is for this emotional
  content?

• Do I experience conflict in my “personal” feelings vs. my
  “customer” feelings?

You are likely to find that you have more emotional labour in your
job than you originally thought.

If you have ever ranted at a call centre you have created emotional
labour and the call centre was in part responsible for responding to
your emotions. The call centre agent could not turn around and call you
unreasonable and they need to hide, move or other wise suspend their
emotions into a pro-active space and channel it into results to ensure
that the client vents and that the breakage in the system is fixed.

Frustration, anger, and humiliation – these are all common emotions
that get processed in the service industry. The professional emotional
labourer remains calm, positive and engaged in the process of resolving
the complaints of even the most irate customer. On the extreme you may
not even know what the customer wants at all (neither does the customer)
and you may have to keep presenting different options until the customer
issues are resolved. An effective emotional labourer needs to show a
genuine concern for customer needs, smiling, and where possible making
positive eye and voice contact and these all contribute to the
customer’s perception of service quality. An effective emotional
labourer does not take it personally and has great talents in
forgiveness, compassion and caring.

Some people do not have what it takes to be an emotional labourer and
cannot face angry clients, or people who are generally unpleasant,
deceptive or manipulative. Master emotional labourers know how to deal
with each of these classes of emotional clients and can achieve outcomes
for the business that is in line with service parameters. And it may
contrary to popular belief not always be to please the customer – but
sometimes it requires us to know where to draw the line and let the
other party realise the nature of the challenge.

When you continually need to show only those emotions that are
appropriate for the job, despite how you really feel, this can often
lead to emotional conflict between your real emotions and those you show
to others. This conflict can be registered as fatigue, disengagement and
uncharacteristic responses in normal situations. The emotional worker
can become exhausted and burn-out in a different way to a person that
has high physical content in their job. Research findings seem to
indicate that higher levels of stress and disassociation with close
personal relationships can be quite common. It seems that the type of
person that is generally more cheerful and pleasant is able to turn
negative emotions around more easily than others but mechanisms such as
job-rotation and other emotion free breaks are critical to keep high
engagement employees motivated and focused.

It also does not help to use facts and to be data driven in most
situations. Emotions are seldom factual and it is often better to
pretend that someone made you think – rather than really letting someone
think. By using logic to get out of emotional situations – you are
generally labelled as insensitive, brutal and unkind.

A general social intelligence is a key determinant in the success of
the emotional employee – if the person is able to interact and relate
with people and do they have an emotional vocabulary that allows for
expression, action and reaction to emotional situations.

Companies are strangely ignorant of the discipline of emotional
labour and this can be witnessed by the lack of training programmes that
deal with emotional intelligence. The specific focus on how to deal with
complex emotional situations seems to be part of areas of psychology,
coaching and not part of the general management curriculum. Often the
whole issue of emotional labour gets side-lined into the area of service
orientation to external customers although this area has much wider
application and is relevant to colleagues and internal clients as well.
As such the company can look at mechanisms to recognise, support and
reward emotional labour more effectively. The reality is that this
discipline effects every area of the organisation and that companies
that effectively manage emotional labour would have higher returns than
companies that do not.

For an organisation it is important to examining the role of
emotional labour in different positions and to factor this into the
recruitment, performance management and staff retention plan. Very few
performance schemes looks at how well you have dealt with clients and
rate the emotional performance of the employee. It is feasible that
measures can be developed for this however and it can account for some
of the aspects that seem to be missing from traditional performance
management approaches.

Specific policies and actions introduce emotional labour. We have
seen this from maxims such as ‘The customer is always right,’ or ‘Always
greet customers with a smile.’ And ‘Make sure you notice and make
positive eye contact with any person that is within 1.5 metres from your
current position’. Expecting people to work in teams and show positive
team behaviours with their colleagues, adds another element of emotional
labour. For some people, having a high values content in the daily
operations of the business causes emotional labour.

Many companies use “buffering” to shield the business from direct
emotional labour. This is done through call centres and other mechanisms
where you do not deal with the problems directly but through using
scripts, standard “house” responses and limited pathways to resolution.
Any “escalations” or non-standard issues can then be managed in by the
back-office where the emotional content of the situation has already
been filtered or gets presented as statistics and issues.

Apart from teaching emotional intelligence to staff, two additional
systemic ways of dealing with emotional responses is to teach
problem-solving techniques. The aim is then to move workers beyond using
scripts or relying on other “house” rules and teach people how to act
effectively in their scope of control. This helps people build
confidence, and reduce their negative reactions to angry or
unpredictable situations. This then reduces anxiety because there is the
ability to deal with the issue. The second is to create effective ways
to share knowledge. Success stories, practical processes and
socialisation of complex situations lead to higher resolution rates and
allows staff to deal with the impact of emotional conflict.

If all else fails – it is always important to make counselling
services available to staff.

Conclusion

We assume that most people want to be authentic. However – at the
coal face when people are negotiating or demanding service there is
usually a range of emotions that get generated for which the emotional
labourer needs to find the right ways and strategies to manage the
situation to a positive outcome for the business, the customer and the
emotional labourer. If we become cognisant of emotional labour and we
become much better at it – it may redefine our ability to act in
organisations.