Emotional labour and how to handle it

Emotional Labour and how to handle it

Emotional Labour the struggle to balance emotional needs of customers with emotional needs of employees.

Customers are far more demanding now than they were 15 or 20 years ago and competiton has increased, therefore excellent customer service can offer organisations a competitive advantage.

So organisations try to engage certain emotions in their employees’ minds to enable them to offer the best customer service possible. Research has shown that even if the product is good but not the best,  excellent customer service can offer customers the feeling of satisfaction and therefore turn them into returning customers.

Engaging in Emotional Labour may mean becoming an actor for some people; thus hiding their true feelings. Hochschild1calls this surface acting which means that people can project certain feelings such as joy and fulfillment just by acting using their body language. There are certain techniques in which people can be trained to achieve that. On the other hand, Hochschild’s1 research on flight attendands has shown that people can engage in another type of emotional labour, which is deep acting. By helping people draw happy pictures in their minds  whenever they have to deal with customers so that they work on the feeling and by practising it, this comes out naturally. So in the end ‘the actor’ does not try to seem happy but actually feels happy using those techniques.

Whether organisations decide to engage their employees on one or the other type of emotional labour, management has to keep in mind the consequences and employees’ reactions. Consequences vary from stress and frustration to anxiety and even depression in the worst scenario. Hochschild’s research involving flight attendands has shown that the more people engage in deep or surface acting the more they are likely to face such problems.

So here the main question is not how to engage our people more into emotional labour since this is easier to achieve than to live with the consequences. Things can be done, though, to manage the consequences

Working in a pleasant environment with colleagues that support and help each other is according to research the number one factor that can eliminate those consequences. People who work in such supportive environments tend to be more creative and in the long run they can more easily avoid stress and anxiety.  Therefore creating a positive culture can help people offer better customer service to the external customers and would obviously put this smile we all need on their faces.

Note1: Hochschild is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has established the sociology of emotions as a field of study.