Emotional labor is the work of managing your own feelings to meet the demands of a job, like staying calm and caring with an upset guest. Left unchecked, it leads to stress, burnout and turnover in customer service roles. This post covers why that happens, the two strategies people use to manage it (deep acting and surface acting), and how to hire and develop people who handle it well.
In a time with plenty of concerning numbers here's another: 73 percent of Gen Z age adults are looking for a job change according to a recent survey. Millennials are close behind them at 70 percent. In contrast, just 51 percent of Gen X and 33 percent of baby boomers shared the same intention. We expect our job hopping intentions will be higher earlier in our careers and will gradually ebb as we age. While this is a time of division, in many areas, we can probably come together to agree that these numbers are a concern. In fact, earlier this year we talked about the hospitality bubble - an increasingly narrow pool of people willing to accept jobs in the service industry.
The above graphic shares the previously shared statistic that more than 70 percent of employees in Gen Z and Millennial generations are looking for a change in employment
Hiring and Developing an Early Career Workforce That Thrives Through Emotional Labor
The early career workforce, due to a lack of interest or previous dissatisfaction, may be reluctant to join, particularly affecting the ability of hospitality and service-focused industries to maintain full staffing levels. We shared earlier how this hospitality bubble can spark a decline in these industries.
At the same time, we're taking a skills-based approach to hiring and employee development. Where are the greatest gaps? If we set industry specific technical skills aside, across industries we're seeing demand for greater -
- Adaptability and change. Readiness to pivot, learn, and show resilience in the face of what's tough, difficult, and initially uncomfortable.
- Problem-solving and critical thinking. Navigating complex and new situations with the goal of driving continuous improvement over time.
- Communication. Needed for customer and team interactions and relationship building. Choosing the right medium and tailoring communication to the needs of the situation.
As we navigate new technology and artificial intelligence we're needing to rely more on one another. Customer service has become, and will continue to be, an even greater competitive key. Similarly internal customer service, teamwork, and relationship building are central to navigating fast change. Competence in the ability to both understand what someone needs and meeting them serves a greater good is core to all these skills.
We work in an economy where we thrive or languish based on how we connect with others. This means we're equipped with data, and evidence-based practices, to understand what's necessary for employees to not just meet job expectations demonstrate competence, but also thrive while working in service for others. Service, at its core, means fulfilling the needs of others – and serving others, whether in foodservice, healthcare, hospitality, or business services – can come with emotional, physical, and psychological costs.
Emotional Labor - a too often overlooked job expectation
This makes the concept of emotional labor more relevant than ever. While used in a myriad of contexts, in organizations emotional labor is the work of managing and often suppressing one's own emotions to meet job demands. Not surprisingly, left unchecked, emotional labor contributes to stress and burnout. This connection is key for a few reasons:
- Mental Health and Well-Being: The past decade has demonstrated that caring about employee well-being, and mental health, can't be viewed as a perk or benefit. It's not only the right thing to do, but there's a key connection to the health of our own organization. Emotional labor, when not successfully managed, is a common denominator in poor health outcomes - both mental and physical.
- Belonging: When employees engage in emotional labor, they often have to hide their true feelings and present a facade that aligns with their job roles, such as displaying friendliness or concern even when they might not genuinely feel those emotions. This constant emotional regulation can lead to feeling disconnected and inauthenticity, which can undermine their sense of belonging: feeling valued and a part of the organization for who they are as a person.
When employees feel that they belong, and are prepared and supported, they are more likely to experience psychological safety, allowing them to express their true emotions and reducing the emotional burden. - Bridging Divides, Generational and Beyond: We are a more diverse workforce now than ever before - not just in regards to age and other individual differences, but also our beliefs, backgrounds, and strengths. Emotional labor is core to teamwork as building productive connections across disciplines and teams. Working side by side means understanding and managing the emotional labor required to bridge gaps and build shared commitment together.
- Employee Engagement: We know employee engagement has reached a 10-year low, with a lot of the workforce feeling disconnected from a greater mission and purpose. When we're working towards a greater mission and purpose, and see the support and care we're providing as important, managing emotional demands comes with greater ease. Addressing these challenges is key when we're seeking to build resilience and the ability to support our ability to thrive through emotional labor.
In short, we overlook the emotional demands and requirements of work at our own risk. In thinking about skills-based hiring and development, it's easy to focus on the hard technical and cognitive requirements and overlook the (supposedly) 'softer' skills and competencies required. The younger half of the workforce are often at key junctures for building their competence in roles that require significant emotional labor. Consider a -
- Gen Z employees are the majority of the frontline workforce. This generation is the face, heart, and hands of the customer, or end stakeholder, experience for many industries.
- How are we building early and mid-career leaders? Farther into their journey, both groups are entering their first, or new levels, of leadership. Navigating difficult conversations, managing up-down-and-in between, communication, and resilience are all core competencies linked to managing emotional labor demands.
As we have shifted to a service-driven economy, we’ve started to understand what it takes for employees to not just meet job expectations, but also thrive in a role that serves others. Service, at its core, means fulfilling the needs of others – and serving others, whether in foodservice, healthcare, hospitality, or business services – can come with emotional, physical, and psychological costs.
Photo by Daniel Lee on Unsplash
Success in a service role requires displaying appropriate emotions at the right time: those emotions that build customer or stakeholder satisfaction and loyalty to your business. In order to do this, employees have to remain acutely self-aware of their own emotions. This means often overriding authentic emotions to display the appropriate feeling to customers and team at the time it is needed. This is the core of emotional labor.
An almost universally understood example is a restaurant server needing to show concern and understanding to a guest who is angry about a perceived fault in service that the server (and perhaps others) might see as unreasonable. But emotional labor can become even more complex and is demanded of anyone needing to subordinate their natural emotional reactions to serve a customer or be a team player. Empathizing with a customer or analyzing a situation from a peer's perspective, as well as suppressing or faking an emotion, triggers a physical stress response. Our sympathetic nervous system is activated, and we secrete stress hormones like cortisol – just as if there was a physical threat to our safety. Sustained activation over time has a physical and mental cost which leads to burnout, poor customer service, and turnover.
Emotional Labor: Service-Driven Roles and Hiring
You have probably encountered people who thrive on serving and caring for others and relish the challenge. Those who thrive likely enjoy caring for others and are also equipped with strategies that help them manage these demands. When we meet the emotional demands of our jobs successfully, and provide exceptional customer service, we often receive positive feedback. Our customers and team smile, celebrate, and communicate our success. This positive bolsters our physical and mental well-being and recovery from the stress of the situation.
Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: if we struggle to meet the emotional demands of providing service, we are less likely to be successful – and more likely to receive negative feedback. These positive and negative feedback loops are key, but also make it tough to recover when things consistently fall short. In this way, people who are poorly prepared for the demands of a service role can find themselves in a negative spiral with increasingly negative customer reactions, exhaustion, and less resources to manage difficult demands.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
We know there are specific strategies people use to alter their emotions at work. The more strategies we have at our disposal, and the extent to which we deftly leverage them, strongly influences our ability to build loyal stakeholders: whether that’s a customer, patient, or team member.
In one strategy, Deep Acting (which we often call Customer Empathy), we work to authentically experience the emotion that is required of the situation. This could come from -
- Empathizing with the customer - envisioning yourself in their situation
- Connecting with the bigger mission and purpose of your role and how this situation is key to achieving that purpose
- Thinking about similar events and challenges from your own experience
Sometimes, that empathy or reframing just isn’t possible and you have to “fake it until you make it.” This strategy is called Surface Acting. It shouldn’t be your only strategy, it can help you succeed in meeting customer demands.
Surface acting could involve -
- Self-awareness of your tone of voice, facial expressions and other nonverbals and what they communicate to the customer or person
- Actively forcing the suppression of negative emotions, like anger or disappointment
We’ve taken the science behind these emotional labor strategies to create a pre-employment assessment that can screen for the ability to provide exceptional service without experiencing the strain of emotional labor. Our assessment presents scenarios like the ones below (the first scenario is part of our customer service assessment and the second for healthcare) and asks candidates to indicate how likely they would use each of several strategies for managing the demands of the situation to understand exactly how a candidate will manage the demands of the position. This provides hiring managers with a better understanding of the strategies a particular candidate would use on the job.
Measuring the Potential to Thrive Through Emotional Labor
The above potential assessment items gauge not what the candidate would do, but how. What resources will the candidate use to manage the emotional labor demands of service-heavy work?
Each situation, whether for healthcare or service, was derived from our research and subject matter interviews with professionals in these roles. From using this assessment in service positions, we know candidates who pass this assessment achieve the following:
- 27% greater service or care to patients and customers
- 31% more likely to meet expectations for performance
Next Steps for Building Teams that Find Purpose and Meaning within Emotional Labor Demands
Measuring the strategies necessary to meet emotional labor demands can help organizations build teams that can grow and develop over time. Consider using skills-based assessments for current employees to guide training and development. By measuring self-awareness, empathy, and the specific emotional labor strategies we shared you can support the training and growth of your current team. Developing qualities like resilience and relationship building can set your organization up for success. These intentional programs ensure your team has the qualities needed to excel in a variety of situations – whether that’s building cross-functional relationships or adapting to changing roles and service or care environments. A comprehensive strategy that recognizes the demands of service is key to earning the trust and long-term commitment of younger and mid-career employees.
New to assessments for hiring or development ? Check out our resource, The What, Why, and When of Assessments.
