A consistent trend since COVID has been the rise of customer aggression. With the holiday season amplifying customer expectations, employees in public-facing roles will likely see more challenging behaviour, making emotional labour even harder to manage.
In this article, we’ll dive into what emotional labour is, why it’s so important to focus on in the workplace, and how it affects staff. We’ll also share key insights on what can help or harm employees when it comes to emotional labour. To keep it practical, we’ll wrap up with three actionable tips for you to support your teams through this challenging period.
So what is emotional labour?
Emotional labour is all about managing your emotions to meet the expectations set by your workplace. In simple terms, it’s the effort employees put into controlling their feelings and expressions to align with job requirements.
In many service roles, for example, employees are expected to always display positive emotions—think “service with a smile”—even when they’re not feeling that way. This expectation to suppress or adjust true emotions to match what the organisation wants creates emotional demands, which can be taxing over time.
Real-Life Insights: The Emotional Labour of caring for others
To get an inside view, ROW asked an HR professional from a healthcare organisation to anonymously share how emotional labour plays out in their setting:
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