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Emotional intelligence — regulating and understanding one’s own feelings as well as other people’s emotions — is an asset in the workplace. Tapping into this skillset can yield impactful results: it can harmonize teamwork, reduce conflict, bolster morale, and enhance the customer experience for students, alumni, and donors.
When employees operate with a high degree of emotional intelligence, they perform difficult work in ways that appear effortless and genuine. In reality, the grace and fluidity we see are often the result of considerable internal labor. These high performers consider and weigh the needs of others as part of the professional product they deliver.
In her book “Emotional Labor,” author Rose Hackman explained: “Performing emotional labor — identifying or anticipating other people’s emotions, adapting yours in consequence, and then managing to positively affect other people’s emotions — can often look like someone is putting other people’s feelings first.”
Emotional labor is deep, hard work that is regulated internally and then enacted outwardly. Because it is made to look smooth and pleasing, the effort behind this work can seem undetectable. But the output it yields is real, as is the exhaustion and fatigue it can cause, especially when the work isn’t appreciated or compensated. Here’s how to identify and manage the emotional labor that you’re undertaking at work.
The Lowdown on Emotional Labor
The term “emotional labor” was first coined in 1983 by sociologist Dr. Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book “The Managed Heart,” which featured a case study about flight attendants whose smiles were a mandatory part of their uniform to make passengers feel comfortable and at ease. “This labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others — in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place,” Hochschild wrote.
She noted that curbing employees’ own feelings of annoyance, frustration, or weariness is part of the self-regulation associated with this labor. “To show that the enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly,” she wrote. “Similarly, part of the job is to disguise fatigue and irritation, for otherwise the labor would show in an unseemly way, and the product — passenger contentment — would be damaged. Because it is easier to disguise fatigue and irritation, if they can be banished all together, at least for brief periods, this feat calls for emotional labor.” Hochschild called it “surface acting” to suppress one’s true emotions while demonstrating a different emotion.
Many higher ed professionals engage in some degree of emotional labor that includes surface acting while catering to the needs of students, alumni, trustees, direct reports, and others. Hochschild explained: “most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people’s feelings and our own, and in this sense, we are all partly flight attendants.”
The Toll Emotional Labor Can Take
Surface acting can make emotional labor look effortless to everyone other than the employee who is engaged in the work. When employees are not supported in this work or when they are over taxed with emotional labor, it can lead to a sense of anxiety, detachment, exhaustion, and dissatisfaction.
“Emotional labor, like physical labor, is effortful and fatiguing when done repeatedly all day long, and can be costly in terms of performance errors and job burnout,” according to the Workplace Emotional Labor and Diversity Lab (WELD) at Penn State University. Hochschild captured this sense of detachment when she wrote: “The workers I talked to often spoke of their smiles as being on them but not of them.”
Recognize the emotional labor in which you engage in your role. Note it if you feel a sense of depletion or burnout from centering the needs of others. Also, recognize that because this work by its nature looks effortless, or as Hackman describes it, “invisible,” it can be trivialized or taken for granted.
Because of this, emotionally intelligent employees who do this work well can find themselves being asked to absorb extra emotional labor. They may be asked to assist with the most demanding students, for example, or to field phone calls from the most difficult alumni. While these can be opportunities, employees should document this work and note it in their performance conversations, because of its tendency to be regarded as invisible.
How Managers Can Help
WELD indicated that employees who engage in this difficult work benefit when their managers center employees’ needs: “Put employees first, not customers: Giving employees autonomy and support is key: allowing them the freedom to take a break if needed, or to decide how to manage [their] emotions.”
Employees also benefit when they feel that have space to be authentic with their managers and peers, WELD noted. Opportunities to drop their acting and vent honestly can be rejuvenating. WELD also emphasized that when managers listen to staff and give them support when they encounter difficult constituents is also meaningful. “In other words, recognizing and supporting the effort of emotional labor, just like physical labor, is helpful to value the employee,” WELD noted.
Measuring Emotional Labor
Both Hackman and WELD noted that emotional labor should be considered part of the performance review conversation and compensated appropriately. “Human resources departments should develop clear emotional-labor metrics based on amply available research and recognize the exponential value created from its performance,” Hackman wrote in the Washington Post.
Track emotional labor that you undertake. Note the impact of this work. Make it part of your performance conversation. WELD noted that “While employees can take the important step of recognizing extra emotional labor in which they are engaged, they also need support from their managers and their institutions.”
Remember
Because emotional labor looks smooth and polished on the outside doesn’t make this work any less rigorous, real, or valuable. Emotional intelligence is a workplace skill that drives results and makes an impact. If you are being asked to engage in extra emotional labor because you are emotionally intelligent, your work should be seen, applauded, and compensated.
