Managing Emotional Labor of Service - The EQ Way of Service Excellence

The service employee’s experience consists of his cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses when performing his service role at work. This experience by the service employee conveys what occurs in the service role i.e. time spent in the service place immersed in the sights, sounds and other environmental factors that surrounds him (“immersion”) and demands of the service role to meet or exceed customers’ needs and expectations (“intensity”). The intensity in the service role is often described as the amount of emotional labor required for the planning, organizing and control needed to express the publicly observable and desired emotions compared to what the service employee really feels in the customer experience. Service staff are expected to have a cheerful disposition, be friendly, compassionate and self-effacing. They are required to manage their personal emotions to produce the desired customer response for service excellence.

Emotions play an important part in how service employees function in their customer experiences. The display rules are similar to a script, describing what the response the service staff should express and suppress during his performing service task. This means that he may evoke or suppress his certain emotion in order to conform the social norms. There are two dimensions of emotional labor namely emotive effort and emotive dissonance. They reflect how challenging it can be for employee to maintain a helpful and caring attitude when inside, he may be dealing with negative personal or work issues. Have you ever in your service role had to deal with a rude and unreasonable person? Were you able to manage your emotions and still be at your professional best?

Alice works as a customer service agent. She has to serve customers from different walks of life, handling their diverse requests from the routine to the demands of exceptional waivers to the stipulated policies, terms and conditions. No matter what demands and emotions Alice has to handle, she has to project “service with a smile”. Alice needs to have a high level of self-awareness and management to be able to handle her emotions in her service role, and this is called emotional labor. Alice has to project to be happy and polite to the customers though inside, she maybe upset and disillusioned. The show must go on! She has to conceal her real emotions and continue to be pleasant when receiving critical remarks from demanding customers. It can be draining.

There are two types of emotional labor, and they are called deep acting and surface acting. Deep acting is about the service employee trying to feel a specific emotion that he is thinking about in his mind. For example, Alice would think about the great time when she is appreciated by the friendly customers who take time to write her letters of commendation while serving. This will put Alice in a positive mood prompting her to respond to customers' concerns with joy and politeness. Surface acting is when the service employee has to fake emotion to meet the required social or work rules. For example, Alice is very upset with this aggravated customer shouting at her and refusing to listen to her. Her supervisor and colleagues have no idea that Alice is in personal turmoil. Alice has intentionally portrayed emotions that she is not currently feeling by faking to exude positivity and providing friendly service to her customers. Engagement in surface acting can happen when one needs to hide negative emotions, such as masking the dislike of a customer’s suggestion. Surface acting has been most extensively studied in service workers, who need to put on a pleasant smile for their working hours even when engaging unpleasant customers. It can cause suffers to experience detachment from their own emotions and it may suffer emotional exhaustion at the same time decrease job satisfaction.

Emotional labor affects how the service employee performs at work. Relentless surface acting is physically and emotionally exhausting because it requires constant application of effort to act. Based on the role conflict theory, it is assumed that people who display “fake” emotion (surface acting) will have experience a higher level of emotional exhaustion and lower of job satisfaction. Staff in jobs that contain high levels of emotional labor tend to have higher levels of absenteeism, turnover and less engagement. Managers can identify service professionals who are having emotional labor and provide relevant and practical training to help them deal with the concerns, be energized and avoid job burnout. Discovering ways to maintain authentic and positive relations with others without having to constantly monitor the emotions one is expressing. Some research points to the approach to find ways to feel the emotion yourself, eliciting the authentic emotions and then portray those with a conscious choice. In this emotional intelligence (EQ) way, one will not need to pay the same energy toll as with surface acting. Improving is an effective way to reduce the burden of emotional labor.  

Another deep connecting way to know and manage oneself will be through the discovery of his self-efficacy. Self-efficacy refers to the service employee’s belief in his capability to organize and execute a course of action needed to meet the demands of service tasks. It refers to evaluations that employee make concerning his ability to do what is needed to successfully conduct his service job. Service professionals who have high levels of self-efficacy believe they have the potential for mastering job-related stressors more effectively. Most research studies have emphasized the individual perceptions of one's self-efficacy can buffer against the tension of emotional labor.

On a bigger picture, connecting the significance at work to a larger purpose is another sweet spot to counter emotional labor. Finding the significance at the service work is not about taking some lofty action in the future. It is about understanding why we might do a particular task, then putting that “why” in action today. It can be a small action of greetings well done, and ensuring these small moments add up to significance that they total to what we mean to create. Significance is really about putting it in action within us. Knowing why you are doing what you are doing and what you want to accomplish will help you make choices and decisions for the shift.

Service is a lot of heart-work and being sincere and authentic will be the way to go!