Emotional labour in hospitality: invisible, unrecognized and unrewarded
A business traveler once asked an airline stewardess when she was handing over meal trays from the food cart to her colleague “Why aren’t you smiling?” She paused, looked him in the eye, and replied, “I’ll tell you why, if you can do something first. When he said “Tell me what I should do?” she asked him to smile first. The passenger smiled at her.” Good, now freeze and hold that smile for twelve hours”. Imagine yourself trapped in a metallic tube 30,000 feet above the ground, continually smiling in the quest to enhance the customer’s status through acting as if the cabin is the customer’s home?
Why is it that the hospitality industry pays generously for people who undertake only mental labour, i.e. labour done by the brain,(for example an accounts employee), and pay much less for frontline employees who, juggling with both mental and emotional labour, perform much harder work accompanied with a smile - even in the face of an insult?
In the case of accounts or human resources personnel, the workplace is away from the customer spotlight; whilst the majority of emotional plus mental labour falls on staffs that work with customers. Such members of staff - think customer service agents, restaurant servers, airline crew are taxed to deliver countless pleasant interactions with strangers (customers) on a daily basis.
How does mental labour differ with emotional labour? Some examples of mental labour include mentally creating a list of things to do, making a mental note to finish a report, thinking about how to handle a disciplinary problem at work or planning what meals to roll out this week at the staff cafeteria. Emotional labour is not to be confused with mental labour. A supervisor making note at the back of his mind to remind an employee to deliver an item on time, is mental – not emotional.
Emotional labor deals with thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It occurs when employees are expected, in part, to manage and control their emotions in whatever dire circumstances – particularly where service excellence is a key driver of success.
A clear differentiator is to recognise what extent emotions play a part in the type of work done? It can vary with the situation and/or the person. A housemaid cleaning a vacant guest room need not have to hide her emotions at work - she can be as grim as she wants when vacuuming the carpet. Whereas, the receptionist working at the front desk must mask his emotions no sooner he comes out of the back office, despite being giving a tongue lashing for a mistake by his superior. Clearly, the amount of emotional labour required by jobs varies.
According to the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, the author of the book “The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling”, emotional labour is emotion at work (the management of human feeling), performed in exchange for pay as a condition of employment.
She explains that emotional labour is typically about attempting to feel the right feeling for the job, examples of which include a flight attendant creating a calm atmosphere, a waiter promoting an excellent dining experience, or even a funeral director making the bereaved feel understood.
Bringing emotional labour into commercial contexts, where employees’ performance and management are made into an instrument of labour comes at a human cost. The struggles that this forced labour imposes on the worker who is required to be nicer than might be considered natural, is largely invisible or rarely recognized.
The nature of most jobs in hospitality is stressful and emotionally draining. This, together with challenging working hours, often involving night, weekends and holidays, routinely missing out on time with family and friends and being unable to attend celebrative occasion’s, drains out the emotional battery quickly. Despite whatever emotions experienced, employees are expected to suppress them to provide good, if not excellent service to a customer – often “with a smile.”
Just as much as some hotels claim that certain guests are more equal than other guests, shouldn’t the same consideration be given to their guest-facing employees?
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, ex-Hotelier
|
|
|
|
