Radio 4′s “Thinking Allowed” was talking about “emotional work” this afternoon – alas I only caught a 2 min clip and listen again is not allowed because of rights issues and the link is to a paid access to the paper which the programme was based on. Hmmm – a lot of work and emotional disappointment 
Whether the research is any good or not I can’t therefore comment, but the idea of “emotional work” struck a chord with the work we’ve been doing on “customer effort“. The paper being discussed was called “When it pays to be friendly: employment relationships and emotional labour in hairstyling” by Rachel Cohen at Warwick University.
A quick bit of googling shows that “emotional work” (or for the Americans “emotional labor”) as a concept was invented by sociologist Arlie Hochschild as “management of feeling to create a publicly facial and bodily display”. For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor .
There are a lovely couple of concepts called surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting involves “painting on” affective displays, or faking it; Surface acting involves an employee presenting emotions on his or her “surface” without actually feeling them. The employee in this case puts on a facade as if the emotions are felt. Deep acting is where an employee modifies their inner feelings to match the emotion expressions the organization requires.
I’m sure this concept of emotional work might help explain several areas that lead to personal stress and affect performance. You can put in a lot of emotion without doing any emotional work – how? Zero gap between what people feel and what an organisation wants. Zero gap between what brands promise and deliver. Or you can imagine a ton of emotional work in doing very simple things that you don’t believe in. Giving excuses, saying you’ll help when you know your boss won’t let you.
Transparency, veracity, purpose and passion – the things you want in your people, your brand and your customer experience – could all be measured by the amount of emotional work your business causes your people and customers. Emotional work is one component of customer effort. The physical and emotional dimensions of any customer experience are recognised as equally valuable.
We’ll be shortly publishing a couple more blogs on the dimeniosn of customer effort and emotional work, some great video blogs on passion at our workplace and a white paper we’re publishing next week on the dimensions of a customer effort index.
Get in touch if you want more
