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CHAPTER FOUR
EMOTIONAL LABOR OR EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE?

Maureen O’Hara sits in an old-fashioned office chair, dressed all in black, looking resolute as she is interviewed for the brisk-selling business magazine The Fast Company. Dean of faculty at San Francisco’s Saybrook Graduate School and postmodern psychologist par excellence, Dr. O’Hara makes a strong case for the necessity of emotional skills at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Contrast this message with that of Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart, as she discusses emotional labor:

Are these two viewpoints, expressed over a period of fifteen years, with one seeing emotional competence as a “glorious” skill set and the other viewing it as a emotional “burden,” merely two different opinions about service work? Or do O’Hara and Hochschild, the spokespeople we have chosen to represent these two points of view, speak to fundamental and divisive beliefs about the nature of service? We think it is the latter.

In fact, we contend these points of view reflect a chasm that puts management and service staff on opposite sides and is so deep that it must be acknowledged and bridged if organizations are to gain the participation of their staff in effectively offering emotional value to customers. Hochschild contends that service providers are alienated from their own emotions in a service economy and that they, therefore, cannot experience meaningful relationships in the service exchange. We would say that it is up to managers to create a context for meaningful relationships to develop. This context requires choosing emotional competency over emotional labor to define service offerings.

If customer-staff relationships are structured so value is experienced by both customers and staff, then service providers can see themselves as adding value in their work, rather than merely laboring under the weight of service requirements. The “reality” of service work can be a positive definition that we choose and one that benefits both the supplier and the receiver. Or it can be a burdensome definition, one that gives little value to either customers or service providers. As Anais Nin implies in her quotation—“We see things not as they are. We see things as we are”—the choice is ours.

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Do Employers Have the Right to Demand Emotional Participation?

Arlie Hochschild’s 1983 work brought attention to the concept of emotional labor. She pinpointed a point of view held yet today by many who believe that workers are demeaned, basically under the thumb of managers and customers. They are, in Hochschild’s world, taken advantage of. Hochschild’s point of view is based on assumptions that need to be revisited. This is particularly true as we transition from a service to an experience economy. Genuinely expressed emotions, or as we call them, authentic interactions, are in even greater demand today in order to create memorable experiences, the touchstone of success in the experience economy.

Authentic interactions demand more than merely giving personal attention to customers. Authentic interactions demand emotional connectedness and require some level of emotional disclosure.³ While civility is better than rudeness, scripted politeness or forced friendly behavior will not add sufficient emotional value to create the experiences out of which loyalty is deepened. To use the words of marketing experts, “it [authenticity] involves a relational exchange that requires emotion work, real giving on the part of the provider.”⁴

This creates a conundrum. You can’t force emotional transactions of this type, and yet this is precisely the type of interaction organizations must encourage and even expect their staff to create with customers. Consider managers who supervise staff with little sense of teamwork. To fix this problem, managers may attempt to create a functioning team by hiring team-building experts. Team builders, with exercises, discussions, and reflection, attempt to change team dynamics from within the team. They don’t just tell the staff to be a team and expect that will happen. They start with the assumption that staff won’t function as a team if the individuals don’t want to be a part of that team. They also assume people will like their work more when they function as a team. A group of people cannot be forced to operate as a team, but they work better when they do.

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In the same way, if managers force service workers to engage in friendly transactions with customers, not only will these commands be countereffective, but a real disservice will be done to frontline staff, as Hochschild points out. The only means to bridge this chasm is for everyone to shift perspective and see the value that is present for both customers and service providers when authentic exchanges occur. In short, to gain the full benefit for everyone, service needs to be redefined as emotional competence, rather than emotional labor.

Hochschild bases her notions about emotional labor and the service economy in a reality rooted in the industrial age. Her analysis is grounded in Marxist theory, which says that workers are necessarily alienated from their own labor in a manufacturing society. That is, the Marxist line goes, industrial line workers can have no meaningful relationship with the goods they produce. This is in contrast to the craftsperson who carefully carves a piece of furniture from start to finish and in so doing identifies with the outcome of work.

Service workers become similarly alienated, Hochschild writes, when they can’t express their “true” emotions, when they must “transmute” their feelings of hostility into a smile—all for the purpose of increasing corporate profits. If service providers are upset with customers, she asserts, they dare not snap back because that action would interfere with the economic goals of their organizations. Actually, we wish she would tell more service workers they can’t attack their customers. We see all too many instances of scolding, arrogance, and flat-out rudeness—and they do interfere with the economic goals of organizations.

Hochschild further argues that workers who once sold their labor in the manufacturing economy could at least retain some sense of self or individuality at the end of the day. Because workers could be angry at their situation, they retained personal dignity and worth, even if their assembly line work was devoid of meaning. Angry workers couldn’t be fired for expressing their attitudes, as Hochschild assumes they can be today.⁵ (This probably wasn’t true even in the early industrial period, 67unless workers were protected by a union.) Industrial employees were asked to produce goods under difficult conditions, Hochschild concedes, but they didn’t have to endure the onerous and stress-filled burden of forcing smiles on their faces or being nice to customers or colleagues when they didn’t feel like it.

This point of view undoubtedly romanticizes events from the industrial past in its criticism of the service economy. Hochschild assures her readers that selling emotional labor is more demeaning than selling physical labor. We suspect that most laborers who were “authentically” angry while chipping coal in mile-deep mines or standing on their feet in sweltering steel mills or performing the single task of tightening the same screw on every passing automobile might happily have changed places with modern service workers. Hochschild makes a big assumption when she states that the service workers’”public faces” are necessarily not the service workers’ “authentic selves.” To the degree that we accept this viewpoint as a “real” description of the modern service world, we undermine the entire field.

The Positive Challenge of Service Work

Maureen O’Hara, on the other hand, promotes the idea that learning the skills of human interaction in all their magnificent complexity is an honorable task, a blossoming of individual potential, rather than a diminishment. O’Hara sees a positive challenge in service economy work:

Daniel Goleman’s term for the empathy that O’Hara refers to is “social radar.”⁷ Goleman suggests that without this empathic radar, people become blunt and inappropriate with each other. Nonempathic people don’t know how to effectively 68ease the bumps and pressures that naturally occur in social communication.

Consider the following example of botched empathy reported in a customer service newsletter. A woman called a mail-order catalog company to order a scanty undergarment. She was a little nervous about spending money on something she feared was frivolous so she told the man who took her order,”I don’t know whether I should be buying something like this.” His task-focused, nonempathic response to her comment, delivered in a flat tone of voice, was “Credit card number, please.” The woman was upset enough to write about the incident to an electronic newsletter. The clerk’s non sequitur comment, totally lacking in empathy, will never nurture customer loyalty and may even drive business away. Any sales organization would certainly not want this to continue.

This type of exchange happens all the time, all over the world. A friend went to fill a prescription at a local drugstore that prides itself on its quality customer service. He was asked, “How is your day?”“Fine,” he responded. “How is yours going?” “Don’t get me started,” the clerk answered. “It’s a lousy day. I have to stay in here and work all day long.” (Unspoken message: waiting on you is no fun.) She continued, “Here’s my philosophy. First you work all your life—and then you die.” The management of this particular store may argue that it is difficult to hire staff who, for a low hourly wage, like to wait on customers or that there is no time for training or that staff turnover is ridiculously high. Perhaps. But then stop advertising your store as an establishment that treats customers as number one—as this particular drugstore does.

The emotional labor point of view is that if the order taker and sales clerk are required to engage in reassuring behaviors to customers when they don’t want to, they are somehow selling their souls. O’Hara, in contrast, would say that the organization and the employee are facing a challenge of empathy, and the service provider needs enhanced skills. If empathy involves learning to read one’s own emotional signals and those of others and then acting out of compassion with this information, under what circumstances could this be negative? Perhaps only if the service provider took this job as a last resort or faked attitudes during the 69interview process or believes that showing empathy for customers/ strangers is more than can be reasonably expected for a salary.

There are positive examples where both customers and staff seem to benefit. Another friend went to a drugstore. He is forty-four years old and bought some beer. The female clerk said in a coy manner, “How can I be sure you’re old enough to buy this?” He laughed and responded, “I’ll show you my ID, but first I want to know how old you think I am.” She said, “About thirty-four.” Flattered, he told her his real age, to which she said, “Well, if you’re married, you tell your wife that you’ve still got it. You’ve definitely still got it!” When our friend related this exchange, he said, “Can you imagine how lucky this store is to get someone like her working a checkout stand? She makes me want to go back in there and get more of her sunshine.”

Creating Customers

Peter Drucker proposes, in a deceptively simple statement, that the fundamental purpose of business is to “create customers.” Obviously, there has to be a needed, offered, and available product or service in order to create a customer. But products or services alone won’t create customers, unless you happen to have them forced into your lap. Loyal customer relationships require nurtured, personal connections and generally don’t happen by accident.

Imagine the benefits if every organization could enjoy the results of all staff working to create these relationships whenever the opportunity arose. What could happen to the bottom line of an organization if all new hires clearly understood that the reason they were hired was to create customers, to spread sunshine? Yet how many times is creating a customer about the farthest thing from a service provider’s mind? Maybe the boss is on the staff’s mind, perhaps the difficulty of the new software program, possibly the long queue of customers waiting to be helped.

Creating customers can occur at the emotional, human level any time, any place. It happens when customers walk down grocery store aisles and an inventory stocker turns to smile at them, when a genuine 70voice of concern is heard at the other end of the line as they express frustration over another computer glitch, or when an item is accepted for return with a smile.

Dianna recently checked out of a hotel. The desk clerk, while asking all the appropriate questions to ensure a speedy checkout, remained consistently involved with his computer, didn’t look at Dianna except as she stepped up to the counter, and then gave her a weak smile when he finished looking to see who was next in line. He made no attempt at all to engage Dianna as she was leaving.

This desk clerk thinks his job is to check people out of the hotel. He doesn’t have a picture in his mind that his job is to “create customers” for this hotel. The purpose of a concert pianist is not simply to play a piece of music. It is to create an experience for the audience. To the degree that the pianist and the service provider are able to explore the full possibilities of their work experience and their subsequent impact, they also create customers.

Hochschild uses the word “transmutation” to describe suppression of feelings. It’s a word we like—but with a different twist. Hochschild uses the term to mean “selling out” one’s true feelings. Transmutation also refers to the supposed Middle Ages alchemical practice of converting base metals into gold and silver. What if service providers thought of their work as converting base (normal, everyday) emotions into gold and silver (customer-creating) emotions? Would the undergarment mailorder clerk and the drugstore clerk referred to above perhaps see and then perform their work differently than when they see their tasks as simply filling orders or earning a paycheck? Would they find some sunshine and deliver it to their next customer?

British psychologist Brian Parkinson summarizes it this way: “In more general terms, the ways in which organizations define emotional reality may directly shape emotional responses to it.”⁸ If service staff, with the support of management, do not embrace emotional skills and see them as a positive addition to their own competencies, they will 71indeed find themselves with Hochschild’s “commercialized feelings.” Furthermore, if organizations fail to move from emotional labor to emotional competence, they will unconsciously nurture an “us” (service providers) versus “them” (customers and management) attitude.

Does Giving Diminish Us?

Some cultures struggle with the concept of service because of its connection to the word “servant” (L. servitium servus, a slave: see serf). In these cultures, service implies “over” and “under” positions. The dictionary supplies other meanings as well: “the serving of God, as through good works; an act giving assistance to another; friendly help; also, professional aid or attention.”⁹

A more modern view of service is that in today’s world of fluid roles, all of us offer service and assistance to each other at one time or another. There is a profound difference between being a good service provider, being a server, and being servile.¹⁰ When the authors present a seminar to hotel staff, they are in a service provider position to everyone in attendance at that course. Later in the evening, if one of the members of the class goes to the authors’ rooms and provides turndown service, the daytime course participant has become the service provider. The next morning, back in class, roles are shifted once again.

It used to be that servants remained servants twenty-four hours a day in relation to their employers. Many were born as servants and died as servants. The concept of “internal customer,” introduced in the 1980s and gaining wide acceptance by the end of the twentieth century, has had a tremendous influence on adding fluidity to roles in modern organizations.¹¹ A staff member’s internal customer is his or her boss. At the same time, a boss’s internal customers are his or her staff. They are customers of each other at different times, roles switching throughout the day.

Hochschild implies that when workers are placed in a service role for which they are paid they are somehow dirtied. This attitude is remarkably prevalent among a substantial percentage of service providers 72themselves, and fundamentally it suggests that service work is not valued. Yet everyone understands that if an organization delivers poor service, it will be hard-pressed to retain customers. If an organization disparages its service work and workers in any way, service providers will play out this reality and deliver inauthentic service exchanges, with smiles that involve only the mouth and tones of voice that could never be criticized for being rude but contain not an ounce of friendliness or compassion. It’s almost as if they are saying, “I’ll give you a smile on my face, but you’ll get nothing else from me.” We think it reasonable to conclude that no one is ennobled under these circumstances of pretence, that the service worker is indeed being servile. Most customers are not taken in by this lack of authenticity.

Another view of the role of service providers is provided by Naomi Rhode, one of America’s foremost public speakers. As a past president of the National Speaker’s Association, Rhode developed the theme “The Privilege of the Platform” to remind speakers of the great opportunity and responsibility they have to impact people’s lives. Of course, speakers are placed in a service role for which they are handsomely paid. However, in illustrating her theme, Rhode chose to use the example of a waitress at a busy airport restaurant who provided an outstanding experience while serving a cup of coffee. This waitress, Rhode remarked, understood that the coffee counter was her platform.

We have also received similar outstanding service from a toll taker at the Golden Gate Bridge who makes every perfunctory transaction memorable to us and his other customers—even if the contact is only a few seconds. His outstanding attitude has even been the focus of a San Francisco Examiner article.

Service Relationships versus Service Encounters

Service today is offered via encounters or via relationships. Service encounters are relatively short-lived exchanges, mostly with strangers, such as in the fast-food industry, in department stores, or with a telephone operator. The service level of an encounter generally doesn’t depend upon specialized information that the service provider has. 73 Service encounters are thought to be more or less “one size fits all” kinds of service. Service relationships are entirely different. A service relationship might be one’s relationship with an insurance broker, banker, pharmacist, doctor, or baby-sitter. Generally relationships are experienced more than once, take more time, and require a degree of tailoring.¹²

Organizations use service encounters as much as possible because they are less expensive to deliver, can be standardized, and aren’t as dependent upon staff forming long-term relationships with customers, making staff turnover not as big a detriment. Encounters also make more sense because increasingly larger numbers of people live in heavily populated urban areas; they move easily from one shop or restaurant or business to the next, rarely forming relationships along the line. Internet shopping, which is very distant and encounter-like in its nature, is also booming in popularity.

People want faster, standardized service across the world, twenty-four hours a day, so they can enjoy the limited personal time they have. Many more people travel today and conduct business at all times of the day and night, so service companies are forced to have several providers, not just one, interact with the same customer. The challenge for businesses is to make service encounters feel like service relationships.

Hochschild sees an inherent problem with service encounters. She argues that people can be who they authentically are in their personal family and friends relationships, while in their work encounters they can’t. Staff have to “put on a face” at work when they are in the business of service encounters, and this is laborious, Hochschild contends.

In reality, people regularly compromise to aid their social interactions—whether at work or at home, whether they have personal encounters or personal relationships. If people behaved as they truly wanted to all the time, they would no doubt find themselves without families or friends. Indeed, we know many individuals who find emotional giving at work a relief compared to coping with the emotional demands of their families. Emotional competence requires learning which of our fundamental 74values—at work or at home—should never be compromised and at the same time learning how to get what we want without having to fight battles all day long. We disagree with Hochschild that emotional labor is just a work-related issue.

Parents who easily lose their tempers and physically abuse their children need to seek help so they avoid acting out destructive feelings. They must practice emotional strategies to make being around children easier for them. Are parents less authentic because they don’t hit their crying or messy children? Hardly. Conversely, Hochschild assumes that when we modify our responses in a paid environment we have “sold out.” She writes that when service workers transmute or squash their feelings so many times during the day, they run the risk of losing the function of feeling altogether. Couldn’t the same charge be made of parents with small children?

We don’t want to be overly harsh in our judgment of the “emotional labor” point of view ably represented by so many. Hochschild’s book is important, as is British business psychologist Sandi Mann’s latest book, Hiding What We Feel, Faking What We Don’t. We recommend these books along with the entire issue of the January 1999 Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, devoted to this topic.¹³ They speak to challenges in the service industry that must be addressed. In fact, Hochschild’s book has helped us crystallize our own approach to customer service.

If we buy into the thesis, however, that service workers necessarily sell out their feelings when they provide service, then we will have created a reality where service work is, by definition, emotional labor in the worst sense of the term, and we will have no means to escape it. To the degree that businesses create or allow the emotional environment that Hochschild has described, they are ultimately doomed to suffer its consequences. We think a better approach is to choose and nurture a philosophy of service that recognizes and compensates for the value of emotional competence, rather than focuses on the burden of emotional labor.

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We agree that many flight attendants (the group that Hochschild focuses on) find it difficult to work flight after flight in crowded airplanes with unhappy, rushed, stressed passengers—and still maintain a happy countenance. But what about the alternative? Would Hochschild encourage flight attendants to express frustration at passengers who don’t move quickly to their seats? (Actually, they sometimes do.) Or should they shout back a cynical response to a passenger who dares to ask for yet another cup of coffee? (This happens, too.) She does not recommend this, by the way, though she does not offer any alternatives either. In fact, while she admires the airline training programs that help flight attendants cope with their jobs, she also disparages the airlines as taking advantage of women, since most flight attendants and other frontline staff are female.

Maureen O’Hara, on the other hand, acknowledges that learning to be empathic can be difficult and cause stress. People in business and on the front lines definitely know it is not without costs. Managers can help by designing customer-friendly systems and by offering service training about coping with relationship demands. In this way, service work can be experienced as a challenge, rather than as a burden, and as more than “grunt” work. We’ve heard participants in our programs say, “I can hardly wait until a customer blows up at me so I can try out this technique.” If service staff are appropriately supported, they are excited to try out a new competency.

Service work is best viewed as requiring emotional sophistication, just as writing computer code requires programming skills. Someone who does not possess the emotional competence to deliver emotionally competent service needs to be placed in a position with more limited human demands, just as someone who cannot learn to use a computer needs a position where a computer is not required.

Can Technology Save Us from Emotional Labor?

Is it possible to avoid the challenge of emotional demands placed on service staff by using more technology? In other words, is it possible to avoid the stress of emotional labor by substituting technology for personal 76contact? Certainly technology can help. In some limited ways, computer technology makes it possible for brief service encounters to possess more of the feeling of ongoing service relationships because enormous amounts of customer data can be stored and quickly accessed by staff. This allows any service provider to be seamlessly connected to whoever last interacted with the customer.

Some companies are getting very good at enabling customers to help themselves to products on the Web. In 1997, a single Cisco customer reportedly bought a hundred million dollars worth of equipment without talking to one Cisco employee!¹⁴ As more and more people, particularly the younger generation, become comfortable with technology, examples of this type will abound. We do not believe, however, there will ever be a perfect substitute for human contact.

Janelle Barlow and Claus Møller reported in A Complaint Is a Gift that some companies use tape recordings for the opening words of telephone greetings.¹⁵ A perky tape-recorded “hello” is delivered in an interested high-energy voice so that the customer hears a positive service provider answer the phone. This saves the service provider from expending unnecessary energy on the first few words of greeting. The service provider then shifts into real time. The customers get that important first impression delivered electronically, though customers would never suspect they just heard a tape recording.

However, the notion that technology can save us from negative emotions is based on the faulty assumption that the feelings customers experience when dealing with machines are minimal. Anyone who believes this has not experienced a computer crash destroying three hours of painstaking work. People have been known to tip over vending machines when they eat up coins and do not deliver a product. We have seen people pound on ATM machines when they are depleted of funds.

There is no reason not to use technology to help ease the burden of service providers, but at some 77point humans need to be present, especially when persuasion is necessary to complete a transaction. When one considers that over half of the interactions companies have with their customers take place over the telephone, the importance of managing the emotional impact of this technology is immense.¹⁶

In fact, the demands on service providers may increase because the first contact many customers have with an organization is a machine. By the time customers get to talk with a person, many of them are already upset. This especially happens with voice-mail systems that present dozens of looped menu options, not one of which involves talking to a live human being. It is not uncommon for service representatives to hear customers say when they finally reach them, “My God, I can’t believe I actually got through to a person!” That’s not a very positive beginning to a service experience. In fact, consulting firms are now beginning to suggest that Internet companies, many of which limit customer contact with their staff, must learn from the traditional businesses against which they have been competing. Issac Lagnado of Tactical Retail Solutions concludes, “Progressively more and more of the e-players will have to hire people and train them.”¹⁷

The Challenge of Burnout

There is no magical solution to the challenge of constantly dealing with emotions. Choosing to see service as emotional competence over emotional labor can help, but intense emotional involvement with limited opportunities to escape hassled customers can still cause burnout. The “opportunity” question for organizations is, How can service workers learn to deliver service hour after hour, day after day, without becoming alienated and paying a health price?

Burnout, as an idea, has mostly been used to describe people in the helping professions (social work, nursing, psychology, and child care). Sociologists have long assumed that the helping professions required intense emotional involvement, and, therefore, people in these fields were the ones who would most likely suffer burnout’s negative effects. To the degree that an organization expects staff without any coping skills to 78offer “experiences,” burnout will also surely take its toll on the modern service/experience worker.

Signals of burnout include fatigue that does not go away with more sleep, low motivation for just about everything, and a cynical attitude.¹⁸ Burned-out, exhausted nurses, for example, might stop caring about how their patients feel or even whether they live or die. Burned-out service/experience providers also stop caring whether their customers walk away with a positive attitude, whether they get their needs met, or maybe even whether they live or die as well! Most readers of this book have probably suffered through desperately needing something from a business, only to be told in a completely flat, cynical, disinterested voice, “Sorry, there are none left.” And if a customer protests, explaining the genuine need for this product, he or she may be told by a service provider who cares not a bit for the customer’s personal situation,”Look, you’re not the only one.”

We know of airline gate agents who have gotten into shouting matches with passengers over cancelled flights. A group of gate agents at San Francisco International Airport actually requested “cages” to work behind so they could be protected from their customers. This request speaks to a high level of cynicism among the gate agents or perhaps a level of frustration with their management that they are reluctant to voice directly. So they take it out on the customers.

Flight attendants in the United States have asked for special federal legislation, called “air rage laws,” to protect them against unruly passengers. It could be that airlines (both management and cabin crew) need to look at how to make the whole flying experience more friendly, rather than blame their customers of which it is estimated only one in three million engage in air rage. In the case of the San Francisco fiasco, an airline grossly oversold cheap tickets for the last flight of the day between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who knows what impact this had on the individual lives of the passengers who couldn’t get where they had counted on going?

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Cathay Pacific flight attendants in early 1999 threatened to refuse to smile for one hour on every flight to show their unhappiness over management plans to eliminate automatic pay increases.¹⁹ That’s not exactly “creating customers” behavior. Their action raises several interesting questions. Are the flight attendants saying that it is easier for them to deliver their service without a smile? When workers go on strike, they withhold something of value—namely their labor. So in the “smile strike,” should Cathay Pacific flight attendants be paid less for that one hour’s flight time? Should the passengers get cheaper tickets because they endured one hour of no smiles? How do the flight attendants prepare themselves for this hour? Do they put little reminder signs up: “Remember, don’t smile”? Do they let the passengers know they are entering into an hour-long smile-free period? Do they tell the passengers their somber faces have nothing to do with the passengers but are a message to Cathay Pacific management? If the flight attendants felt like smiling but were in their one-hour smile strike, would they think of negative emotional situations so they could hold back automatic smiles?

What if a group of New York or London actors decided to engage in an “emotional” strike in the middle of a stage performance? Would such withholding make it easier for them? Undoubtedly not. We suspect that when people lose themselves in the sheer joy of performance, work is easier, not more difficult. It can take a lot of energy to be negative.

Blaming bad behavior on senior management’s refusal to grant automatic pay raises shifts responsibility away from individuals, where we believe responsibility for personal behavior lies. At the same time, some senior managers make decisions and communicate these decisions in a way guaranteed to create unhappy staff. Some managers also try to script every move of their employees in an attempt to “get it right,” telling staff what to say, when to smile, and how to behave in every situation—in short, treating staff like machines that happen to look like humans.

Is Cathay Pacific in the transportation business, or is it in the “creating customers” business? If it is the latter, how could management have communicated with staff when an automatic pay increase was not possible during a period of economic downturn so staff did not feel inclined 80to take it out on Cathay customers? The answer has a lot to do with how a company handles internal emotional discontent and how it defines its reason for existence. It also has something to do with being emotion friendly and choosing a service model of emotional competence.

Becoming emotion friendly can be done in part by focusing on voluntary partnerships in every aspect of the business: partnerships between staff and their coworkers, partnerships between management and staff, and partnerships between staff and customers. Partnerships will never work if they are forced. We will indeed have emotional labor under those circumstances. When this happens, not only will we have alienated and former staff, we will have “former” customers as well.

Emotional competency is extremely valuable in an increasingly crowded, interdependent society. It is the role of management to describe it, explain it, set up systems to make it easy to deliver, and then honor it as genuine added value. Hans Selye,”father” of the modern concept of stress, wrote about contributions years ago, “If you want to live a long life, focus on making contributions.”²⁰ Selye’s message applies to both staff and managers.

Teaching staff stress management techniques is a strong antidote to burnout. Stress management can show staff how to maintain peak performance levels while operating in high-stress environments. Instead of using energy to deny emotions, staff can learn to work cooperatively on teams and with customers while not denying their emotions. Acknowledging feelings is one of the best ways to avoid burnout and is a powerful stress management strategy; it also enables service workers to maintain contact with their own emotions. No one wins if service providers go home in the evening burned out and numb to feelings.

Years ago, Janelle was invited by a hospital to conduct a stress management program. The program organizers asked an unusually large number of probing questions regarding program content. Finally, Janelle asked them if something negative had happened that prompted them to ask such detailed questions. The woman replied that they had had a previous “stress” speaker who urged the surgical nurses to just say “no” to 81the surgeons if they didn’t like the way they were asked to hand over surgical equipment. That would never work in a crisis or operating room environment. Unfortunately, some people believe that there are only two strategies for dealing with stressful situations, both of which are extremes: either debase yourself by giving in, or simply refuse to cooperate. There is middle ground, and it is up to managers and staff to find this shared space with each other and with customers.

Organizations must likewise develop systems that do not put staff in impossible and demeaning situations, while simultaneously understanding that emotionally hostile customers are very upset about something that matters to them, feel desperate, or sense they are not being heard. Understanding the emotional needs of customers requires open staff discussion. Staff must be recognized as being capable of making legitimate contributions to how their teams can best operate. If we expect staff to emotionally connect with customers, the organizational structure itself must reflect this approach by valuing staff connections with the organization.

We know of organizations that provide their staff with zero opportunities to discuss emotional responses to their work. In support of Hochschild’s thesis, some managers definitely deny the impact of operating in an emotional environment all day long, whether these emotions are generated by interacting with customers or colleagues or from losing automatic pay increases. In Part I, “Building an Emotion-Friendly Service Culture,” we discussed the importance of allowing staff to discuss the frustrations inherent in their work. These discussions need to be held within the context of a larger organizational philosophy so that staff walk away with the feeling that customers are not a burden but can make work enjoyable.