What is emotional labor?

اayiz basstiqrarh waminhajiatih almusisiat wafaeiliat 'iidaratiha Work is the process of managing emotions and emotions to make sound decisions. It is the ability to recognize our personal feelings and the feelings of others to manage our emotions properly in our relationships with others. Emotional work creates a stable pattern of positive public relations between individuals and employees and influences a stable growth with its institutional methodology and effectiveness.

Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, co-workers and superiors. This includes analysis and decision making in terms of the expression of emotion, whether actually felt or not, as well as its opposite: the suppression of emotions that are felt but not expressed.

Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job or a relationship. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, co-workers and superiors.

As a result, on-demand workers end up performing outsize amounts of what sociologists call “emotional labor,” or expressive work to make the customer experience a positive one so that users come back to the platform. This work extends beyond good customer service: It involves actively reshaping a worker’s inner emotional life to conform to employers’ and customers’ expectations of emotional performance.

Studies have confirmed that both men and women perform emotional labor. Hochschild and other sociologists have noted that emotional labor in the service of work often produces “emotional dissonance” — a conflict between how workers really feel and the surface feelings they’re expected to perform as part of a job. Hochschild’s work on flight attendants found that unless managers acknowledged and appreciated the emotional efforts of their workers, the pressures around emotional dissonance created by so-called “surface acting” caused flight attendants stress, anxiety, and resentment against their employers — and, ultimately, long-term burnout.

Companies in the service sector have long struggled to get the balance right when it comes to asking for and acknowledging emotional labor. What’s revolutionary (and troubling) about the present moment is how much companies in the on-demand economy, including Uber, are taking emotional labor for granted, especially given its centrality to their ongoing success.

Getting ahead of these curves would benefit the long-term health and retention efforts of digital economy platforms. Entrepreneurs should consider these changes to their user experience design, HR policies, and general corporate strategy to recognize, value, and support the emotional labor of on-demand workers:

Hire workers as full-time employees. An increasing number of on-demand businesses are realizing what the CEO of Costco recently noted — workers will be happier, more productive, and more loyal if you recognize that, legally, they’re indeed your workers.

Consider faces, not numbers. If you want customer service functionality in your app, don’t use a simple 1–5 rating system. This is known as a Likert scale in psychology, and it is a poor way to incentivize positive customer engagement over the long term. Numerical ratings prime customers to cluster around either the top or bottom ends of a rating scale, meaning neither workers nor managers get sufficiently accurate or granular feedback about performance.

An alternative way to get feedback might be through automated customer experience interfaces. Those produced by Swedish company HappyOrNot, which use a sequence of expressive faces ranging from smiling to frowning, can get a more holistic sense of a user’s experience. The company claims a 10% improvement in customer satisfaction for users of its product.

Give users the option to give a little extra. One of the biggest complaints we heard in our study was the lack of a way to tip through Uber’s app. (One differentiator for Lyft, Uber’s competitor, is that it has this function.) Including a tipping mechanism in your application, whatever the on-demand task involved, shows you value your workers and their abilities.

Actively fight discriminatory biases in your system and your customers. Research by my colleagues Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst shows how digital platforms can inadvertently reinforce older forms of discrimination. So it’s important to be aware of how seemingly neutral ratings systems might be disadvantaging women or minorities simply because of the extant biases of some customers. You’ll benefit by working with your software engineers to troubleshoot and eliminate potential trouble spots.

Foreground the rules and expectations of your platform to workers. Many drivers struggled to figure out how to manage Uber’s expectations around emotional labor. After all, the company only suggested that certain behaviors impact driver ratings. So make the expectations and metrics around comportment and customer service clear when you hire workers. Clearly state what is and isn’t required, and stick to it. If things change, be timely and up front about what’s different and why.

Remember that you’re in the service sector. Your workers are human beings, and their emotional labor is a critical component of their lives on and off the clock. Your workers run the front line of your business, so treating your workers well will mean your customers get treated well in turn.

Appreciating the emotional labor of workers is a smart strategy for the on-demand economy. Not only will your employees be happier and more productive, but they’ll also be better positioned to support a business over the long term. Specific changes to both app interface design and broader training practices will go a long way to ensuring the sustainability of these business models in an increasingly crowded digital marketplace.