Introduction
In the workplace, employees encounter different forms of stress, and emotional labour is one of them. Emotional labour is a process that employees use to manage feelings and expressions to achieve their occupation’s emotional requirements. According to Maxon (1999), 75% of the workers in America describe their work as stressful. In every profession, employees experience different emotional labor that influences their ability to fulfill job requirements.
Emotional Labour in Teaching
Daily, teachers have to deal with numerous decisions, and the majority of them revolve around managing their emotions. Managing emotions involves addressing feelings and expressions by employing deep and surface acting (Clark, 1995). In the teaching profession, emotional labour arises from sources such as financial strain, passion for ensuring continuous academic improvement, student trauma, and meetings or training that seem useless. If a teacher is in financial constrain, he/she must not pass this stress to the learners but try as much as possible to contain it.
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Emotional Labour in Nursing
Nursing is one of the professions where there is heavy use of emotional labour because nurses must manage their emotions and expressions to provide the best care to the patients. When dealing with patients, nurses need to manage their daily feelings, which is important because it helps to soften the patient’s distress (Delgado, Upton, Ranse, & Furness, 2017). Nurses sometimes have stress related to their working environment, and this, in most cases, is the leading cause of stress among the nurses resulting in emotional labour.
Emotional Labour in Human Resource
Human resource professional regularly performs emotional labour as they provide their services to different organizations. In most cases, human resource managers have to deal with different types of decisions, which may lead to stress that the manager has to deal with professionally and still deliver quality services to the organization. Employers should ensure that all human resource managers receive training and mentoring about emotional labour, thus facilitating positive outcomes (Gabriel, Cheshin, & Moran, 2016). It is important to ensure HRPs have good working relations with other stakeholders because they have a significant role in the achievement of set goals in an organization.
What Employers Should Do
To address emotional labour among teachers, employers should ensure that teachers receive their pay on time and should be sufficient to gather for their needs. In the case of nurses, the employers should ensure that they provide a pleasant working environment, thus minimizing their stress and enhancing their ability to provide quality healthcare service to patients. The employers should provide Human Resource Professionals (HRPs) with time and space to support one another in addressing emotional labor in their workplace.
Conclusion
Emotional labour is part of every workplace, and every three out of four employees in America experience stress in their workplaces. Addressing emotional labour is one way of enhancing quality service delivery. Therefore, employers need to ensure that employees have a good working environment to minimize stress, thus improving service delivery.
References
Clark, C. S. (1995). Job stress. CQ Press.
Delgado, C., Upton, D., Ranse, K., & Furness, T. (2017). Nurses’ resilience and the emotional labour of nursing work: An integrative review of empirical literature. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 70 , 71-78.
Gabriel, A. S., Cheshin, A., & Moran, C. M. (2016). Enhancing emotional performance and customer service through human resources practices: A systems perspective. Human Resource Management Review, 26(1) , 14-24.
Maxon, R. (1999). Stress in the workplace: A costly epidemic. Fairleigh Dickinson University publications.
