an emotional labor tax??
Hi from sunny Florida! ☀️
This week I’m at Workhuman’s conference and I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned. I love walking away from conferences with a few nuggets of advice and new connects. This work can be lonely so having each other is important!
While I’m catching the sun in Florida, here are few things to keep your eye on:
🍎 NYC Spring Fling: NYC crew, where you at???? I’m hosting a Spring Fling in NYC on May 19th and I'd love to see you there! RSVP and let’s fill the venue with HR people. :)
✨ SAFE SPACE SUMMIT: IDK if you saw but last week I announced all the details for the Safe Space Summit! Oct 13 - Oct 16 in Huntington Beach we’re gathering 200 HR people for 3 days of fun in the sun, interesting keynotes and connection unlike anything else. Bonus: it’s free. Yup, you read that right!! If you apply and are accepted then it’s on us. Why an application? We’re trying to fill the room with people are experiencing similar things that you are dealing with in your day to day.
📺 HR Therapy in May is focused on feedback across the ages. I’m gathering some folks to talk about how different generations accept feedback and how to best set up your org for continuous feedback.
🎧 S12 of the pod is back!!! Today’s episode features one of my fave online friends, Lauren Schneider! We talk about the first time she quit a career and made some pivots in her life. Lauren made me laugh the entire episode and lit a fire under my butt when it comes to the things we’re willing to accept from jobs.
Now onto today… the emotional labor of being in HR.
HR'S ROLE
The emotional labor of HR:Copy anchor linkCopied
I’ll take emotional labor for $400 Alex!
🧠 Wait, what IS emotional labor????
I want to start here because I think the word emotional labor gets thrown around a lot. Guilty!
Fun fact: Emotional labor was coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983.
📖 She defined it in her book, The Managed Heart, as the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. Basically, getting paid to feel (or NOT feel) certain things so other people (coworkers, clients, etc) are comfortable. She studied flight attendants and service workers and honestly she should’ve studied HR!!!
📣 Because what is our job if not managing our own emotions so everyone else can have theirs?
We hold space for employees who are terrified about layoffs, while we're also scared too.
We stay calm during investigations that include details that make our stomachs turn.
We nod through the leadership meeting where a decision we advocated against moves forward. (The fire in my soul during this one can’t be controlled.)
We absorb the panic, the grief, the anger, the stress and then we go home and we are supposed to just... leave it at work.
Yeah, right.
The body keeps score she screams!!!
🚨Here's a stat that I haven't been able to shake: in a survey of HR professionals, 61% of respondents actively agree that they often feel personally stressed out at work.
I meannn, think about it…
The constant code-switching. The managing up while also managing down. The feeling that you can't actually say what you feel because you ARE the people function and people are watching!!!!
A lot of that is….
✨ emotional labor ✨
This quarter, I've been digging into the “this is fine” mentality that we allll have felt in HR. And the thing I kept coming back to was this emotional labor aspect.
When I try to describe it to people outside of HR they don’t seem to get it??
Maybe I’m doing a bad job or maybe this feeling really IS that unique?? I mean think about what other executives deal with what we deal with? Not many…
So, let’s look at the forms of emotional labor in HR and maybe I can take those examples to my friends when describing this CONSTANT WEIGHT on my shoulders that I feel.
The forms of emotional labor:Copy anchor linkCopied
The thing that makes emotional labor a tiny bit sneaky is the fact that it can hide in things that we think are “part of the job.”
Hochschild didn’t just coin and define emotional labor, she also described two ways employees alter their emotional expressions in the workplace:
🎭 Surface acting. Surface acting is all about public displays of emotional expressions. Basically it’s when you feel one thing but show another.
A common example of surface acting: a service worker faces a smile when dealing with a demanding customer. While the service worker doesn’t feel like smiling, they do it to make the customer feel more comfy or less rude.
Here are some HR specific examples:
- You're in an exit interview with someone who was absolutely wronged by their manager and you actually agree but have to stay neutral
- You're announcing a "restructure" you didn't agree with and your face cannot betray you.
Surface acting takes energy because you are essentially performing a character, hence acting, and TBH, that character doesn't always feel like you!! I know for me this is usually my least fave part of our work. The friction between what must be done and what I feel is a never ending struggle.
Sometimes in our Exec meeting my CEO catches my expression and I know I’ve failed at my surface acting. Early in my career I used to get the feedback constantly that my face was a billboard for what I was thinking. Since then I think I’ve become a bit better at the neutral expression (I think).
🎭🎭 Deep acting. This is actually the more exhausting one because it's when you try to actually convince yourself to feel the thing you're supposed to feel.
This is a step further than just showing surface-level emotional expressions.
Like:
- You try to find genuine empathy for the executive who is being, frankly, unreasonable.
- You try to get excited about the initiative that you know is going to create more problems than it solves.
- You coach yourself through an investigation to feel truly neutral but you know what happened.
- You generate real warmth and kindness towards an employee who has been difficult because they need support.
Yeah, I’ve been in every single one of those situations. And I bet you have too.
Why deep acting burns people out faster than surface acting:
Research has found that surface acting is exhausting but deep acting is depleting at an identity level!!! An identity level. Let that sink in for a second.
When you spend years trying to reshape your internal emotional experience to match what the job requires, you can eventually lose touch with what you actually feel.
This can show up in various ways like: not knowing how you really feel about something until days later, feeling emotionally flat outside of work, or genuinely not being able to tell anymore whether their reactions are theirs or the job's. Is this mask off? IDK??
❤️ I want to add one more layer: values.
A lot of people (myself included) go into HR because they care and they have strong instincts about fairness and how people should be treated. I remember saying early on, I want to be a leader in this space because I NEVER want someone to go through what I went through at work. The microaggressions, the harassment, the belittlement. I wanted real systemic change in how people are treated at work.
What makes things complicated is deep acting asks you to suppress or override those instincts repeatedly. Over time that creates a kind of internal friction that's really hard to name but really easy to feel.
Let’s just take a minute, okay? That was a lot. If you’re on the brink of an existential crisis, you’re not alone. Some weeks I do ask myself WTF is even happening and who am I? Yes, I do be like that.
Okay, we’ve taken a timeout, we’ve let what I wrote above marinate. Now… what can we even do about it??
How to lighten the load:Copy anchor linkCopied
I'm not going to tell you to journal more or take a bath.
I mean, do those things if they help! I know my baths are sacred!!!
Here's what I actually think could help:
✍🏽 Name it in real time. This sounds small but it is not I promise!! When you're in the middle of a hard conversation, just internally clocking, okay, I'm surface acting right now, this is costing me something, creates a tiny bit of distance that does help. You're not a machine!! Acknowledging what's happening in your body while it's happening is how you stop it from building up unnoticed.
I keep a noteback next to my desk and sometimes I’ll write things down to myself like: anger, disappointment, and fear. At the end of the day I’ll glance at it and process.
❤️ Find your decompression ritual and PROTECT it. Not a morning routine you read about on LinkedIn or the latest self-help piece. Something that actually works FOR YOU after an emotionally heavy day. A walk. A TV show. A playlist. A workout class. A vent to a trusted peer.
I cannot overstate the value of having at least one other HR person in your life who gets it!! That was the inspo for Safe Space, I needed to get things off my chest to people who actually understood what I was dealing with.
⏰ Build some emotional labor time into your bandwidth convos. This is one I’m not sure many of us actually do… When you're planning your bandwidth or pushing back on what's on your plate, the emotional weight of the work also needs to be a factor. An investigation isn't just the hours it takes, it's the toll it takes. Start factoring that in. Think about advocating for yourself with the language of emotional load, not just time!
A simple way to achieve this: I always factor in 30ish minutes after a termination or tough convo. Just to take a walk and clear my head before sprinting into the next thing. You can accomplish this via calendar holds or even if you factor your time weekly.
❤️🩹 Give yourself permission to not be fine. Okay I know this one sounds ironic given the entire theme this quarter. But here's what I actually mean: the "this is fine" meme is funny because we relate to it but living inside it indefinitely is how we end up hella crispy and burned out and wondering why we went into HR in the first place.
You are allowed to say this week was a lot. You are allowed to sit with that for a second before you pivot to solutions. You are allowed to take a beat.
You hold a lot for a lot of people. Someone needs to hold some of it for you too, and sometimes that someone has to be you.
What's next:Copy anchor linkCopied
Something I can’t stop thinking about is who is really making the decision at an org?
I’ve vented about how I feel like I didn’t own the decision but the delivery and how icky that is for HR people.
So next, week let’s explore it.
Are you really the decision maker? Should we actually be the decision maker? Am i just writing my journal entries as newsletters?
:)
(HUMAN) RESOURCES
Tim Cook departing Apple as CEO
CEO turnover is at an all time high
I broke down Motivosity's new report on connection and culture*
State by state what to expect re: pay transparency laws
- Is AI forcing workplaces into gridlock?
*This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners
WORK-LIFE BALANCE
- 📚 What I’m reading: The Deal by Elle Kennedy. I knowww I’ve already mentioned this one but I recently re-read the entire Briar U series and finally caught up on Love Song. The Deal TV show is about to be released and I know I’m gonna EAT IT UP. The long running joke is how I’ve learned nothing about hockey from these books despite them being hockey romance novels. I mean, that’s not why I’m reading them… just sayin’.
- 📺 What I’m watching: Hacks. The way I love Hannah Einbinder should be studied. She may be one of my favorite actresses?? Her interviews crack me up. She was recently in an interview ranting about AI. This final season of Hacks is already delivering hit episode after hit episode for me.
- 📱What’s happen in the group text: This week was one of the books. The GC was popping off with shared experiences and funny memes. I walked away and came back to 95 texts. The people have THINGS to say. Say what you want but I looove a fiery group text.
SONG OF THE WEEK
🎧 Speed Demon, Justin Bieber Copy anchor linkCopied
Out of the gate the lyrics are fire:
I don't really need a reason to stall you, that's all you
Don't pretend I got a reason to call you, it's not true
I only got a couple people to talk to, and it's not you (Yeah)
And I don't even got the patience to argue
Now paired with the 90s inspired beat, I was hooooked. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was my most played song this year.
Yes, I know it's April and there are still months of music to come but lately I’m reaching for this song constantly.
I hope you enjoyed this, please let me know what you think and what other topics you'd love for me to cover. I'm allll ears.
Reminder: Take care of yourself and know that I support you.
