- Hey there, welcome to the video.
My name is Melissa and I'll be your host for today.
Today's special is emotional labor with a side of bread.
I love your shoes by the way.
How was that for performance?
In this video I learned from emotional labors,
leading researcher and read 1,156 reviews on the internet
to figure out if y'all even notice it happening.
I think this is going to be a long night.
Thank you to Brilliant
for sponsoring a portion of this video.
I used to be a server at a bar for almost four years,
more than half of my income that I made, came from my tips.
And I know that that probably wasn't
because people were impressed
by my ability to remember their orders
or the fact that I was running around on eight hour shift
on a handful of French fries,
It was because I was friendly, inviting, and acted nice.
And people like that.
It kind of felt like I had no choice
but to put up this facade, otherwise I wouldn't get paid.
And that could be really hard because sometimes people suck.
All right, so are we ready
to take our orders and everything?
Yes, so I would like the Cobb salad.
Great choice.
But can I get that with a hard boil egg instead?
Yeah, we can absolutely do a hard boil egg for you.
I just wanna let you know
that it's gonna take about an extra 15 to 20 minutes
just 'cause we don't have any ready on hand right now.
Is that okay with you?
Oh, I don't mind waiting, that's no problem.
Wonderful, wonderful.
I'll go put those in the kitchen.
Hi, yeah.
So it's been exactly half an hour, where's my egg?
Oh yeah, I'm really sorry, it's actually not ready yet.
This is unacceptable.
And you know what?
It was never listed my responsibilities to smile at creeps
but it might as well have been.
So in this video, let's figure out
why servers need to smile, and if it's worthwhile
I don't understand, how am I supposed to boil an egg faster?
You want me to defy physics?
(soft music)
Now it took about two Google searches before realizing
that the thing that I'm talking about is emotional labor,
which is a term created by Dr. Arlie Russell Hochschild.
So I reached out to her, and she actually replied.
She's too busy.
However, she gave me a reading assignment,
tell me answer all of the questions that I sent her,
which is really sweet and unexpected,
considering I misspelled her name in the email that I sent.
I need to get better at that, but anyways let's get reading.
So I read her recommendations, which included her book,
"The Managed Heart," and a collection of essays
including Can Emotional Labor Be Fun?
All right, so the thing that I felt at the restaurant
like being super friendly to guests was a part of the job
is actually an example of emotional labor.
Now to understand what that really means,
let's go back to the beginning.
What is emotional labor?
The sociologist Dr. Arlie Russell Hochschild
coined the term in her 1983 book, "The Managed Heart."
She first notice the way people
can manage their emotions to sell a specific image.
After seeing the way her parents' behaviors changed
around dinner guests.
She then extended that concept to the workforce
and defined emotional labor as the work employees do
to evoke or suppress healing
or emotion in the service of doing paid work.
Hochschild's original example
was the common caring persona flight attendants maintained
even in the face of rude flyers,
to sell the idea that the cabin is a safe space to relax.
Now, emotional labor is often overlooked by customers
because of social expectations
and the way that it's commonly used to disarm
and create a sense of ease.
It can also be invisible to employees
in the sense that the labor is expected,
even though it isn't tracked
or consistently compensated like other responsibilities.
However, if you look for it,
you can find emotional labor across many industries,
especially in the service sector.
Like when your real estate agent is excited
for you to sign the deed on a house,
selling the idea that accepting the average person's
largest source of debt is fun.
Or when your server laughs at your joke,
selling you a comradery that's worth tipping.
Or when a social media manager
filters their personal experiences through brand account,
selling you a sense that a corporation
is as relatable as a person.
So if that's what emotional labor is, or is it?
There's another way
that I've seen the term emotional labor being used.
And it's kind of summarized in this deranged tweet
that Taha sent me a couple days ago.
I should preface
that I'm sure that this person is really lovely,
but check this out, asking for consent for emotional labor
even from people with whom
you have a longstanding relationship
should be common practice.
Someone reached out and asked for an example
of how you can respond to someone
if you don't have this space to support them.
"Hey, I'm so glad you reached out,
I'm actually a capacity helping someone else
who's in crisis dealing with some personal stuff right now
and I don't think it can hold the appropriate space for you.
Could we connect, insert later date or time instead?
Do you have someone else that you can reach out to?"
If I was in a crisis, and my friend told me
to come back at another time, there's something about that
that's just a little off.
This isn't emotional labor.
In an interview, Dr. Hochschild said that
this isn't how the term was intended to be used
and it's kind of been over extended.
And I agree, because it turns the conversation away
from the fact that workers have to perform emotional labor
to meet job requirements, not to be your friend.
But I think that we can both agree
that managing your emotions does take a lot out of you.
Like remembering people's orders
or lifting heavy boxes, it's a skill that people can learn.
Some people are good at math
and some people are good with people.
Maybe you are a fellow service worker
and have great people skills, but maybe you wanna sharpen up
on your math skills or something.
And that's where Brilliant comes in.
Brilliant is an interactive stem learning platform.
And they have an extensive course catalog in subjects
ranging from geometry, algebra, statistics to physics
and it's for anyone who wants to learn at any skill level.
Something that I really appreciate
about their learning approach
is how interactive and hands on it is,
kind of like what we do here at Answer in Progress.
We kind of learn by doing things.
That's what I appreciate about their learning style.
Everything is hands on.
You can explore all these topics and concepts
through puzzles and games, which makes learning pretty fun.
The course that I've been really interested in
is their logic course.
Two robots finished between Lex and tie, that's wrong, okay.
It helps you build your critical thinking skills
and kind of keeps your mind really sharp and focused.
Yay, using this course has been really helpful
in helping me organize my thoughts and pull it all together,
'cause sometimes I struggle with that.
And it doesn't really feel like you're doing homework
because you're playing games.
You can break your learning down into manageable chunks
and do a little bit every single day
to kind of help keep your mind sharp and focused.
So to get started, you can visit
brilliant.org/answerinprogress,
or you can visit the link in the description.
And the first 200 people will get 20% off
Brilliant's annual premium subscriptions.
And with that, let's get back to the video.
So with your friends, you both agree
that I'll be there for you and you there for me.
but as an employee, it's kind of like,
I'll be there for you, and that you yell at me.
Thanks to researchers like Dr. Hochschild,
we know a lot about the people performing emotional labor,
but what about those receiving it?
Do they recognize it?
And how do they respond?
I used to think as a server that if I didn't smile
or be super friendly, I wouldn't get a tip.
So I'm sure that there's varying opinions on this matter.
But you know one of the best places to go
to get unfiltered and honest opinions?
Google reviews, my hypothesis and you know what?
I'm gonna pick up the microphone for this part
because I think this is important.
Okay, hypothesis time.
There's two types of people who leave reviews.
The people who leave bad reviews, who have probably
not had a very good customer service experience and are mad
because they weren't met with plaintiffs and friendliness.
And then there's the people who leave good reviews,
who have just had a good pleasant customer experience
because people are friendly.
Okay, so I'm gonna need to read a lot of reviews.
Okay, so here's the rules,
Sabrina and Taha collected 1200 reviews
in 27 different service sectors
in five different countries based on where you live.
Yes, I'm talking about you.
So we looked at our audience demographics
and found the largest associated cities.
And after Google mapping the location and service sector
they rolled the D20 to select the business
and save some of the best and worst reviews for me to read,
which I now have and this is so expensive.
Boom, let's get some reviews.
Hello, now I knew that 1200 reviews was a lot,
but seeing it in physical form in front of me
confirms that it's a lot.
I thought it'd be a really great idea to print it in color.
'cause it would be pretty, color printing is very expensive.
So I print this in two batches.
The first batch is in color
and then I told Sabrina about it.
- What?
- And then 172 pages, not in color.
I've got a lot of reviews to get through, it is 4:30 PM.
Honestly, this is the same size
as the "Chronicles of Narnia,"
if not bigger and I guess I should start reading.
So I was looking to see if there were patterns
and what motivated people
to leave a review in the first place.
Whether it be a five star review,
one star review or notable.
If I could give this place zero stars, I would reviews.
Okay, strap in, this person wrote a five point essay.
"The waiter had spilled water all over my husband
and a bit on our appetizer.
No, we did not get a replacement of apps."
This one was interesting,
and they still gave the waiter a 15% tips.
On to airlines, I think this is going to be a long night.
As I read, I noticed that the most intense reviews
had one of two motivations.
One, someone had felt morally wronged
and was seeking reparations,
or two, they were just delighted by the services
and wanted to drop in and say, "You go girly."
I started to pick up on some words
that people were using often.
In the good reviews,
people like to describe the experience as very professional
or the person is very caring and trustworthy.
And in the bad reviews, well, just rude in all caps.
try to read 60 pages every hour,
and then I should be done in three hours, four, six hours.
Oh my God, I still have a lot of reviews to get through.
I think I need to get into cozy mode.
Boom.
Oh, that's why I needed the light.
Something to note though,
is that in a lot of these bad reviews,
people were complaining
about the product not being what they expected.
And then secondary was about the experience of the person
giving them service.
You know what I just realized,
I am reading these reviews manually.
I could have gotten Sabrina to run these
through some sort of code to just scan for buzzword
and see what words came up,
and see what people were complaining about.
That would've taken a lot less time.
Well, here we are.
"Awful and not helpful
and has zero customer service skills, and is rude AF."
Fair enough, ooh, ooh, another one.
"This place is depressing."
Again, fair enough.
It's late and it's taking a very long time
to read these reviews, I should probably shower.
So I read a lot of reviews in several sectors
across the service industry, so much paper.
Restaurants, accountants, lawyers, hotels, auto repairs,
plumbers, airline workers, cab drivers, theme parks,
movie theaters, concert halls, we covered a lot.
And something that I noticed
is that there's some service industries
where people just expect more emotional labor
from workers than others.
And I guess it really depends on what's being sold
and how central the personality of the person is
to the service or experience that you have.
All right, so I finished reading all of the reviews
and I think I've actually changed my perspective
on emotional labor, just a little bit.
But let me explain.
I took some notes while I was reading all the reviews,
and I have some of my favorite ones here.
I'm not sure if I'm gonna read them all
because it'll take a very very long time.
It was really interesting for a couple of reasons,
I still think that over smiling and over politeness
is a little excessive.
And I don't think that, that is a natural thing to expect
from people you are engaging with in a business.
Service workers are doing their job
and it's something additional that they have to do
to perform and be polite and be nice.
Like some of the most common words
that I came across in my reviews were friendly and polite
and caring and all of these things.
And when people left really bad reviews, oftentimes
it was because they were dissatisfied with service
or they were just complaining about how mean people were.
But it got me thinking a couple of things about expectations
for when you're going to a restaurant
or going to see your accountant or going to the salon,
you're going there for a service,
you're going there to get a thing.
And people being kind and polite
and nice to you is kind of just an extra.
And I understand creating that
because it's nice when a stranger is nice to you.
But I think that we also have remember
that this relationship goes both ways.
If you want this amazing, caring, professional,
friendly experience from service workers
and people that you're interact with
you also have to be that person as well.
Man, I don't wanna live, laugh, love on y'all
but these people at the end of the day,
they're not your friend,
they're there to do their and do the work.
This is a business relationship that we're talking about.
And I think that's why talking about emotional labor
is so important.
Some people do just wanna make genuine connections
with people.
But again, remember that this is a work environment.
There's a lot to unpack in these reviews
but I think it's important to recognize
that I just should not have printed them.
That was my takeaway.
Next time we're not gonna print them.