People in mission-driven work explain their exhaustion in a variety of ways. The work takes long hours. It’s spread across too few resources. There’s simply too much to do. All of those things are true. But there is more to the story.
Beside job descriptions and to do lists, other work is being done. It’s a work that’s hard to name, rarely measured, and almost never budgeted for. But it demands a great deal of time and energy.
That work is emotional labor.
A quick note on nomenclature: In this article, I use emotional labor to refer to the act or process of managing emotion to some professional end. In the next article, I will focus more specifically on how emotion management is used to build and maintain relationships (what I will call “relational emotional labor”) as a kind of emotional labor.
What Emotional Labor Looks Like in the Day-to-Day
Emotional labor involves the conscious or subconscious process of managing emotion to fulfill some aspect of one’s professional role. It is distinct from being kind, empathetic, or caring. It is not about always being happy or enjoying one’s work. Emotional labor is the process of mustering calm, care, steadiness, or optimism in the face of a wide range of internal feelings and circumstances.
In service oriented or nonprofit organizations, examples of emotional labor include: having to remain patient or composed with a client or member of the community who is in crisis; having to absorb frustration or grief without visibly reacting or responding; having to project a sense of hope or optimism when an outcome is uncertain; having to smooth over conflict or disagreements while maintaining the relationship; and having to reassure others about a situation even when feeling stressed or uncertain about the outcome oneself.
This kind of work is real work. It demands focus, restraint, and self monitoring. It’s an effort to regulate how one feels and how that is expressed and experienced by others. It does not end when a service or interaction is over. It may linger or resurface.
Why Emotional Labor is Heavy Work in Mission Driven Organizations
Mission-driven work attracts people who care. It is fueled by people who have empathy, compassion, and commitment. Nonprofits value those traits in others and people in the field generally value them in themselves. Over time they can also become expectations.
In many organizations, being emotionally present and available for others is not simply encouraged, it is expected. Staff are asked to be flexible and understanding, to be emotionally present and attentive even when systems are overstretched, budgets are thin, and there are competing priorities and needs. In many cases, they are also being asked to hold space for others but with very little space held for themselves.
In their study of federal public servants, Mary E. Guy and colleagues note that emotional labor is “a central component in many work settings. This labor is skilled, it is required and it is invisible.” Organizations committed to the public good or serving others count on staff to be emotionally present, composed, and steady as they navigate complex interactions with other staff and the people they serve. In that work, there is often an unspoken assumption that the capacity to be that way is built into the people who take these jobs and positions.
Emotional labor does not show up in metrics, budgets, or organizational reports, so the cost of this work can be easy to overlook.
The Price of Performed Positivity
As I noted in the previous article, staff tell me that even “traditionally quiet times are off this year. No weekend, no vacation, no after hours, no unoccupied brain time where the feeling that the ground is crumbling below us goes away.”
Emotional labor has a great deal to do with this. The act of performing gratitude, excitement, or positivity for colleagues or community members when one is depleted or exhausted is a form of emotional dissonance. People understand how they are supposed to be feeling. They also know how they really feel. The effort it takes to bridge that divide is not inconsequential.
The longer someone is forced or expected to do this, the more they may experience emotional exhaustion, distance, lower sense of accomplishment, and challenges with accessing positive emotions or joy even outside of work. When people feel burned out, the invisible emotional labor they are expected to do is usually a big part of that experience.
Why Emotional Labor Never Gets Budgeted
Time, to do lists, and outputs or deliverables are what get budgeted. Emotion or emotional load is not.
Job descriptions may list tasks and responsibilities but very few explicitly mention the kinds of emotion management required to do that work. Budgets account for staff but not emotional bandwidth. Evaluation processes may note a staff member’s outcomes or successes but they rarely capture the unseen work required to maintain relationships, morale, and trust.
This leaves a quiet disconnect. Staff are expected to give of themselves emotionally without any system, process, or effort built into the work to replenish that. The resulting imbalance is not sustainable over the long term.
Crucially, this is not the result of individual boundary setting or resiliency. This is a system issue.
Naming Emotional Labor Brings the Work into View
Naming is often the first step in changing a dynamic. In our conversations about exhaustion and burnout, emotional labor remains invisible for most people.
If emotional labor is never named, people conclude that they are the ones who aren’t coping well enough or not managing their stress effectively enough. The problem is individualized. Naming emotional labor shifts that.
Once emotional labor is identified and named, an organization can start to ask questions. Where and how are we asking people to absorb the emotional costs and consequences of their work without anyone designed into the system to support them? Which roles or positions carry an inordinate emotional burden or cost? How do the expectations we have for staff and the way we talk about them reinforce an idea that we must be constantly emotionally available?
These questions don’t have easy answers, but they are ones that organizations need to ask.
What Comes Next
Emotional labor is a central part of the burnout puzzle. Recognizing it is an important step towards addressing burnout but it is not the last one.
Emotional labor does not exist in a vacuum. It is impacted and influenced by the expectations leaders have, the organizational culture that has developed over time, and the values that get more or less centered in day to day work.
In the next article, we will take a look at a set of leadership values and ideals that can compound emotional labor. As it turns out, certain ways of talking and thinking about leadership (including mine) can make burnout worse, even in organizations that care deeply about staff well being and work hard to do right by their staff.
Guy, M. E., Newman, M. A., & Mastracci, S. H. (2008). Emotional labor: Putting the service in public service. M.E. Sharpe.