Making the Invisible Visible: Valuing Emotional Labor at Work
Emotional labor is the effort it takes to maintain relationships and healthy workplace culture. Often performed by women, it's a crucial task, but not often part of job descriptions. As a result, this work is less valued and not factored into performance reviews. What can leaders do?
First, recognize emotional labor and where it happens at work.
Leaders need to identify emotional labor when it happens at work and how successful management, inclusive culture, and team cohesion depends on it. Emotional labor can include:
Managers and colleagues supporting colleagues who are navigating work and stress (e.g., from health issues affecting them at work, to divorce, child care, and more);
Individuals volunteering to engage in affinity groups, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, environmental and sustainability efforts;
Staff who make sure that colleagues' important life events are acknowledged at work (e.g., farewells, marriages, births, etc.);
Support provided by people of color who may be "the first" or "the only" in their office - to others who belong to such groups, from career advice for young staff, to being the driver of diversity initiatives and more.
This is labor that requires time, energy, and effort - and it pays off in a workplace culture where people feel valued and recognized as individuals. A closely related concept is the invisible labor of "pitching in," or providing extra support in a pinch. This is the substantive work of the organization, but there are gendered penalties associated with this support: women are expected to provide extra help and are penalized when they do not, whereas men are not required to provide extra help. "For staying late and helping, a man was rated 14 percent more favorably than a woman. When both declined, a woman was rated 12 percent lower than a man. Over and over, after giving identical help, a man was significantly more likely to be recommended for promotions, important projects, raises and bonuses. A woman had to help just to get the same rating as a man who didn’t help.”
How Do We Assign Emotional Labor Value in the Workplace?
Once leaders understand the value of emotional labor and how its distribution by gender is likely inequitable, then it's time to take action. The following actions will help you factor in emotional labor as important work in the organization and ensure it is distributed fairly.
Start by reviewing the values of your organization and enumerating the key emotional labor tasks at your workplace;
Review the current distribution of emotional labor tasks and discuss with teams what's needed to equitably distribute such tasks;
Train managers to recognize and value emotional labor at work;
Make the most important emotional labor tasks part of job descriptions;
Factor those tasks into performance reviews; and
Create time and billing codes for key emotional labor tasks.
What Comes Next?
Once you have the ball rolling and have an action plan in play, it's important that as an organization, managers and employees create a feedback loop where all individuals are able to share their thoughts on how they feel this work is going. Organizations should consistently seek out this feedback from individuals at all levels of the organization in order to assess what people feel is going well and what are areas for improvement when it comes to recognizing the inherent value of emotional labor and assigning it more equitably. These thoughts and ideas should be taken seriously and used to further improve the workplace culture towards emotional labor.
