Behind the Mask

Look carefully at this faces above and what do you see? It is a mural that is part of the #KingstonCreative initiative in downtown Kingston and when I looked at it with some others we saw different things. What I picked up and want to talk about is that the women are wearing masks. It has me thinking of the many masks that women wear as they go about their daily lives. It is a required part of the work actually - because of the need for 'Peace and Unity' which you will see are part of the mural.

My academic research has been on Emotional Labour and in that labour individuals are often required to manufacture feelings in order to create a particular response in another individual. It may mean suppressing anger, frustration or indifference to make the customer feel welcome and to put them in a frame of mind to consume whatever it is that we are selling. It may mean being cold and uncaring in order to collect the debt from someone who is telling a hard luck story.

Emotional labour is most likely to occur in women's jobs and if you've never even heard of the term, it is still likely that you have performed the labour because it is a required part of the job, Arlie Hochschild who coined the term, studied it in flight attendants who were expected to be sexy, flirtatious, understanding and competent all at once as they managed their passengers. Her concern was what happened to the REAL person. She argued that they could become estranged from their own selves and put on a mask just to get by.

Some jobs have the mask institutionalised. Disney employees - I mean cast members because that is what they are called, are expected to put on a costume (not uniform) and go onstage (to work). I personally have told employees to leave their feelings at the back gate. Let me hasten to say that I am not proud of that but as Maya Angelou says "When you know better, do better".

As employers let us recognise that people cannot simply leave their feelings at the front gate so they are still there even if they hide them underneath the mask. The question is how long can they successfully hide them? And at what cost do they hide them? If you've ever been on the end of an uncaring, indifferent service employee you probably have met someone whose mask has slipped. They are burnt out and they don't care anymore. In some cases they can't care any more - they just do not have the emotional energy to create the required feeling.

So leaders, let us try to avoid burnout by

1. Don't hire people who need to put on a mask every day. Hiring introverts for a job that requires constant interaction with the public, is a recipe for disaster for example. Invest in psychometric testing or a good selection mechanism to ensure that the person is a fit with the job requirements
2. Providing emotional and social support for people in jobs that require a lot of interaction. We all can smile when we don't feel like it, but it helps when you have a co-worker who has your back and who will laugh with you about the challenging customer
3. Train employees. Sometimes people have to put on a mask because they just do not know how to handle situations. Dealing with the general public is very difficult so prepare employees with the right set of skills for dealing with challenging situations.
4. Anticipate difficult situations and prepare for them. For example system changes are going to create more customer anxiety which then are cast on to frontline employees. Prepare your staff to deal with irate customers - forewarned is forearmed as they say
5. BE OPEN TO FEEDBACK and COMPLAINTS. When I did research in this area one of the key complaints from employees was that their managers just did not care about THEIR feelings. One employee said that giving customers the scripted speech ticked many of them off but her supervisor refused to listen to her concerns and insisted that she keep on giving the script. She was going to work frustrated every day. Another employee told me about receiving racial abuse from a customer and being told to get over it. These employees WILL put on a mask and perform work in an unfeeling manner .