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??
