Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives

3 Putting Your Heart and Soul Into it (#ulink_66eafad2-5294-5f48-9d62-622509d10374)

The two ways of measuring the demands of a job which we have considered – time and effort – have defined industrial relations since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but a third is a phenomenon of the last few decades: emotional labour. It’s not just your physical stamina and analytical capabilities which are required to do a good job, but your personality and emotional skills as well. From a customer services representative in a call centre to a teacher or manager, the emotional demands of the job have immeasurably increased. Emotional labour has become one of the hardest parts of many jobs. So just why is your employer after your heart?

The demand for emotional labour is driven firstly by the growth of the service economy. Companies are increasingly competing to provide a certain type of emotional experience along with their product, be it a mobile phone or an insurance policy. Where once muscle-power was crucial to the employment contract for millions of manual workers, its modern-day equivalent is emotional empathy and the ability to strike up a rapport with another human being quickly. Employers believe customers will stay loyal, and will sometimes pay a premium, for a certain kind of interaction – they want to be treated as individuals, with a personalised service in a mass consumer market driven by technology. The standards are exacting: employees are instructed to provide service with personality, ‘naturalness’, spontaneity and warmth; qualities which they must, paradoxically, provide consistently.

Another kind of emotional labour is also in increasing demand. It is a response to the changing structure of organisations. The clearly denned hierarchical bureaucracies which served industrial society well in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been outstripped by the pace of change; only much flatter, more fluid organisations can adapt and continuously re-adapt in different formulations of networks. But as the lines of authority become less clear, much more falls to the individual employee to negotiate, influence and persuade. This is often called the ‘relationship economy’, and what makes it particularly hard work is that it requires skills of empathy, intuition, persuasion, even manipulation, for which there is little preparation in an educational system focused exclusively on analytical rather than emotional skills.

Speak As If You’re Smiling

The phrase ‘emotional labour’ was first coined in 1983 by the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her study of how flight attendants were trained to provide their customers with a particular emotional experience.

(#litres_trial_promo) The concept has spawned a large academic literature analysing the emotional demands of the service economy on the workforce. Call centres, one of the fastest-growing sources of employment in Britain, represent perhaps the most intensive form of emotional labour. Nearly half a million employees are handling around 125 million calls a month in centres which have clustered in areas of high unemployment such as around Glasgow, Tyneside, South Wales and South Yorkshire.

Projecting warmth on the telephone is a skill which Claire and Tracey, in an Orange call centre in North Shields, Tyneside, have perfected. Both in their early twenties, they are paid to talk – all day. My conversation with Claire is punctuated every few sentences by her incantation, ‘Hello, this is Claire, how may I help you?’ She says it with the same tone of friendly helpfulness every time, only to then explain to the customer that the system is down and she can’t do anything. Nothing rattles her, nothing alters her wording or the tone of her voice; it is entirely consistent. Ironically, what is less consistent on this particular afternoon is the technology; but Claire continues to give the cheerful, good-natured emotional interaction which is expected of her.

They work on the site of an old colliery, but there are few clues to that now. The land has been levelled apart from one hump in the distance which is the last slagheap, now grassed over. The pit was called the ‘Rising Sun’, oddly echoing Orange’s famous slogan, ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Orange’. Both speak to an optimistic aspiration of a dawning new future. In the past it would have been men working here; now over half the workforce is women. They drive in – it’s twenty minutes from Newcastle – to sit at a desk all day answering the phone.

The key thing, Claire explains, is: ‘You have to take control of the call. A lot of customers go mad if you don’t know what you’re doing, and the calls escalate [have to be referred to the supervisor], so you have to be confident all the time. Some customers can be very patronising, and if you don’t seem like you know what you’re doing, the call will escalate.’

On Claire’s computer screen, a series of little squares indicate if there are calls waiting, as well as telling her how long she has been on her current call; she usually has no more than eight seconds between calls. If a call has been difficult, there are only eight seconds in which to take a deep breath and compose her voice into the expected tone of friendliness. All the time she’s managing her emotional demeanour, she’s flicking through a wide range of information on the screen, which she uses to answer customer queries. Later, the head of Claire’s section, experienced in call-centre work, acknowledges that it has become much more technically complex than it used to be. It looks very hard work to me, yet Claire much prefers it to working in a shop, her previous job: ‘I don’t mind talking, I could talk all day. Usually I can cut off after a call, I’m very easy-going. But a really complicated call is sometimes still going through my head.’

The system is down for several hours that afternoon. What is striking is how on the one hand Claire is dealing with very rigid systems set down by company procedure and the vagaries of the computer system, while on the other she is expected to convey a sense of naturalness and her own personality. It’s a tricky combination, and she is frequently apologising for things which are beyond her control. No matter how many times she repeats exactly the same response, she must make it sound ‘warm’, ‘sincere’ and ‘natural’.

Tom is twenty-four, and has been a customer service representative (CSR) here for two years, which counts as experienced in an industry plagued by high turnover. While I listen in, he answers the call of an elderly gentleman who isn’t sure how to explain what the problem is with his mobile phone. He meanders and frequently goes off on long explanations which appear to have little to do with his query. Tom gently coaxes him back to the point and tries to intuit what he really wants from him. It’s not an easy task, and it requires considerable patience – which Tom seems to have in abundance. His easy manner doesn’t falter for a moment, and gradually he manages to establish what he can do to help. As he talks, he’s flicking through computer screens, bringing up the customer’s account details and information about the products he needs.

All the while, there’s a ticker board above the CSRs’ heads showing the number of calls waiting to be answered. They are distributed by the ACD – automatic call distributor – a computerised telephone-handling system which identifies the CSR who has been waiting longest and sends the call to his or her workstation. In most call centres, calls are expected to be dealt with in a specified period of time, although Orange is unusually relaxed on this, believing that too tight a target compromises quality. In other call centres, operators are reprimanded for not meeting the target call duration.

John, another CSR, spends seventeen minutes on one of his calls, advising a customer with great patience and enthusiasm on which mobile phone to buy. Again and again the customer asks questions, and John seems to relish the opportunity to dig out the tiniest detail on the potential purchase. Without a pause, another customer comes through with a complicated enquiry which John also goes out of his way to help answer, only to find that the line has gone dead after he puts her on hold. He calls her back in case she got cut off, but she doesn’t answer her phone. He shrugs it off – he’d been trying to save her money.

Do the customers ever bother him, I ask. He smiles, then admits, ‘The customer wants the moon on a stick…they treat you like a work monkey.’ It’s as if he’s not supposed to say things like that, but having said it, it comes out with real passion. ‘Customers don’t treat you like you’re a human being. [But] if you see things from their point of view it’s easier, and I’m better than I used to be. You need resilience, but I do get worked up. I do raise my voice.’

While John admitted that he sometimes gets upset, Claire seemed at some fundamental level disengaged from what she was doing. There was something robotic about her level of fluency as she switched back and forth between talking to me and answering the phone. What makes the job so demanding is that this intensity of emotional labour goes on for several hours, with little let-up. What the call-centre manager wants is a steady stream of work, and technology, in the form of the ACD system, offers them the possibility of achieving that.

The level of monitoring in a call centre is intense. Alison, the head of a ‘community’ of teams (about two hundred CSRs) at Orange, can see with a glance at her computer screen what everyone is doing. A CSR’s name flashes into red the second he or she is late back from a break. Everything is monitored: the length of calls, the time spent on ‘off-call work’ and the number of calls put on hold. All the figures are collated and sent back to CSRs – those that fall below the targets are highlighted as ‘NI’(needs improvement), while those which exceed the target are ‘HE’ (highly effective). Every second of their time is accounted for.

There are sweatshop call centres where the profit margins are so tight that operators are under continual pressure to meet tight deadlines, forced to stick to strictly scripted interactions, and yet still to manage some cheerfulness and good humour. What all call centres drill into their employees is to ‘speak as if you are smiling’, and ‘as if you have been waiting for this particular call’. This is a job where you’re not allowed an off day – or even an off moment. If a customer is difficult or rude, the call handler must not respond aggressively. He or she certainly can’t betray any irritation or frustration during the next call which is instantly routed through to them. While call handlers are expected to provide the customer with a certain pleasurable emotional exchange, they must also continually repress their own emotions to ensure a standardised service. The equation of providing empathy to another while denying it to oneself is complex. A five-minute call to a call centre represents a profoundly unbalanced human relationship. It is an interaction in which the possibility of reciprocity has been shrunk – by technology and the tyranny of efficient time-use – to the smallest possible component, perhaps no more than a ‘thank you’.

Empathy has become big business, according to consultants Harding & Yorke, who specialise in what they describe as an ‘empathy audit’. They claim to be able to measure every aspect of the emotional interaction between customer and company. If a company wants its employees to sound warmer or more natural, they turn to the likes of Bob Hughes at Harding & Yorke.

I’m intrigued by the idea that something as subjective and spontaneous as human communication can be measured so minutely and then prescribed for employees, and Hughes offers to explain why his company has been called in by the likes of Toyota, Standard Life and Vodafone. He has snippets of recorded call-handler interactions which he plays on his laptop. In one, the handler is confused and uncertain, and the customer ends up hanging up. That could cost the company a customer, points out Hughes, adding that customer loyalty is the biggest predictor of profitability. Delight your customers and they’ll be back; empathy makes money, he argues.

The taped clips are the kind of raw material which Harding & Yorke analyse; they put as many as five hundred questions to the call-centre client about every aspect of the call handler. The client is asked to analyse exhaustively their own emotional response to each part of the interaction, answering questions such as: How much confidence did the call handler inspire in me? How personalised does their language feel? How sincere are they, or did they sound perfunctory? How well did I feel they were listening to me? On the basis of the answers to these questions the call handler is given a score.

Quality emotional interactions are the hardest things to short-circuit, claims Hughes. People are extraordinarily sensitive at recognising emotional cues, so ‘Sincerity is a big thing for us,’ he adds, claiming, ‘If one person has been told to smile and a second person has been made – by a joke, for example – to smile, we could measure the difference.’

The call handler’s voice is minutely analysed for pace, volume and timbre to ensure the right ‘mood’. Timbre is a function of breathing, and if there is any anxiety the ensuing adrenaline surge can constrict the diaphragm, which raises the timbre. So Harding & Yorke train people to breathe properly. The final aim is to achieve ‘emotional resolution’ as well as practical resolution of the customer’s call, and that, explains Bob, is about ‘making the customer feel great’. He quotes management guru Tom Peters: ‘It doesn’t matter how good you are, the only tiling which matters is how good does your customer think you are.’ Bob believes it’s instinctive to be empathetic, so his consultancy’s job is to ‘liberate people’s natural behaviour’. To top it all, Bob claims empathy is efficient: it’s a win-win formula, because empathy means the employee works out more quickly what the customer really wants.

Empathy, defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the power of identifying oneself mentally with (and so fully comprehending) a person’, has become an important skill in the labour market, and it is changing the employability status of individuals. This intrigues social theorist Andre Gorz, who argues that while the assembly line represented ‘the total and entirely repressive domination of the worker’s personality’, what is now required is the ‘total mobilisation of that personality’. He writes that ‘technical knowledge and professional skills are only of value when combined with a particular state of mind, an unlimited openness to adjustment, change, the unforeseen’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

At the Orange call centre in North Shields, the manager told me they never recruited someone for their technical skills. What they were looking for was a particular personality: cheerful, outgoing, flexible, good-natured, adaptable – because these were the characteristics which they couldn’t train. It is an approach shared by B&Q, the DIY retail chain which uses an automated telephone personality test to recruit employees with the right kind of emotional characteristics; applicants have to press their telephone keypad to answer questions such as, ‘I prefer to have my closest relationships outside work rather than with a colleague.’ In December 2002 B&Q’s Human Resources Director explained to the Financial Times that ‘We wanted a psychological underpinning to the entire culture – the same description of cultural fit across the entire population [of the company] – including management.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Identifying the right personalities has become a big industry, with a turnover of £20 million a year; over 70 per cent of companies in the FTSE 100 now use psychometric testing. In this labour market women and young people are favoured, while the shy, the reserved and those who find it hard to adapt to change are disadvantaged.

Gorz goes on to claim: ‘What this represents is an end to the impersonal relationship in which the employee sold labour to the employer regardless of personality, a return to the pre-capitalist relations of personal submission as described by Marx.’ That submission does not depend on rules and coercion – you can’t force someone to be ‘warm’ and ‘natural’ on the telephone. The required attributes derive from the worker’s ‘entire ability to think and act’. The ‘power battle’ is no longer played out in the workplace, says Gorz, but shifts ‘upstream’: ‘The battle lines of that conflict will be everywhere where information, language, modes of life, tastes and fashions are produced…in other words, everywhere the subjectivity and “identity” of individuals, their values, their images of themselves and the world are being continually structured, manufactured and shaped.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In other words, the conflicts over power and autonomy which always characterise working lives now no longer take place in the factory, call centre or office, but in the wider cultural life of the country, which promotes the required norms for the twenty-first-century workplace. For example, when a human resources director gives out instructions that staff are to ‘be themselves and be natural’ with customers, the staff’s understanding of self or naturalness can be drawn from a disparate range of pop psychology, television, magazines and friends.

These required emotional characteristics are in continual conflict with the pressure to be efficient; a conflict which is symptomatic of many forms of service work with low profit margins. There’s an inherent contradiction in this, because contrary to Bob Hughes’ claim, empathy is not always efficient: the confused old lady who can’t use her mobile might take up twenty minutes if a call handler is too empathetic. The old lady may even get canny and try to reach the same call handler every evening, in a bid to alleviate her loneliness – it happens – and just how empathetic should the response be? The empathetic employee is caught in a tension between the organisation’s drive to be efficient and competitive, and meeting the consumer’s desire for satisfaction. Balancing the two is no mean feat, given the often unrealisable promise of consumer culture that ‘we can have whatever we want whenever we want it’: the ‘enchanting myth of customer sovereignty’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Often the failure to cope with this tension is placed on the shoulders of the individual employee, rather than acknowledged as a contradiction of the position they’ve been placed in.

Furthermore, the emotional labour may require some degree of deference on the part of the employee. Bowing is taught to workers at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo because ‘Guests wish to experience an appropriate feeling of prestige or superiority, purely by virtue of their using what is commonly evaluated as a deluxe enterprise.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The culture of the hotel industry is about an illusion of old-fashioned servility and ingratiating hierarchy. The flipside of the catchphrase ‘the customer is always right’ is the put-upon employee who is required not only to repress his or her own emotions (irritation, frustration), but also to accept responsibility, which results in the endless and meaningless apologies of service culture. The egalitarian aspirations of Western democratic countries do not seep into the interface between employee and consumer in the service economy. The result is a mismatch between the values of the workplace and the values of consumer culture: in the former, employees are expected to repress their own emotional responses; in the latter, they are encouraged to give them full rein.

Inevitably, the mismatch is most acute amongst the lowest-paid: they are required to provide emotional experiences which they could never afford to receive themselves. In a culture which privileges the expression of emotion and rejects traditional forms of emotional self-management – such as the British stiff upper lip – the mismatch becomes even more acute: on the one hand, the consumer can become more demanding, while on the other, the employee has to control his or her own culturally legitimised emotions.

One study quoted the instructions given to clerical staff at Harvard University, who were advised to ‘Think of yourself as a trash can. Take everyone’s little bits of anger all day, put it inside you, and at the end of the day, just pour it into the dumpster on your way out of the door.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In Hochschild’s seminal study, flight attendants were told to think of passengers as guests, children, or people who have just received traumatic news – similar analogies are used in training British call-centre staff. This kind of cognitive restructuring of employees’ responses is required to pamper the customer’s every whim. Such self-control can be very hard work, as management theorist Irena Grugulis points out: ‘Expressing warmth towards and establishing rapport with customers may provide a genuine source of pleasure for workers. Yet in practice, emotions are incorporated into organisations within strict limits. Emotion work does not necessarily legitimise the expression of human feelings in a way that supports the development of healthy individuals, instead it offers these feelings for sale. Work is not redesigned to accommodate the employees’ emotions, rather employees are redesigned to fit what is deemed necessary at work.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

There is a world of difference between the waitress who chooses to smile, quip with her customers and be good-natured, and the one whose behaviour has been minutely prescribed by a training manual. The former has some autonomy over her own feelings; the latter has been forced to open up more aspects of herself to commodification. Research into a call centre for a British airline concluded: ‘Service sector employers are increasingly demanding that their employees deep act, work on and change their feelings to match the display required by the labour process.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Employees are left to manage the dilemmas of authenticity, integrity and their sense of their own natural, spontaneous personality, which all spill into their private lives. Perhaps this reinforces the low self-esteem often associated with women and the low-wage service economy; perhaps it also contributes to the high turnover of call-centre staff – often 25 per cent or more a year.

This alienation from the individual’s own emotions was Hochschild’s concern: ‘When the product – the thing to be engineered, mass produced, and subjected to speed-up and slowdown – is a smile, a feeling, or a relationship, it comes to belong more to the organisation and less to the self. And so, in the country that most publicly celebrated the individual, more people privately wonder, without tracing the question to its deepest social root: “What do 1 really feel?”’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Perhaps you’re wondering what all the fuss is about. What does it matter if the call handler has to talk as if she is smiling? What does it matter if staff are instructed to smile – has being made to smile ever hurt anyone? This is a fascinating aspect of this form of hard work – how it is dismissed, belittled, or just happens without being remarked on: ‘The truly remarkable feature of emotion work is its sheer ordinariness, the extent to which it has permeated most forms of work and to which it is deemed natural.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Two reasons explain the uncritical acceptance of this kind of hard work. The first is that it is largely done by women: 54 per cent of service sector jobs in Britain are held by women, and 89 per cent of the jobs held by women are in the service sector.

(#litres_trial_promo) Whatever is regarded as women’s work has historically been underpaid and undervalued compared with men’s work. That structural inequality has been extended to many of the emotionally demanding service jobs created in the last few decades. Women are regarded as being better at managing their own emotions while serving the emotional needs of others; these are skills which they have brought to bear in the building of family and community life, and which until now had little market value.

Secondly, a historical legacy of rational materialism still values the solid, measurable and tangible over the immeasurable and intangible. That makes us better at treating heart disease than afflictions of the heart such as depression and anxiety; the former is declining, the latter are increasing. There is still a cultural stoicism which belittles emotion: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.’ But how can you think of yourself as a ‘trash can’ all day, and then go home with the satisfaction of having done a good job? How do you gain the sense of self-worth which properly comes with paid employment if you’re being paid to be servile?

While we’ve learnt that certain forms of labour are inimical to good health – coalmining often led to lung disease, for example – we have yet to begin to think that perhaps some forms of emotional labour fall into the same category. Many people compartmentalise human interactions, applying completely different etiquettes to each: they are generous and solicitous to friends, but switch to being rude to the customer services representative, demanding of the waitress, and ignoring the cleaner and the dustbin men. ‘Blank them out’ is the most common attitude extended towards those who serve. In some ways this is an even more cruel denial of a human being than a patronising hierarchy in which at least ‘everyone had their place’. Underlying this indifference is the erosion of human reciprocity – a sense about what we owe each other – which is symptomatic of a culture which puts so much emphasis on the individual.

Increasingly, policy-makers focus on ‘self-esteem’ as a critical element in how to break the cycle of poverty and deprivation entrenched in some neighbourhoods. It’s an issue which Charles Leadbeater takes up in his book Up the Down Escalator (2002). He quotes Robert William Fogel, the Nobel Prize-winning economist: ‘The modernist egalitarian agenda was based on material redistribution. The critical aspect of a postmodern egalitarian agenda is not the distribution of money income, or food, or shelter, or consumer durables. Although there are still glaring inadequacies in the distribution of material commodities that must be addressed, the most intractable maldistributions in rich countries such as the United States are in the realm of spiritual and immaterial assets.’ Leadbeater points out that ‘Self-esteem cannot be redistributed in the way income can,’ and goes on to claim that ‘Assets of the spirit [in Fogel’s words] have to be personally produced; they cannot be delivered by the state.’ But self-esteem is not a personal achievement; it is the product of a set of social relations, and it is the state which orders many of them. What is missing from the analysis is how the emotional labour of low-paid jobs in the service sector reinforces that low self-esteem.

The contradictions of the growing emotional economy are increasingly an issue for the public sector. The welfare state has wrestled with different forms of emotional labour – in health, education and social services – for many decades, but now the demands are increasing. For example, teachers are having to cope with much higher levels of behavioural problems and children with special needs (between 1993 and 2003 their proportion nearly doubled from 11.6 per cent to 19.2 per cent in primary schools, and from 9.6 per cent to 16.5 per cent in secondary