Emotional Labor

1160 Words3 Pages

Long term stress from negative feelings and unexpressed emotions can lead to job burn out and mental or emotional illness. More and more dispatch centers realize that emergency dispatchers need more time away from work to separate themselves from daily emotional management by offering generous vacation time. Beside just sending the dispatcher home to vacation on the beach centers are also providing more organized peer support with teams that are trained in soft on-the-spot debriefing with the dispatcher’s peers. These briefings have been standard with police agencies and fire departments for some time. Dispatch centers are also beginning to realize the benefit for emergency dispatchers to share their experience with other first responders, …show more content…

Emotional labor takes empathy. Emotional management is how we practice emotional labor. It is our ability to manage our internal feelings in a way that creates the response we want from another. We do this by suppressing the wrong emotions for the situation so we can put on a mask of controlled expression. There is a hypothesis that women are better than men at service-oriented jobs that require emotional labor. Contrary to that belief, if that was true than men wouldn’t dominant the public service positions of police officer and firefighter. Emotional management is a skill everyone has but only a few can do as well as an emergency dispatcher, police officer, and firefighter. Unfortunately, being good at it comes with a price. Constant suppression of emotions creates negative feelings such as anger, fear, isolation, frustration, exhaustion, self-critical hesitation, and irritation. Joking with co-workers, sometimes with some degree of sarcasm, helps to release negative feelings that previously had been suppressed. Additionally, built up stress long term can create Compassion Fatigue. Long term stress can also turn into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). As technologies allow us to move further away from manufacturing jobs into service-oriented jobs all of us need to be alert for signs of burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and PTSD. Furthermore, debriefing with co-workers and attending a debriefing with other service-oriented people allows expression and release of true feelings. By doing this there is hope to ward off these long-term illnesses. First responders such as emergency dispatchers, police officers, and firefighters are at a higher risk for stress related emotional illness. Therefore, administration and human resources have realized the need to provide these specialties skilled individuals

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