When It's Just Too Hard to Smile!

TLDR: The authors of as discussed by the authors summarized the opinions of managers and service workers in the tourism/hospitality industry in the Adelaide metropolitan area during the Christmas holiday season, and identified strategies developed by managers and staff to sustain each other in their front-line service work.

Abstract: The Christmas holiday season brings particular challenges to managers and front-line service workers in the accommodation and hospitality sectors. These staff, while striving to provide their normal high standards of service, must maintain their welcoming demeanour in the face of an increasing tide of patrons, some of whom are endowed with more social graces than others and many who are fuelled by various degrees of intoxication. The following paper summarises the opinions of managers and service workers in the tourism/ hospitality industry in the Adelaide metropolitan area. Their views were solicited during the course of a series of interviews that addressed a number of issues associated with the performance of emotional labour. As one hospitality manager observed: `Christmas time is a tough time ... there's a different variety of people coming into your restaurant -- different backgrounds ... normally, it's one person that's made the booking but there might be thirty people in the party ... they might be from an office or a factory or a solicitor's office ... sometimes they bring along their partners and the waiter becomes the battering ram for dissatisfaction at the table between arguments between spouses ... extended families on Christmas Day are often difficult ... they're high on emotion ... people are thrown together once a year and you actually bearing the brunt of the strained relationships at the table.' The nature of frontline service work is succinctly described by Albrecht and Zemke as follows: `The service person must deliberately involve his or her feelings in the situation. He or she may not particularly feel like being cordial and becoming a one-minute friend to the next customer who approaches, but that is indeed what frontline work entails.' (1985, pp.114-15). In the process of becoming these `one minute friends', managers and service workers are performing emotional labour, which is defined by Morris and Feldman as `the effort, planning and control needed to express organisationally desired emotion during interpersonal transactions' (1996, p.987). One particular negative consequence of the performance of emotional labour is known as burnout. Maslach and Jackson (1981, p.99) indicate that `burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion and cynicism that occurs frequently among individuals who do `people-work' of some kind.' As a result of the emotional exhaustion experienced, workers feel that they cannot give of themselves any longer (Maslach and Jackson 1981). The comments of a front office worker in a large hotel draw attention not only the emotional exhaustion experienced as a result of frontline service work, but also the challenges of working during the Christmas season: `... one of the hardest times would have to be Christmas and New Year ... ... you walk off the desk after eight hours, just feeling like you could just go home and not talk to anyone ever again ... some days I just don't want to talk to anyone ... my mum will call me and I'll just snap at her and you get to that stage where you just don't want to do it anymore.' These interviews identified strategies developed by managers and service workers to sustain each other in their front-line service work. Managers would intervene on behalf of their staff when necessary as indicated by the following comment: `I just go and see the table ... become a bit of a buffer between the difficult customer and my staff.' An accommodation service worker acknowledged the importance of such intervention: `If a manager hears an employee getting torn apart by a customer and getting really stressed and upset about it, I don't think the manager should wait for the employee.... to go up to him and say `Can you help me out here? `I think that managers should automatically step in. …