Finally, a System That Can Recognize Emotional Labor in the Workplace

Photo by Look Up Look Down Photography on Unsplash

Globally, women’s unpaid caretaking and emotional labor would have netted them nearly $11 trillion in 2019, according to one estimate, if they had earned minimum wage for their efforts.

Although it can be essential for a project, this type of labor receives little or no recognition in a professional setting. It is largely invisible from a corporate perspective, especially if it is performed outside the scope of official job descriptions. A better descriptor of such workers’ contributions can incentivize this type of labor and promote far greater organizational productivity.

This description can come if employment status, in general, is described in a finer-grained manner, rather than simply the binary “Do you have a job” and the one-line “What is your title.”

A 40-hour-per-week, full-time employee will spend approximately 2,000 hours per year on work-related tasks. Many people can only do part of this, perhaps quite well. However, they are cut off from the whole because of the binary nature of employment.

Emotional labor can be represented if the job is described using a multidimensional scale and visualization, representing the aspects of engagement that are present. A project called Organic Recruitment, or Org-Rec for short, is developing this scale…