Exploring Emotional Labour
An IP Inclusive and Jonathan’s Voice Webinar
Tuesday 25 March 2025
12.30 – 1.30 pm, online
This webinar explored the concept of emotional labour, and its personal and professional implications.
In today’s workplace, emotional labour—the effort of managing emotions and creating a positive environment—often goes unnoticed yet significantly impacts our well-being and productivity. Once viewed primarily as a gendered issue, emotional labour is often an unacknowledged aspect of many professions, and may include maintaining a façade, shouldering others’ burdens, improvising, or managing complex emotional or traumatic situations. Attendees joined us for an insightful webinar which sought to enhance your awareness of emotional labour and offered strategies to acknowledge and address its hidden challenges.
Our speaker Nicola Neath considered the implications of maintaining a positive demeanour to serve, comfort or placate others, even when it may not align with your own emotional state, drawing on insights from Arlie Russell Hochschild and contemporary thinkers like Liz Yeoman and Rose Hackman.
You can watch a recording of the webinar below.
Meet the Speaker
Nicola Neath is BACP Integrative Psychotherapist and trainer, and workplace counselling specialist working in HE and in private practice. She is co-chair for the Council for Work and Health Mental Health Group. She has published on Relational Ethics; offers advice on national initiatives; written several articles for BACP journals and is regularly invited to speak about Workplace Counselling. Following the pioneering and successful organisational application of the McCluskey Model at the University of Leeds, she and Una McCluskey published an account of the application and the model in the book titled ‘To be Met as a Person at Work’. She has a small private practice, which is mainly for supervision and collaborative training. She is passionate about bringing different Psychological perspectives into the workplace.
Registration
This event was free. So are all our resources. The Jonathan’s Voice events and resources are also free at the point of delivery.
That said, both organisations do need money to keep the show on the road, so if you are able, please consider contributing via our Just Giving page. For more information, visit the IP Inclusive fundraising page, or the Jonathan’s Voice donations page.
Resources
Nicola has kindly agreed to share her slides which are available here.
Our Mental Health Hub has lots of great resources.
You may also be interested in our other mental health webinars, which are available on our YouTube channel playlist.