The emotional labour of teleworkers conducting online counselling during Covid‐19.

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• Author: Jennifer. J. O'Neil,Britta. H. Heidl,Andrew Bratton,Andreas Vossler,Naomi Moller
• Date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12284

Received: 16 May 2022

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Accepted: 15 November 2023

DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12284

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The emotional labour of teleworkers

conducting online counselling during

Covid‐19.

Jennifer. J. O'Neil

1

|Britta. H. Heidl

1

|

Andrew Bratton

1

|Andreas Vossler

2

|Naomi Moller

2

1

The Business School, Edinburgh Napier

University, Edinburgh, UK

2

School of Psychology and Counselling,

The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Correspondence

Jennifer. J. O'Neil, The Business School,

Edinburgh Napier University,

Edinburgh, UK.

Email: j.oneil@napier.ac.uk

Funding information

Moston Care Foundation

Abstract

Drawing on emotional labour theory, this paper

explores the barriers to emotionally complex telework,

with a specific focus on the space, interface and pace of

work. We examine the working lives of mental health

counsellors who adapted from in‐person delivery to

online delivery whilst working from home, during the

Covid‐19 pandemic. Our qualitative data set comprises

of semi‐structured online interviews with 31 counsel-

lors across the United Kingdom. Findings reveal that

boundary issues, increased technical interruptions,

increased screen time and associated fatigue, and

increased contact‐ability due to digitalisation were

key barriers to conducting emotionally complex tasks

and exacerbated the emotional labour of participants

creating more negative outcomes. This resulted in

heightened emotion management in the home space,

emotional dissonance, stress and in some cases,

burn‐out.

KEYWORDS

counselling, COVID‐19, emotional labour, telework, working

from home

New Technol Work Employ. 2024;39:238–258.238

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wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ntwe

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits

use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or

adaptations are made.

© 2023 The Authors. New Technology, Work and Employment published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

Working from home (WFH) became ubiquitous for many categories of workers during the

COVID‐19 pandemic (Hodder, 2020; Rofcanin & Anand, 2020), and research suggests that the

increased prevalence of WFH is a global trend that will ‘stick’(McCartney, 2022). This trend

marks a dramatic shift in how work is performed and experienced. For many service sector

employees who were involved in emotional labour, the transition to WFH was especially

significant. Specifically, mental health services are essential for economic recovery

(Ferenstein, 2021) and the pandemic has changed how mental health systems operate with

the increased provision of online services (Fiorillo & Gorwood, 2020). As demand for ‘talking

therapies’grows and warnings of a looming mental health crisis materialise (Iqbal, 2020), this

raises important questions about counsellors’experiences of practising emotion‐based

telework.

Emotional labour, or the capacity to manage, suppress or induce emotions and the

expression of deep or surface feelings in a commercialised (wage exchange) environment

(Hochschild, 1983), is a vital part of the counselling role (Mann, 2004). However, emotional

labour is also associated with adverse consequences for counsellors’health and well‐being,

which can consequently affect the delivery and outcomes of treatment (Singh & Hassard, 2021).

The ‘enforced’home‐working (Anderson & Kelliher, 2020) of the pandemic presents an

opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of online counselling from a workers’perspective,

specifically with the enhanced use of video‐conferencing technology such as Zoom, Microsoft

Teams and Webex as a replacement for in‐person contact. Whilst there is research that

examines the emotional labour process of in‐person counsellors (e.g., Singh & Hassard, 2021)

and the benefits and drawbacks of teleworking (Mann & Holdsworth, 2003), there is little

research that investigates the emotional labour process of teleworkers conducting emotionally

complex tasks online, such as online mental health counselling.

This research is significant because emotional management is integral for many workers,

especially in customer or client‐facing roles. Both organisations and workers increasingly value

emotional intelligence or using emotion‐based skills at work (Kessler et al., 2015). However, there is

limited research on workers’experiences of conducting emotional labour in an online

environment. Our work addresses this gap and contributes to two distinct literatures. First, we

contribute to the WFH literature, also called telework literature. We build on the idea that the pace

(Thulin & Vilhelmson, 2021) and space (Felstead & Henseke, 2017) of work have altered the

telework experience and argue that they can represent a barrier to emotion‐based telework

counselling. Second, we contribute to the emotional labour literature by examining how the

technological interface influences the lived experience of performing emotional labour online. To

better understand the emotional labour process of serviceworkers,weexploretheexperiencesof

online counsellors who had to transition rapidly from in‐person work to online work during the

pandemic. Whilst we acknowledge the many positives or enablers of teleworking (see Boell

et al., 2016), our focus is specifically on the barriers and challenges participants experienced.

The contextual environment of online counselling: Space, interface,

and pace of work

Counsellors play a central role in mental health provision. Before the pandemic, online

counselling had been practised since the 1960s (Grohol & Kraus, 2004) and the precursor to

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