Call Centre Emotional Labour, Stress and Burnout Among Employees

Call centre employees perform emotional labour all day. Read about its effects, the risk of burnout and the practical steps employers can take to protect staff.

From the moment you put on your headset and take the first call until the end of your shift, your voice is expected to be warm, patient and friendly. The person on the line may be shouting, insulting you or furious after waiting half an hour; you still have to answer in the same tone, watch the timer on your screen, meet quality criteria and be ready for the next call. The work that call centre employees do every day is not only about giving information or solving problems; it also demands intense emotional labour. In this article, for customer service managers, HR professionals and employers, I look at what emotional labour is, why it is so concentrated in call centres, how it affects employees and organisations, and which measures can be put into practice.

What Is Emotional Labour?

The concept of emotional labour was defined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild to describe how service-sector employees regulate their emotions as part of their jobs. Put simply, it means managing, suppressing or changing your own feelings in order to display the emotion the organisation expects.

Emotional labour takes two main forms:

• Surface acting: The person projects a smiling, calm expression outwardly while feeling angry or tired inside. The wider the gap between what is felt and what is shown, the greater the fatigue.
• Deep acting: The person tries to empathise genuinely by understanding the other party's situation, and tries to change their own feeling from within. This can be less draining, but when repeated constantly it also uses up energy.

In call centres, this labour is spent in an environment with no visual cues, where only the voice is used, and at a very high pace. The employee moves on to the next call without time to process the anger or sadness of the last one. By the end of the day, this accumulation is felt as "I haven't done anything but I'm exhausted."

What Wears Call Centre Employees Down?

Stress in call centres does not come only from difficult customers. The way the work is organised matters at least as much as the customers. Common risk factors include:

• Time and performance monitoring: Average handling time, waiting time, number of calls and breaks are measured second by second. The sense of constant surveillance reduces perceived autonomy.
• Mandatory scripts: Employees are expected to use set phrases in every situation. This can lead to being unable to respond to the other person's real need and to "feeling like a robot."
• Low control: The employee lacks the authority to solve the customer's problem. They have to absorb anger over an issue they cannot resolve.
• Verbal abuse and harassment: Insults, threats, sexist or demeaning remarks.
• Short, uncontrolled breaks: Breaks, including toilet breaks, being monitored and restricted through the system.
• Shift and night work: Disrupted sleep patterns, especially in centres that operate 24/7.
• Job insecurity and high staff turnover: Constantly changing colleagues and the feeling that "I could be replaced at any moment."
• Physical conditions: Noise, headset use, sitting for long periods and working at a screen.

European data show how widespread these risks are. In the OSH Pulse survey of more than 27,000 workers in Europe, 46% of employees reported severe time pressure or work overload, 18% a lack of autonomy, and 16% violence or verbal abuse from customers or patients (EU-OSHA, 2022). In the ESENER 2024 survey of workplaces, 56% of workplaces in the EU cited "dealing with difficult customers, patients or pupils" as a risk factor (EU-OSHA, 2025). These figures cover all sectors; call centres are among the environments where these risks occur together and intensely.

One more factor stands out today: simple requests are increasingly directed to automated response systems, chatbots and AI-supported channels. This can mean that the calls reaching a call centre representative are comparatively more complex, longer and more tense. By the time customers reach a representative, they may have gone through several menus and run out of patience.

The Effects of Emotional Labour on Employees

Intense, long-term emotional labour can affect an employee's mental health and job performance in many ways:

• Emotional exhaustion: Running out of energy, struggling to go to work in the morning, not wanting to talk to anyone at the end of the day.
• Depersonalisation: Developing a distant, cynical or mechanical attitude towards customers.
• Feeling inadequate: The sense that "nothing I do makes a difference" and a drop in perceived professional competence.
• Physical symptoms: Headaches, hoarseness, sleep problems, stomach complaints.
• Tension spilling over at home: Anger suppressed all day showing up as impatience and tension within the family.
• Anxiety and hypervigilance: Overreacting to a ringing phone or certain tones of voice.

These three core dimensions, namely energy depletion, mental distance from the job and a reduced sense of professional efficacy, match the World Health Organization's definition of burnout. The WHO classifies burnout not as a medical condition but as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed (WHO, 2019). I discuss organisational strategies for preventing burnout separately in the article on preventing employee burnout.

In Turkey, the general picture is already challenging. According to Gallup's 2026 report, 66% of employees in Turkey report experiencing a lot of stress daily, while only 8% are truly engaged in their work (Gallup, 2026). For employees who absorb other people's anger all day, this general stress combines with the burden of the job itself.

Behind a smiling voice there is often a tiredness that has been suppressed all day.

Consequences for the Organisation: Turnover, Quality and Cost

In a call centre where emotional labour goes unmanaged, the consequences are not limited to the employee:

• High staff turnover: When representatives in whom training has been invested leave quickly, recruitment and training costs rise continuously. An analysis in the United Kingdom calculated that about 40% of the costs of staff leaving were related to mental health problems (Deloitte, 2022). This figure is specific to the UK, but it matters for showing the direction of the relationship.
• Decline in service quality: An exhausted representative shows customers less patience and tries to close the call quickly rather than solve the problem.
• Absenteeism and presenteeism: Frequent sick leave, lateness, or turning up to work but not being mentally there.
• Team climate: A constantly changing team weakens the transfer of experience and solidarity.

The Employer's Responsibility Under the Law

In Turkey there is no provision that regulates emotional labour by name; however, existing legislation places a clear duty of protection on call centre employers too:

• Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331, Article 4: The employer is obliged to ensure employees' work-related health and safety, and carries out or commissions a risk assessment.
• Law No. 6331, Article 5(ç): The employer is obliged to prevent, or where this is not possible to minimise, the negative effects of monotonous work and production pace on health and safety. Calls that are measured in seconds and follow one another without interruption fall directly within the scope of this article.
• Law No. 6331, Article 5(f): The employer develops a coherent prevention policy covering the effects of factors related to work organisation, working conditions and social relations.
• Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098, Article 417: The employer is obliged to protect the employee's personality and, in particular, to take the necessary measures to ensure they are not subjected to psychological harassment.

Within this framework, establishing a policy for abusive customers, reviewing the break and pace arrangements and recording psychosocial risks are not just good management choices but part of the employer's duty of prevention. We recommend working with your legal adviser and occupational health and safety (OHS) specialist for details.

What Can Employers and Call Centre Managers Do?

Emotional labour is inherent in the work and cannot be eliminated entirely, but its burden can be reduced considerably. Concrete steps that can be taken include:

1. A clear policy for abusive calls: Defining in writing the representative's right, in calls containing insults and threats, first to warn and then to end the call. It is vital that employees know they do not have to endure abuse under the pressure of "the customer is always right."
2. A short recovery break after a difficult call: The representative being able to stay off the system for a few minutes after a heavy call, with no reduction in their performance score.
3. Balancing the metrics: Giving weight to quality measures such as first-call resolution and customer satisfaction, rather than only handling time and call numbers.
4. Script flexibility: Giving representatives room to step outside set phrases and respond to the person in front of them in a human way.
5. Granting authority: Giving representatives decision-making power to resolve certain problems. An employee who can produce a solution takes the anger less personally.
6. Training team leaders: How a team leader approaches a representative after a difficult call is decisive. In the World Health Organization's guidelines on mental health at work, the recommendation with the strongest evidence is mental health training for managers (WHO, 2022).
7. Humanising the break arrangements: Giving up second-by-second monitoring of toilet and rest breaks, and planning regular breaks away from the screen.
8. Including psychosocial risks in the risk assessment: Article 8 of the Risk Assessment Regulation requires psychosocial sources of hazard to be identified and recorded as well. Verbal abuse, work pace and level of surveillance should be part of this assessment.
9. Equipping employees with emotion regulation skills: Practical training in breathing and grounding techniques after a difficult call, noticing negative thoughts and "not taking it personally."

I discuss the wider framework of customer-originated violence and the employer's obligations in detail in the article on customer and patient violence.

Suppose that in a telecom call centre, a representative spends fifteen minutes with a customer who disputes their bill and insults them. In a centre with no policy, the representative has to stay on the call and greets the very next call in a tense voice. In a well-designed centre, the representative can end the call after a warning, take a two-minute recovery break, and the team leader can come over and ask, "That was a difficult call, how are you?" This small difference changes both the employee's day and the next customer's experience.

How to Get Started in Your Organisation

1. Needs analysis: You can start by examining staff turnover rate, absenteeism, quality scores and records of abusive calls. An anonymous psychosocial risk survey for representatives and focus groups with small groups from different shifts then follow. Questions such as "What is the hardest moment of your day?" and "What happens after a difficult call?" reveal the source of the problem.

2. Programme: Based on the analysis, measures are planned at both the organisational and individual level. At the organisational level, policy, metrics and break arrangements are reviewed; at the individual level, stress and emotion regulation training for representatives and supportive leadership training for team leaders are provided. The ILO's 2026 report stresses that individual measures should complement organisational ones, not replace them (ILO, 2026). A meta-analysis of workplace stress management programmes also found that cognitive-behavioural programmes had a larger effect than other approaches (Richardson and Rothstein, 2008). You can explore corporate training and consultancy options on our corporate services page.

3. Measurement: Staff turnover, absenteeism, quality and customer satisfaction scores, use of support services and repeated survey results are tracked regularly. Changes are shared with teams and the measures are updated together. Representatives' first few months should also be monitored separately; the first months are a critical period in which decisions to leave are often shaped, and experience in this period largely determines the employee's bond with the organisation. Assigning new starters an experienced "buddy" and reviewing their first difficult calls together can make this period less draining.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do call centre employees burn out so quickly?

When intense emotional labour, a high pace, constant performance monitoring, low control and verbal abuse come together, there is no time left to recover. Burnout is an occupational phenomenon that emerges when this chronic stress is not successfully managed.

Can a representative hang up on a customer who is being abusive?

This depends on the organisation's policy and should be clearly defined in advance. Allowing the representative to end a call after warning, in calls containing insults and threats, is an important measure for protecting the employee.

Can emotional labour be eliminated entirely?

There will always be emotional labour in service work. The aim is not to get rid of it but to make its burden manageable: recovery breaks, supportive leadership, authority, fair metrics and emotion regulation skills can ease this burden considerably.

What can be done for representatives who work remotely?

Representatives working from home can be left alone after a difficult call. Regular short check-ins from team leaders, online team meetings, a contact channel that is reachable for immediate support, and tips for protecting the boundary between work and private space at home help close this gap.

• #call centre
• #emotional labour
• #customer service
• #burnout

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Eda Erkan Alapala

Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.

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