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🖤 Open Works #025 Where To Draw The Line On Emotional Labour

🖤 Open Works #025 Where To Draw The Line On Emotional Labour

Every edition we solve a people and culture problem, crowd-sourced from the Open Org community.

John Faulkner-Willcocks
February 14, 2025

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 420+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

❝

“Where do we draw the line on emotional labour?

People & Culture teams are increasingly expected to ‘fix’ emotional wellbeing, while other leaders offload this responsibility.

If we push back, we’re seen as the villain.

How do we set clear boundaries and ensure emotional labour is shared, not just delegated to P&C?”

Head of People & Culture | 40ppl | Tech startup

That moment when everyone finally gets what your job is (and isn’t)

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

Emotional labour is real work.
It’s everyone’s responsibility, not just People & Culture’s.
Leaders need clarity on their role in emotional wellbeing.
Set boundaries early and often so people know what your job is and isn’t.
Pushback isn’t villainous—it’s leadership.

⚡️ The Problem

Ah, the Emotional Labour Trap. It happens when:

👉 You’re the de facto team therapist.
👉 Leaders say, “Can you just handle this?” (without handling their own team’s wellbeing).
👉 You’re expected to carry the culture, without owning the business decisions shaping it.

Sound familiar? 😵‍💫

It’s exhausting. And if you’re here, you’re probably at capacity—or close.

So, how do we draw the line before we burn out?

💡 Setting Boundaries Without Being ‘The Villain’

Boundaries don’t make you a bad People Leader. They make you a sustainable one.

Here’s how you reset expectations:

🔹 1. Define What’s People Team’s Role vs. Leadership’s Role

Your job: Enable the business to lead well—not to carry everyone’s emotional burden.

Not Your Job	Your Job
Solving team conflicts for managers	Teaching managers how to handle conflicts
Providing constant emotional support	Building psychological safety into leadership practices
Acting as a default emotional sounding board	Providing structured resources (e.g., manager community of practice, coaching)

💡Pro Tip: this might be the time to reset expectations on you and your team's role more broadly*

*Mini blueprint for resetting role expectations

🎯 Align you<>founder/CEO/SLT on your core accountabilities

🎯 Check priorities

🎯 Check desired results

🎯 Publish

Simple example from Open Org’s Doing Culture Right Playbook: How to set effective boundaries for you and your team

🔹 2. Make Emotional Labour Visible

If something’s invisible, it’s easy to offload. So, make it measurable:

✅ Audit where emotional labour shows up (e.g., conflict resolution, mental health support, DEI work).
✅ Track how much time it’s taking. Show leadership the cost—because yes, it is a cost.
✅ Reframe it as a leadership capability gap. It’s not a People Team issue; it’s a leadership accountability issue.

🔹 3. Put Emotional Labour Into Leadership KPIs

If leaders expect you to handle wellbeing, they need skin in the game.

📌 Tie leadership KPIs to team wellbeing. Example: Measure psychological safety in engagement surveys and make it a performance metric.

📌 Train managers on ‘holding space’ skills. Empathy, listening, handling difficult conversations—it’s a leadership skill, not a People team accountability.

📌 Shift the language. Instead of "People Team owns wellbeing," frame it as:
"Our leaders shape the culture. The People Team equips them to lead well."

🔹 4. Push Back with Clarity (Not Guilt)

Here’s a script if you’re feeling the villain arc coming:

“I completely agree that emotional wellbeing is critical. That’s exactly why it needs to be a shared responsibility, not just a People Team function. We can provide tools and frameworks, but the real impact comes from leaders embedding this into how they lead.”

– People Leader

💡 Pro Tip: If a leader offloads emotional labour, ask: “How have you supported them so far?” Wait in the silence.

🔥 Next Steps

📌 Assess where emotional labour is creeping into your team’s workload.

📌 Run a leadership session on managing emotional wellbeing within teams.

📌 Shift wellbeing from a People Team problem to a leadership accountability metric.

📌 Give yourself permission to push back. Because setting boundaries is leadership.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

📖 Luke Shipley’s Substack: “People and Culture Pickles”

💰️ How to set effective boundaries for you and your team – Open Org

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

You do not need to feel like April

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

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With 🧊 & 🔥

John & Adam

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