By David Hingley
‘it was an important reminder of the impression our work can leave on us’
Earlier this year I was lucky to be invited to take part in the first Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), University of Stirling (UoS), and King’s College London (KCL) supported ‘emotions in museum work’ workshop on the topic of investigating emotionally laden work in museums.
Aside from the opportunity to meet and hear from so many inspiring individuals who either work directly in the museum and heritage sector or are involved in the academic study and review of that work, it was a timely reminder of the impact museum work has on the individuals involved and the society they aim both to reflect and serve.
One project I’ve been fortunate to be involved in was the ‘Poppies’ at the Tower of London in 2014. Discussion during the workshop was an opportunity for me to share and to reflect on the mixed experiences of this project. While it left deep emotional scars, it was also an incredibly positive experience that shaped me as a person, and I hope continues to inform how I think about the impact of museum work on the teams delivering.
In terms of the scars, I had never expected, in a role as Head of Operations, to find myself in conversations with people who had purchased poppies to remember their recently deceased child, to be involved in an installation which divided opinions between those who felt it was an apt memorial to lives lost, and those who felt it glorified war, or to end up supporting our small call centre team who were subject to tens of thousands more emails and calls than they usually handled, while at the centre of a media spotlight. Yet at the same time, all these elements truly did make this more meaningful. Over time they feel more like privileged memories, though they seemed raw, and hard and sometimes unfair in 2014. The emotions were created not just by the meanings of the installation, but by the work of the installation.
What was unexpected was how quickly the workshop took me back to this project and left me feeling emotional myself, after all, I’d dealt with ‘all that’ in 2014-15, attended the wash-up project review, even written a cathartic dissertation on the experience, and then moved on in my career too.
But it was an important reminder of the impression our work can leave on us. Even though I’ve personally stepped back and away from roles running large operational teams in the front line of galleries and heritage sites, the impact of emotional labour on front of house roles has continued to grow. It has to be considered in almost every aspect of delivering authentic experiences for visitors which tackle important and often contested subjects. It is always people at the heart.
Even if it were possible to leave aside the huge emotional upheavals of Covid, which led to visitors returning to galleries, museums and community heritage sites literally moved to tears to be back in these spaces, it has been hard to escape the impact of ‘culture wars’, or the more straightforward but ever-increasing level of visitor expectation.
Broadly speaking, having worked in purely commercial retail roles before moving to heritage and culture, my own experience is that the teams working across cultural institutions genuinely are more invested in and committed to their work, more often seeing their role as a vocation and not just a job. This personal investment, quite often accompanied by a decision to pursue a career with less financial reward in exchange for more fulfilling work, has a fantastic upside, bringing a real sense of devotion to a cause. At the same time, this devotion leaves museum workers more exposed to taking criticism more personally than may often be the intention of their visitors.
Many museums rightly remind us that they are not neutral, while aiming to hold safe spaces for open discussion, provoking thought and reaction within their galleries. The challenge here is how best the staff – so often the interface between a bold institutional stance and a member of the public who may strongly disagree – can be supported. To what extent are these ‘safe spaces’ safe for the people that work in them?
A disproportionate amount of emotional labour can be placed on some of the lowest paid and least empowered within an organisation. These individuals can find themselves being expected to defend that organisation or to give a personal opinion, when they may find themselves, on occasion, not fully in agreement, being cast by visitors as the defenders of an institutional position the staff member had no part in agreeing. In my personal experience, there is far more of an expectation that those who work in the cultural sphere live the values of their employer. More so than you would find on the High Street, however much people may love a brand.
Many of us who have worked in front of house teams are aware you don’t need to look into the distant past to find job descriptions where those in visitor-facing roles were there for security purposes only, keeping an eye on visitors who might be trying to damage or steal the collection items, sometimes even being prohibited from speaking at length, and certainly not expected to tell stories or share opinions. Yet now those same roles often do the emotional heavy lifting, facilitating complex, deep-rooted discussions – and that’s before we even consider the increased targeting of museum collection items by groups demonstrating against wider and important issues and in which those same teams can be caught up.
It’s a privilege to be able to hold open discussions in a world where it can feel shouting has taken the place of debate. It’s hugely enriching for front of house roles to be entrusted with such a key facilitation role, allowing these teams to be recognised for their brilliant storytelling and engagement skills, rather than just as people that get you out of the building in a fire. But there’s emotional cost here too. My reflection on our workshop was that this additional impact is something many museums want to and need to embrace if their staff are to feel supported in carrying that burden.
David is a Senior Consultant at BOP Consulting, specialising in strategic and operational planning in the Culture Sector. His previous roles were all based leading front of house teams including as Head of Visitor Experience at Tate Galleries and Head of Operations at Hampton Court Palace.