I was having a really bad day. My kid was sick, my dad was just diagnosed with cancer, my car had gotten stuck in the snow so I was late to work… Just one of those days.
A guest arrived at the office for their meeting with a colleague – not with me. While he was waiting in the lobby, my office door happened to be open and he could see me at my desk, clearly upset about this conflation of events.
He shouted across the room – “Hey, you should smile. It can’t be that bad.”
As if smiling was all I needed to do to make the frustration of that day just melt away.
Here’s the thing about being asked to smile. It’s not really a request. It’s the implication that your expression exists for someone else’s comfort.
Recently, Target rolled out a new holiday directive asking employees to smile more. When I first heard it, I had to double-check it was real. Because in 2025, with everything we know about workplace culture, burnout, and emotional labor, surely we’ve moved past the idea that you can manage morale by managing people’s faces.
Apparently not.
So let’s talk about why this matters. Not because smiling is bad, but because forcing people to perform positivity tells us something deeper about how we still misunderstand work, emotion, and humanity.
When Positivity Becomes a Performance
I’m a smiley person. I’m generally a pretty happy and optimistic person. And yes, a genuine smile can transform an interaction. We’ve all experienced that sense of warmth and connection that feels effortless and human.
But when a company requires that smile, it’s not warmth anymore. It’s a performance.
And that performance is work, specifically what sociologist Arlie Hochschild famously called emotional labor: the management of one’s feelings to create a publicly observable facial or bodily display that produces the “right” emotional state in others.
In other words, it’s not just doing your job. It’s performing a feeling while you do it.
Now, that doesn’t mean all emotional labor is bad. Many jobs rely on it: customer service, healthcare, hospitality, teaching. And when you’re working in these industries, of course respectful and kind interactions are crucial (and necessary) for business success. But the key difference is how it’s managed.
When emotional labor is acknowledged, supported, and balanced with autonomy, it can be sustainable. When it’s mandated, ignored, or punished when not performed “correctly,” it becomes exploitative.
The Subtext of “Smile More”
When someone says “smile more,” it’s rarely about your well-being. It’s about their comfort.
That’s what makes this directive so unsettling, because it echoes a message women have heard for generations: your expression should make others feel at ease, even when you don’t.
It’s an old cultural script dressed up in corporate language. A form of emotional policing that tells workers – often those in lower-paid, customer-facing roles – that their emotions aren’t theirs to manage. Their job is to curate an atmosphere.
That’s not kindness. That’s control.
The Hidden Costs of Forced Positivity
Emotional control doesn’t come free. It costs real energy, and over time, it erodes well-being.
When workers are told to smile through frustration, exhaustion, or disrespect, they start suppressing their authentic emotional responses. They learn that honesty is unsafe, and that performing happiness is more valuable than feeling it.
This suppression is strongly linked to burnout, depression, and turnover. People can only fake it for so long before they check out entirely.
And customers can tell. A forced smile doesn’t build trust; it feels uncanny. Authentic warmth, on the other hand, radiates because it’s real.
“But Smiling Makes Everyone Feel Better!”
This is where many people get stuck. Sure, smiling can lift moods, reduce tension, and create connection. Studies even show that smiling can improve your own mood, thanks to a feedback loop between facial muscles and emotional processing in the brain.
But there’s a crucial difference between choosing to smile and being told to smile.
Choice creates agency. Mandate removes it.
And the more a workplace depends on compliance, the less genuine emotional connection it can ever hope to foster.
What Emotional Labor Looks Like in Practice
If you’ve ever worked retail, hospitality, or frontline customer service, you know the script:
- “Smile for the guest.”
- “Keep it upbeat.”
- “Don’t let them see you’re stressed.”
These phrases might sound harmless, but they add up to a clear message: Your real emotions are a liability.
And often, the people most affected by these policies are those with the least power – hourly workers, women, people of color, and anyone in a “customer-facing” role.
Meanwhile, higher-level employees (or customers) get to be as grumpy, curt, or tired as they want. That imbalance tells us everything about who gets emotional freedom at work, and who doesn’t.
Designing for Real Positivity
So if mandating smiles isn’t the answer, what is?
If companies truly want their employees to show warmth and care, they need to create conditions that naturally produce those emotions, not policies that force them.
That means:
- Paying people fairly. Financial security does more for morale than any “positivity” campaign ever could.
- Staffing adequately. People can’t be cheerful when they’re chronically overworked.
- Allowing emotional honesty. We all have bad days, and acknowledging that is ok.
- Training leaders to model empathy, not enforce performance. You can’t tell people to smile if your leadership practices make them miserable.
Smiles should be a byproduct of a healthy culture, not a metric of it.
The Future of Emotional Culture at Work
We’re in an era where authenticity has turned into a buzzword, but it can’t coexist with policies that punish real emotion.
If a company truly wants authenticity, it has to make room for the full spectrum of human experience: the good days, the hard ones, and everything in between.
Because authenticity isn’t about being happy all the time. It’s about being real, and trusting that realness can still produce great work, meaningful service, and human connection.
At the end of the day, this isn’t just about smiling. It’s about how we value people.
A genuine smile is powerful. A forced one is painful.
One builds trust. The other breeds resentment.
If you want people to smile more, don’t tell them to.
Give them a reason to.
