For those lucky enough to have worked from
home over the past two and a half years or seven years or whatever it was, it
is back to the office time. We are finally returning to the office and in
real-time, at least until the next wave hits. And some people cannot wait.
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But for those less
excited, reluctant to face the creepy supervisor they have been avoiding, the
department suck-up they have been talking about, the portion of the job they
have been faking, here is a nifty tip for easing the transition: Do not “bring
your whole self” to work.
That is right! Defy
the latest catchphrase of human resources and leave a good portion of you back
home. Maybe it is the part of you that has grown overly attached to athleisure.
The side that needs to talk about candy (guilty). It could be the
getting-married part of you still agonizing over whether a destination wedding
is morally defensible in These Times.
Leave those things
behind and I promise: No one in your workplace will miss them. And remember, it
works both ways. Anyone worth sharing a flex desk with is not someone you want
to see every last ounce of either. They, too, can reserve their aches,
grievances, flimsy excuses, and noisy opinions for the roommate, the pandemic
puppy and the houseplants.
You may be unaware
of the prevailing “whole self” fashion. Perhaps you managed to skip that human
resources module, or you work at a small outfit, one unencumbered by systems,
strategies, and sweeping philosophies.
So what exactly
does it even mean? According to TED talker and corporate consultant Mike
Robbins, author of a book called — that is right — “Bring Your Whole Self to
Work”, it means being able “to fully show up” and “allow ourselves to be truly
seen” in the workplace. Per Robbins, it is “essential” to create a work
environment “where people feel safe enough to bring all of who they are to
work”.
Bringing the whole
self is a certified buzzphrase at Google and encouraged at Experian. An entire
issue of the Harvard Business Review has been devoted to the subject. In this
new workplace, you do not have to keep your head down and do your job. Instead,
you “bring your whole self to work” — personality flaws, vulnerabilities,
idiosyncratic mantras, and all.
Perhaps you have heard
of whole self’s cousin, the “authentic self,” also urged to head into the
office. According to BetterUp, which bills itself as the first Whole Person™
platform, “that means acknowledging your personality, including the quirky
bits, and bringing your interests, hopes, dreams, and even fears with you, even
if they don’t seem relevant to your work”.
In other words, for
the world outside the HR department, the phrase “bringing your whole self to
work” is almost guaranteed to induce a vomit emoji. Rarely has a phrase of
corporate jargon raised so much ire and rolled as many eyeballs with everyone I
have talked to about the subject.
In this new workplace, you do not have to keep your head down and do your job. Instead, you “bring your whole self to work” — personality flaws, vulnerabilities, idiosyncratic mantras, and all.
And yet. In recent
years, the “whole self” movement has gained momentum in part because it
dovetails with fortified corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Both purport to make employees feel comfortable expressing aspects of their
identity in the workplace, even when irrelevant to the work at hand.
Comfort sure sounds
nice.
The problem is for
many people, it is no more comfortable dragging the whole kit and caboodle into
the workplace than it is showing up every day on a relentless basis. Nor is it
necessarily productive. Not everyone wants their romantic life, their politics,
their values, or their identity viewed by their colleagues as pertinent to
their performance. For some people, a private life is actually best when it is
private.
So here is an
alternative: Let everyone bring only — or at least primarily — the worky parts.
You remember those fragments: the part that angsted over every resume
punctuation mark and put a suit on for the first interview, the part whose mom
urged her to put her best face forward in the workplace? It is that
old-fashioned thing we used to call “being professional”. Heck, it is the you you
were for your entire corporate history, until the prevailing HR doctrine
abandoned buttoning things up.
But “bringing your
whole self to work” is a cheap benefit — easier for employers to provide than,
say, a raise — and one vague enough to be largely meaningless. Nor is it
available to the majority of the American workforce. Nobody is asking a line
worker or customer service representative to add more personal vulnerability to
the enterprise. For most gainfully employed people, it is not work’s job to provide
self-fulfillment or self-actualization. It is to put food on the table.
After all, the
office is not the only place you exist — why should they get to have all of
you? If you only bring the best parts of you or at the very least, the part of
you that does the actual work, you are more likely to get rewarded for it.
Nor is it fair to
ask the workplace to deal with all your hopes, dreams, and problems. Not
everyone is comfortable having their co-workers know so much about them. As the
co-author of a recent paper out of Wharton (“OMG! My Boss Just Friended Me: How
Evaluations of Colleagues’ Disclosure, Gender, and Rank Shape
Personal/Professional Boundary Blurring Online”) noted, “there’s a tension that
people have between this exhortation to bring your whole self to work, to
connect, to be a part of things, but also to keep a separation between your
personal and your professional life.”
Think of this as
your chance to redraw those lines. Bring back a little healthy
compartmentalization. You need not go all-out “Severance” and slash your brain
in two halves just to get a little separation between work self and
not-work-self. It is not about being fake or hiding who you are. It is just
about keeping some things to yourself.
Let this be a
reprieve for workers as they re-up their subway pass and pack leftovers
lunches. It is tiring being all you, all the time, with all people. People are
exhausted! And they are scarcely even commuting yet.
Think, too, of this additional benefit: Now you have an
excuse to get your work self out of the house. Some people there may actually
be sick of that person.
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