The Watercooler: should you always bring your ‘whole self’ to work?

Have you seen Severance? If not, let me recommend it – a psychological thriller about employees at a dystopian corporation, where some have chosen to have their workplace identities surgically disassociated from their ‘real life’. Each morning, when they walk into the office, they completely forget their home lives – and when they leave at 5pm, all memory of work is erased.

Yet these days, most forward-thinking workplaces want us to do exactly the opposite: professing to be somewhere you can, and should, bring your “whole self”.

The idea is that you don’t have to put up a ‘front’, or have a work persona, in order to succeed. The ideal is all about authenticity.

And yet, I’m just a little suspicious of it. If it means increased tolerance, representation and the championing of different people’s strengths and consideration of their weaknesses, then fantastic: but what about when it doesn’t?

Workplaces are filled with often wildly different characters, beliefs and attitudes – surely to let them all reign authentic and unchecked is a recipe for conflict.

“The old-fashioned concept of ‘bringing your whole self to work’ just paid lip service to some diversity issues,” says Dr Wolfgang Seidl, psychiatrist and workplace health consulting leader for Mercer Marsh Benefits. “Although well meaning, it isn’t clear how you can implement it helpfully, especially for minority groups. However, the concept of ‘psychological safety’ has reinvigorated the idea of bringing your whole self to work and put it on a compelling, evidence-based footing.”

‘Psychological safety’ came from research by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson. Her work found that successful teams are made up of those who feel comfortable in taking risks and being seen to make mistakes at work, whereas teams who are afraid of messing up actually perform worse.

“If you feel safe enough with your colleagues that you can be yourself and share ideas, then you are more productive,” says Seidl. “Google replicated that research around the globe and found teams with high levels of psychological safety outperformed targets by 17% – those with low psychological safety missed them by 19%.

“If you take it a step further, we know that the more diversity in a team, the better it is at problem solving. That is true for ethnicity and gender, as well as educational background: we need different perspectives, not clones of ourselves, to be more effective.”

One way of fostering psychological safety used at Google is an exercise called “Just Like Me”. It reminds colleagues that no matter how contentious a discussion may be, the other party is just like them: that we all have universal needs. Some of the reflections to consider include, ‘this person has beliefs, perspectives, and opinions, just like me.’ ‘This person has hopes, anxieties, and vulnerabilities, just like me.’ ‘This person wants to feel respected, appreciated, and competent, just like me.’