PAMELA PAUL
Do Not Bring Your ‘Whole Self’ to Work
Sept. 25, 2022, 6:00 a.m. ET
By Pamela
Paul
Opinion
Columnist
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’s back to the office time. We are finally R.T.O.
and I.R.L., at least until the next wave hits. And some people can’t wait.
But for those less
excited, reluctant to face the creepy supervisor they’ve been avoiding, the
department suck-up they’ve been Slacking about, the portion of the job they’ve
been faking, here’s a nifty tip for easing the transition: Do not “bring your whole
self” to work.
That’s
right! Defy the latest catchphrase of human resources and leave a good portion
of you back home. Maybe it’s the part of you that’s 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 H.R.
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’s
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’s
“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 don’t 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’ve 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 H.R. 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’ve talked to about the subject.
And
yet. In recent years, the “whole self” movement has gained momentum in part
because it dovetails with fortified corporate diversity, equity and inclusion
(D.E.I.) 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’s 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’s
private.
So here’s an
alternative: Let’s everyone bring only — or at least primarily — the worky
parts. You remember those fragments: the part that angsted over every résumé
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’s that
old-fashioned thing we used to call “being professional.” Heck, it’s the you
you were for your entire corporate history, until the prevailing H.R. 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 work force. Nobody is asking a line
worker or customer service representative to add more personal vulnerability to
the enterprise. For most gainfully employed people, it’s not work’s job to
provide self-fulfillment or self-actualization. It’s to put food on the table.
After all, the office
isn’t 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’re more likely to get rewarded for it. One friend and
former manager of Boomer vintage told me she credited her own success to
religiously bringing her best self to work — and making sure
the crabbiest, most critical part of her personality stayed home. Why deprive
people of the ability to complain about work to their husband or roommate the
moment they walk through the door? That’s where it generally belongs, despite
the current misguided effort.
Nor is it fair to ask
the workplace to deal with all your hopes, dreams and problems. “A lot of staff
that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a
movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you’re
sick, OK. It’s all the things,” an executive director for an advocacy
organization recently told The Intercept. “Can
you get your love and healing at home, please?”
Look,
it’s understandable that things have gotten blurred. During the pandemic, many
of us inadvertently shared a lot more of ourselves than we might have otherwise
— partners yammering in the background, the occasional toddler, that weird
wallpaper in the kitchen. Why are all your plants dead?
But
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’s not about
being fake or hiding who you are. It’s just about keeping some things to
yourself.
“I do think it’s OK
to talk about what you’re going to do on the weekend or more generically,” a
33-year-old business analyst named Emily told The Times in a recent focus group on millennials in the
workplace. “But if there’s something personal going on, or a problem that my
family is having or something, health reasons or health concerns, I don’t talk
about any of that.”
Let this be a
reprieve for workers as they re-up their subway pass and pack leftovers
lunches. It’s tiring being all-you, all the time, with all people. People are
exhausted! And they’re 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.