Yahoo Lifestyle Personality hires: How much of yourself should you bring to work?
The plot of Severance, the Apple TV+ series with its long-anticipated second season due to hit screens next year, is unusual – which is what makes it so compelling. If you haven’t manage to catch it, the show hangs on the premise that a biotechnology company has found a way to spatially separate the memories of their employees. If an employee is in the office, they are ‘innies’, unable to remember their life on the outside world; when they’re outside of work, they have no memory of their day jobs and are dubbed ‘outies’. Because of this, ‘innies’ and ‘outies’ can have different and distinct personalities depending on where they are and what they have experienced. Being able to physically separate the memories of employees in and out of workplace scenarios may be the stuff of science fiction, but the reality of the matter may not be too far off – how much of our true selves do we (or should we) really bring to the office?
There’s always a degree of masking when entering a professional environment, explains the psychiatric nurse and human behavioural expert Jessen James. “There are many professions out there where it is completely mandatory for you to act, behave, and dress in a professional manner,” he tells me. “One of the main reasons for this is because we want to be seen and taken seriously in the role that we are in. This is especially true if you are in a senior position that you've taken a lot of time to build up to.
“For many of us, we will do whatever we can to maintain or enhance our status. So many of us hide elements of our personality to avoid a dent in the status that we have created.”
But having chameleonic characteristics in our office spaces runs deeper than just wanting to bag a promotion. It’s partly evolutionary, stemming from our innate primal instinct to be part of a tribe. “Humans have fundamental needs for control, affection and inclusion,” explains Lorraine Mills, principle consultant for Right Management. “We’re finely tuned to monitor the environment for threats and to notice when we may not fit in or be accepted. We learn quite quickly which behaviours will lead to positive experiences, such as friendship, fun, involvement, achievement, purpose and control.
“We develop an identity linked to our work. As these identities are cemented, we learn to hide parts of ourselves that we fear will be seen as unacceptable to our peers.”
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, Mills adds, as this sort of professional persona can help us cope, particularly in high-stress professions, such as law or medicine, or jobs that demand a lot of emotional labour. “Emotions are contagious so if we react without managing ourselves, we’re likely to trigger other people and it becomes a negative chain reaction,” she says. “We work best when we feel safe and we monitor the environment every few seconds to check this out. If we don’t feel safe we will narrow our focus and prepare for a problem.”
However, there's a fine balance between having a professional demeanour at work and effectively being an entirely different person in and out the office.
“Editing or monitoring your persona can become counterproductive if you start to overanalyse and mute yourself,” James explains. “It can make you come across as fake, make you seem as if you're trying too hard, and can ultimately be detrimental to you.”
It can be a particular difficult balance to strike, especially in a customer-facing role. “The high levels of emotional labour required to deal with irate customers and to demonstrate that your company is responding appropriately, can take a very high toll,” says Mills. “Managing surface expressions is difficult but managing your actual feelings to help you carry out the work (for example in the work of emergency responders) requires even greater demands on an individual’s resources.
“The drain on a person's energy is a clear downside. Longer term, this can lead to greater problems such as burnout.”
The winds of change are in the air, however, with Covid having disrupted numerous elements of our work life. It’s distinctly more difficult to be aloof once your colleagues have seen you in your pyjamas eating biscuits on Zoom during lockdown, or being interrupted mid-meeting by a barking chihuahua.
TikTok has also suggested the concept of the ‘personality hire’ – a member of the team who landed the role purely based on the sort of person they are, as opposed to any skill or experience. James suggests this isn’t particularly novel, quoting the old adage “hire attitude, train skill”.
“Personality hires can bring a ‘positive vibe’ to the workplace,” Mills agrees. “There is no doubt that that satisfaction at work and potentially productivity too, can be improved by a positive workplace ‘vibe,’” Mills agrees.
“But recruiting someone who has a fun personality and no other capabilities to offer is not going to achieve a positive vibe for long. Trust is built through competence and consistency. If their role is just to be the court jester, this is likely to wear very thin with colleagues who are doing the heavy lifting to get the work done.”
Is there a happy medium we can bring to the workplace between joker and droid? Lindsay Kohler, a behavioural scientist at the employee engagement consultancy Scarlettabbott, argues that balance is about boundaries.
“We should be bringing the majority of our true selves to work,” she says. “Of course, there are always going to be elements of ourselves we perhaps don’t want to reveal to our colleagues and work isn’t the best place to air dirty laundry, but suppressing ourselves is as it sounds: stifling, restraining, preventative – all of which are negative traits that will grind us and our productivity down, and could lead to stress, anxiety or depression.
“The most important factor is having a workplace environment where we feel safe, comfortable and able to show our true colours – whether it be one or two shades or the whole spectrum.
“That means employers must recognise and celebrate people’s individual experiences and backgrounds to cultivate a culture where all colleagues feel they truly belong.”
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