When Our Selves Collide
I’m sure many of you would agree that you have a work self and a non-work self. For those of you with many years in the workplace under your belt, would you also agree that it has recently become harder to keep those "selves" separate? Do you feel like there is pressure to share more of your private self with your colleagues at work? Or maybe you’re from a younger generation and the concept of separate selves seems unnatural and you’re asking yourself right now why would I be anyone other than me all the time?
Our definition of self has been seriously challenged in the past years with the rise of social media, the entrance of the Millennials and Generation Z in the workforce, and the rising trend towards authentic leadership.
What it Means for HR & People Management
Recently, Erin Reid, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Boston University School of Management, and Harvard Business School’s Lakshmi Ramarajan, published a paper in the Academy of Management Review titled Shattering the Myth of Separate Worlds: Negotiating Non-Work Identities at Work. Their research departs from a decades-old myth of separate worlds around the personal and professional, as well as from the limits of past management research on identity, which has primarily focused on at-work identity. Based on an extensive review of research on management, gender and work, work-family, and sociology, Reid and Ramarajan develop a new theory of how people manage their non-work identities in the workplace, arguing that exploring the former has become increasingly important to understanding productivity, employee engagement and well-being, and power dynamics in the latter.
What It Means for You (the employee)
So if our non-work identities are important to business, does this mean the demise of the at-work and away-from-work selves? Is it ok to knock down that wall and be a 100% uncensored version of ourselves at work? Well, it depends...There are various factors that can affect how easy or difficult it is to merge our two selves. The strongest is company culture. Some companies have cultures more inclusive to being different than others. In companies with an inclusive culture you’ll usually notice that everyone looks different, dresses differently, has varying tastes, interests, free-time activities, etc. This diversity is usually celebrated openly and thus there is little pressure to hide one’s non-work identity.
Another factor is an individual’s personality. Some people are just shyer and prefer not to open up to their work colleagues without building relationships with them first. If you have a colleague that doesn’t share the details of her weekend, don’t be offended or take it personally, she might just need more time to create a trusting relationship with you and open up.
Others seem to share every last dirty detail of their lives, sometimes even to the point of oversharing. If you have a colleague guilty of this, just politely ask her to keep extensive conversations about her personal life to non-work environments. If you are interested in getting to know her better then you can have these kinds of conversations over lunch or a drink afterwards.
There are also factors that come more from the external environment and societal pressures. Social media has provided us all with our own public soapbox. Like never before every Jane, Dick or Harry is able to broadcast his or her ideas and life in as much detail as he/she chooses too. And there are people out there that are sharing a lot of details that would make many of us blush! While we all choose what and how much information we share on social media, lack of familiarity (or not thinking through the consequences) often leads people to inadvertently share details about their private lives with people they’d rather not.
We also find ourselves faced with friend or connection requests from coworkers and other professional contacts that are more open with their use of certain more personal social networks. Since each person uses social media platforms for different reasons, it’s important to remember that you, and only you, decide what you’re comfortable with. Don’t be afraid of being open about it. A simple "I'm not a very advanced user of [social network] and so I prefer to just keep my connections on there to my family and close friends" more than suffices if you feel uncomfortable accepting a friend request from a professional colleague. As an alternative, why not offer to connect with them on a more professionally-focused site like Linkedin or Xing.
The Generation Gap
This may be a situation that comes up often with Millennial or Generation Z colleagues or subordinates. This is a generation that has practically grown up with social media during much of their formative adolescent and early adult years (and depending on when they were born, maybe even late childhood). They have spent years relating to others and building relationships in the context of social media. It can seem odd to many Millennials that you wouldn’t want to connect online as they may use chat and social media more than email to stay in touch. Again, deciding which networks you are willing to use for these kind of relationships will help you to build productive working relationships with a generation that is less likely to write out an email and more likely to assume you saw the info in their status updates.
This post is adapted from an original post on my previous blog "Beyond Borders" on Womenalia.com.
