From transsexuals to secret poets, there’s more to your employees than meets the eye. Why can’t you let them be themselves at work?
“Work supported me when I decided to become a woman…how many other people are living a lie?”
There was a time in her twenties, admits Robin White, when the trauma of keeping a huge part of her life secret proved too much, and she seriously considered taking her own life. Six feet tall and a graduate manager on the railways, White, to her colleagues, was clearly a man. Inside, she felt like a woman.
“I can’t describe how awful it is to be physically one thing and feel you are something else,” she says. “I’m told a high proportion of unexplained male suicides are transgendered people. I understand that.”
For the next two decades, White continued to live a lie, but while working as a barrister in her forties she finally made the decision to transition from male to female.
“I was fortunate. I was in secure employment in a vocation that would be very accepting,” she says. “I know someone who is transitioning as a car mechanic and whose best mates read The Sun. That’s a much more difficult workplace to transition in.”
You don’t have to be conflicted about your gender identity to feel you can’t be yourself at work. From staff with HIV or other serious medical conditions to those who have to leave entrepreneurial aspects of their personality at the office door, employees may fear derision, opposition or a stalled career if they reveal themselves fully. Every business claims to make its staff feel comfortable, but how many are unwittingly stifling productivity by promoting a monoculture?
At its most extreme, this means some members of ethnic minorities may feel their entire identity is subsumed by a corporate hegemony. According to the Center for Talent Innovation in the US, more than 35 per cent of African-American and Hispanic people, as well as 45 per cent of Asians, say they “need to compromise their authenticity” to conform to their company’s standards of demeanour. In the UK, a Race for Opportunity (RfO) report revealed that 90 per cent of black and minority ethnic (BAME) women believe they need to leave their culture behind to progress in the workplace.
RfO national campaign director Sandra Kerr cites an example of a Muslim woman who found her workmates’ attitude changed when she starting wearing a hijab after taking part in the ritual pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj. “Before, she looked like them but the dynamic had changed. She didn’t seem to fit because of how she looked,” she says.
Could similar biases affect the 14 per cent of the UK workforce who were born overseas, particularly immigrants from newer EU members such as Poland and Lithuania? Experts have identified a tendency among employers to assume Poles, however well-qualified at home, are more suited to relatively menial tasks. University of Essex research found that male immigrants from central and eastern Europe, as well as a number of other areas, are more likely to be over-qualified compared to UK-born workers.
Magdalena Aydin, an HR adviser at G4S, can identify with the problem. When she came to the UK after graduating, she found her masters – which back home qualified her to teach English language and literature – wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.
“I didn’t realise I would have to start from scratch,” she says. “I had to take any job I could find, and ended up working in retail on the shop floor.” She was lucky: her employers saw her potential and she progressed to management before moving into the HR department. Another People Management reader recounts a fully qualified Polish scientist working in the UK as a chambermaid.
Hiding your true identity at work always comes at a cost. A study from three US universities names the price as decreased job satisfaction and increased churn. “People make decisions every day about whether it is safe to be themselves at work, and there are real consequences to these decisions,” says Eden King, co-author of Bringing Social Identity to Work.
But there are also traits that could benefit the organisation which are undoubtedly lost if we don’t know who staff really are. Management guru Gary Hamel cites the example of an administrator who is also a prolifically creative blogger in their spare time – wouldn’t they be more gainfully employed helping with corporate communications? Kerr points to the benefits employers can reap when they tap into the connections BAME staff have in their local communities or recognise that staff from ethnic minorities may be very helpful in breaking into emerging markets.
Ian Buckingham, founder of the Bring Yourself 2 Work consultancy, believes that encouraging employees to bring their true selves to work – be it social identity or a facet of their personality such as a desire to volunteer – falls squarely under HR’s remit. “It needs to become a core philosophy and to be ingrained in all people processes,” he says. “It should be at the core of the ‘employer brand’ and must be role-modelled by senior leaders and line managers.”
Lianne Corriette, global employer brand director at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), agrees. In 2006, the company launched its “Room to be Yourself” promise – a commitment to value and respect individuality.
“Room to be Yourself creates an environment where you can bring passion and personality to work, and we make sure the proposition shines through in HR processes,” she says. “Today, people have less of a ‘home personality’ and a separate ‘work personality’. If people feel valued for who they are, they will pass that on in the way they treat their colleagues and our guests.”
Examples include allotments, where staff who love gardening can bring their passion to work and use the results in the hotel kitchen. Corriette herself was nominated by IHG to be a torch-bearer for the London Olympics because of her charity work.
University of Greenwich research shows that while being yourself with a partner or friends is likely to make you instantly happier, the same benefits are not seen immediately from being authentic at work. But Graham Wright, a former executive at IBM, argues that in “this brave new world if you are not authentic you will be found out anyway”, adding: “People who are being themselves perform much better because they aren’t on edge, wondering which persona they should deploy.”
Even our inner fears should be brought out into the open, says Wright, who founded the company’s “Fearless” programme, an “online learning environment” which enables staff to fulfil their true potential by not putting things off, being prepared to act when they are not fully ready and – crucially – bringing their whole self to work.
“The philosophy of this programme is that you already have all the capability you need – you are just not acting on it. We have people who write poetry in their spare time and when they come to work they write boring bullet points,” he says. “One of the first realisations you have when you go through the programme is that ‘It is not just me!’ It encourages people to be themselves and acknowledge that, like colleagues, they have strengths and weaknesses.”
Flexible working is intrinsically linked to the notion of being yourself: if your working practices don’t recognise and nurture external interests and responsibilities, the result can be an unseemly trade-off. Accountancy giant EY’s “New Ways of Working” allows staff to flex the traditional working day to accommodate all their needs. “We forget how big our outside life is,” says Fleur Bothwick, director of diversity, who says if staff can’t be authentic “it stands to reason they won’t be so engaged”.
Thanks to flexible working, Bothwick led a parent group to secure free-school funding to open a secondary school for children with autism, and says: “There were times when it was at the top of my important list. I needed to be in a place where I could be flexible.”
Authenticity isn’t straightforward. Anyone with an alternative lifestyle might easily offend a colleague’s religious sensibilities – the sort of moral muddle any HR professional dreads. And freedom to be yourself is never likely to extend to extreme political views that cause offence to colleagues.
That doesn’t mean organisations should give up on more accepting workplaces, says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University. “We are supposed to be living in enlightened times but we aren’t really,” he says. “There will always be comments in the workplace and if you are hiding what you are, it could affect your relationships. When you are allowed to be who you are, people may still have prejudices but they will be discouraged from talking about them.”
Even private information, like relationship difficulties, may need to come out into the open, given the impact it could have on performance, says Cooper: “If it affects your ability to do your job, I don’t think you should hide it. You really should be able to share. The culture of the work environment needs to recognise you are a human being.”
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"I’m transgender"
Robin White, barrister at Old Square Chambers, London:
“Don’t break the news during the office party”
“I thought very seriously about transitioning in my 20s but I wasn’t convinced I would make a transition I was happy with. I hadn’t spent many years then living in the role society wanted me to adopt so I tried to live with the tensions – but it got to the point where I’d had enough.
“In late 2010 the process started with counselling and hormone therapy, but transition takes place over a period of time and to some extent you are in limbo over that period, which can make it difficult to manage in the workplace. You have to go through the real-life test and live in the new role [before reassignment surgery in November 2012].
“The first thing I did was go and see my joint head of chambers, Jane McNeill QC. I’d said there was something I’d like to talk to her about but it took about three weeks to find a time when our diaries overlapped. Of all the things she might have said, she said ‘I’m so relieved’. She had been through the possibility that I might be going to tell her I was terminally ill.
“Chambers have been immensely supportive. I couldn’t have a nicer group of work colleagues. They worked very hard to manage the process in a way that they and I were comfortable with. I’ve had the best possible experience. When things were announced, one lady member of chambers emailed to welcome me to the sisterhood.
“Gender reassignment is a protected characteristic, but if you want to be respected and you want help and support you don’t go to your manager in an open environment – you can’t tell someone in the middle of the Christmas party.
“I had a couple of cases that were ongoing during the period of transition. When I told the judge in one case, he looked like I’d leapt across the bench and kicked him between the eyes he was so surprised. But at least we’d given him the chance to be surprised in private.
“My work is very people-based. I spend a lot of time trying to get to the truth and I enjoy my courtroom law. Emotional intelligence is very important to me but several people who have worked with me have said on some sort of emotional level there were no-go areas with me. When you are pretending to be what you’re not, you raise a barrier between your real self and the world.
“There are people who find it easier to deal with me now, but I hope I have always done a good job. When I am in court I am there to present the affairs of my client and I don’t want any unusual feature of me to get in the way.”
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"I’m dyslexic"
John Levell, executive director, public sector advisory at EY:
“I’ve had to re-learn how to approach work”
“I discovered I was dyslexic at 42, having recognised the difficulties my dyslexic children faced at school. In my own school days, undiagnosed dyslexia damaged my educational outcomes, but I still ended up as CEO of a small IT consultancy. I couldn’t have achieved that without the creativity and lateral thinking dyslexia brings many people.
“I finally got a degree and joined one of the big consultancies 10 years later. With hindsight, putting me in a large, corporate environment was always going to be ‘interesting’ – and it was. There were great outcomes for clients, but since then I’ve ‘re-learned’ how to approach work, building on my ‘coping strategies’: PowerPoint presentations with few words, manic task list-making.
“At EY, I didn’t initially mention dyslexia to colleagues, but an awareness event convinced me to go public. Levels of understanding are low, so you have to make practical judgments about when to tell. I’m lucky to have reached a level of seniority where it feels OK to bring my dyslexia to work, and to work with the EY Dyslexia Network to support the many dyslexics in the firm.”
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"I’m HIV-positive"
Female HR adviser in a public-sector organisation:
“I just don’t feel I can tell people”
“I was diagnosed 15 years ago – I contracted HIV from my [then] husband. I was working overseas and I knew the diagnosis wouldn’t be received well so I chose not to say anything.
“I still haven’t mentioned my status at work now I’m in the UK. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable. We are a big department and sometimes you notice people have [general] prejudices so I wouldn’t expect them to respect it. Some people wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing a telephone with me or eating cakes I brought into the office.
“Being HIV-positive doesn’t define me but it is an important side of my life. I wish I could talk freely about it. I have a couple of close friends at work but I haven’t mentioned it to them. I think one would accept it but the other is rigid in her views and she would distance herself from me. HIV has never affected my capacity to work or learn, and I strongly believe managing this condition has helped to build a ‘never give up’ attitude. If there comes a time when I can contribute to people’s awareness by declaring my status, I will do.”
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