No Half Measures: Bring Your Whole Self to Work

By Janelle Callahan, Principal Consultant, Institute for Public Sector Employee Engagement, CPS HR Consulting

There are many different definitions and measures of employee engagement, and in fact, there are far too many conflicting perspectives out there, which can make it difficult to decide what to do. For this reason, we at CPS HR’s Institute for Public Sector Employee Engagement offer a practical solution to measure engagement. One of the six questions in our measure of employee engagement is, “I feel comfortable being myself at work.” This question is designed to measure the connection between the employee and the organization, and this item hones in on inclusion, e.g.,do you feel like you belong here? Do you feel accepted and appreciated for who you are?

This question comes from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) 2016 Merit Principles Survey. MSPB’s policy and evaluation team publish practical and insightful studies of employee engagement. MSPB is a small federal agency with about 200 employees, and its mission is to uphold federal merit systems principles, including adjudicating employee appeals of personnel actions, and complaints under laws like the Whistleblower Protection Act.

Google also uses a variation of this question in its own cultural assessments. They compare responses on this question by demographic (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, cultural backgrounds). In a re:Work guide, they note: “The Google team is working to understand how unconscious bias affects people’s beliefs, experiences and attitudes at work, and promote a climate of inclusion and a sense of fairness… Comparing responses to questions like – ‘I feel comfortable being myself at work, even when I am different from others,’ and, ‘Google is a place where all types of Googlers (e.g., all genders, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds) can succeed to their full abilities’ - allow analysts to assess those feelings of inclusion.”

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is well-known for promoting this principle of feeling comfortable at work: “A lot of people [act] different on the weekends versus the office. It's like they leave a big part of themselves at home. We encourage our employees to be themselves. We want them to be the same person at home and the office” (Entrepreneur).

There are some awkward things with this ideal, however. One person’s comfort may be another person’s discomfort. During a training session, I heard one manager, imagining her employee’s negative response to this question, jokingly remark: “She could be comfortable and still wear her shoes around the office.” This example of someone who takes their shoes off at work is a little silly, but it highlights how there are all kinds of situations to navigate at work having to do with individuals trying to be themselves.

According to results from our national study, about 80 percent of government and private sector employees say they feel comfortable being themselves at work. State government employees reported slightly lower levels of agreement – 77 percent, while local government employees registered slightly higher rates – 83 percent.

Join us for a webinar in which we will further discuss this question and measuring engagement.