Work culture creep
10Gordon Seidoh Worley
4CrimsonChin
6SarahNibs
1CrimsonChin
3Mazianni
2SarahNibs
6Tobias H
1CrimsonChin
5Dagon
4Samuel Hapák
1CrimsonChin
1Samuel Hapák
1nomagicpill
1Samuel Hapák
1CrimsonChin
1Samuel Hapák
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Are you familiar with the idea of masks and mask work? Most of what I know comes from Johnstone's Impro (here's a decent online review/summary), but the basic idea in theater comes from folk religion, where people wear masks and go into trances to temporarily become someone else. Traditionally humans used mask trances to embody what they believed were gods and spirits. Now people use mask trances to play characters on the stage.
What does this have to do with anything? Although the mask trance is an extreme form, there's a sense in which we can wear masks to become different people in different situations. Most people do this a little bit, e.g. behave a bit differently with different people, and some people do it a medium amount, e.g. code switching, but you can learn to do it a lot.
This gives you the option to put up stronger boundaries between the person you are at work and home (and in other situations). Even just knowing about masks can help make it clearer how you can put down the mask you wear at work, say, when you get home, maybe by having a little ritual where you "take off your mask". For example, think of Mr. Rodgers changing into his sweater when he "came home" and changing out of it when he "left home".
It's not exactly perfect, but it's a technique that may help you deal with the transition between different contexts where you need to present a different persona to the world.
Wow thank you. This is amazing insight that fits perfectly into my model. I will find a way to implement this for a bit and see how it feels.
One of the most valuable things I have done, for myself, is to let as much of my personal life bleed into my work behaviors as I can, as you define them.
This could have backfired spectacularly. In some work cultures probably it would always backfire.
In mine, I:
- make 98%+ of my writing viewable to everyone at the company, and we're remote, so almost everything of importance makes it into writing
- never "try" to display an air of competency - trying to display an air of competency is one of the core behaviors that caused terrible feedback loops and major depression early in my career, now I take joy every time I can display to everyone where I am not competent. In some sense this is signaling extreme competency because who would do that unless they were very comfortable in their position. See also "backfire". But also this can lead to much more rapid professional competency growth, because other people love to teach you things.
- tell jokes, embarrass myself a little, feel okay being silly or weird, literally treat it as a red flag about a person if I feel I need to walk on eggshells around them and bring it up with my manager even if I can't point to exactly why
- push for exploratory "something seems interesting here but IDK what and no I can't tell you its value" work in general, and in specific do some of it myself whenever the mood strikes and nothing urgent is otherwise going on
1Wow the opposite of what I was thinking. You are steps ahead of me if you have actually implemented changes. What is your experience with the change so far? If you don't mind, has it effected the measurables I wanted to investigate?
-am I able to move from work to non work tasks easily -do I feel a need to talk about work
- hopefully I should feel some sense of being more myself although this is vague
My life is similar to @GuySrinivasan's description of his. I'm on the autism spectrum, and I found that faking it (masking) negatively impacted my relationships.
Interestingly I found that taking steps to prevent overimitation (by which I mean, presenting myself not as an expert, but as someone who is always looking for corrections whenever I make a mistake) makes me people much more willing to truly learn from me, and simultaneously, much more willing to challenge me for understanding when what I say doesn't make a lot of sense to them... this serves the duel role of giving them an opportunity correct my mistakes (a benefit to me) and giving them an opportunity to call out when my presentation style does not work for them (another benefit to me.)
My approach has the added benefit of giving people permission to correct me socially, not just professionally, which makes my eccentricities seemingly more tolerable to the average coworker. (i.e., People seem to be more willing to tolerate my odd behaviors when they know that they can talk to me about it, if it really bothers them.)
My relationships with people outside of work depends entirely on what's going on with that relationship. I tend to avoid complaining about social issues at work to anyone except my wife, and few people can really appreciate the nuance of the job that I do unless they're in the same job, so I don't feel much compulsion to talk about my work. (If someone asks what I do, I generalize that I help people figure out how to do their jobs better. Although my work space is not in self-help or coaching, but actually in a technical space... but that's largely irrelevant beyond it being a label for my industry.)
I also tend to have narrow range of interests, which influences the range of topics for non-work relationships.
I do my best to minimize switches from work to non-work "modes". When I am done with work for the day, I usually give myself a half hour to chill before switching to non-work.
I do not feel a need to talk about work. But some work anecdotes are still good for personal life, of course, and I do not censor them.
I actually feel... more intensely not like myself now, at work, than I used to, in some sense, because back in the major depression days I tried to feel as little as possible. Now I notice a lot more often when I'm doing things that "aren't me". So like previously I was closer to Gordon's mask description (in fact I described my fake-self as my "shell") and there was no active tension between shell-actions and identity, just passive drain from using the shell. Whereas now it feels a lot more like "I am always me, but compromise that in certain ways at work".
I think the overall point you're making is intriguing, and I could see how it might alter my home behaviour if I considered it more deeply. But I also strongly disagree with the following:
Just about every work behavior is an example of bad home behavior
There is a bunch of "work behavior" that has been very useful – in the right measure – for my personal life:
- Task Management – This cut down on the time I spend on "life admin".
- Scheduling – Reaching out with "let's find an evening to play tennis" helps me increase the number of fulfilling activities I do with friends.
- Prioritization – Day-to-day life can obscure what's really important. Thinking about what I really value and want to achieve can make my life more meaningful.
- Creating Spreadsheets & Documents – Apart from the obvious use case in personal finance, Spreadsheets are also very valuable to me for evaluating crucial life decisions ("Where should we move?"). I use documents for private events I'm organising (e.g. a weekend trip to the mountains with friends).
Maybe some of them are too obvious and common. But they are things that my grandmother wouldn't have done – and I suspect that they are mostly derived from work culture.
Agree with you that there is some overlapping tasks. If I were more precise I would say,
"I believe 85% of work behavior is an example of bad home behavior, but depending on your job and other factors this has a wide confidence interval"
Even if the tasks have the same name, they can look very different. For example: scheduling is something we do at work and at home but at work I use outlook and teams to schedule while at home I use text. Entire etiquette of what to do if someone proposes an alternative time, who is expected to come, what you are expected to say if you can't come. I would argue that while it's called "scheduling" in both home and work environments there are more differences than similarities between the two behaviors. This is going to wildly depend on your job, I kind of skipped over the assumption that a lot of less wrong users work in an office-like environment.
I think we learn how to use tools at work like spreadsheets, to-do lists, etc that grandma would never use but we are using them to accomplish different goals than at work. I am semi-confident in this even though I haven't thought through all the tasks because I believe that the incentive structure underpinning the whole work environment leads to different behaviors. It would be an odd coincidence if despite different incentives work and home behaviors were exactly the same.
This is important and useful exploration. I think it's important to distinguish between roles, techniques, and identity. You're the same person (to the extent that the phrase makes any sense for constantly-changing beings) at work and at home. You're performing different functions, for different people who are also in different roles.
Note that this would be true even without work - you interact differently with your children than with your wife, and very differently with the plumber or your landlord. There's really very little risk for most people mixing these up.
I caution about being TOO binary in work vs home attitudes. Being goal-driven and performing unfun tasks in order to achieve those goals is part of every life, and there are lots of household goals that benefit from this mindset. Likewise, some amount of whimsy and creativity is a valuable part of many jobs.
1At work people are paid to talk to me. If they like me or not, they kind of need to with with me. In real life, relationships don't work that way. No one it's getting paid to help me and every interaction with me is a choice.
Actually, I see it much the opposite way. You can choose to not to talk with people at work, eg by quitting.
It’s much more difficult to stop talking to your kids, wife. Sure, you can get divorce, but that’s kind of extreme compared to quitting the job :-)
Good point! I guess I am biased as I do not have the gift of lots of work mobility right now, I can't change teams or jobs without lots of effort.
I guess I was thinking more friends and non-household relatives, but I didn't say that.
Even though I butchered the analogy; I think there is still a different dynamic at play, where my kids and wife don't owe me anything like someone who is being paid to help me.
I don't know how it looks like at your work, so hard to judge. But, I would say that your wife and kids do owe you, and you do owe them. It's not like you can stop carrying for your wife and kids tomorrow without breaching a strong (though informal) social contract.
And well, your colleagues are paid to do their job, but normally I would expect them to have a lots of freedom in how they do the job and how much of their attention will they spend helping other people? So, it's still kind of a choice if they do? But, again, I don't know your workplace, so maybe its more strict and formal?
Any report back? I'm planning to implement some of these for a month or two and see how they work.
Here is my list (which riffs off yours):
- Work uniform every day. These will be clothes I rarely outside of work so as to minimize the amount of work-personal blend. I'll also make them more professional to fit in with the "I'm at work and being a professional" vibe.
- Work phone in safe when I get home. I have a work-only phone because I'm on-call 24/7. I plan to put this in my phone safe when I get home and only check it at certain times to avoid checking it out of habit or fear.
- No work in apartment. Separating physical locations is important. If I have to work from home, then I'll go to my apartment complex's study area.
- No talking about work outside of work.
- I've found an identity angle to this, where you become the type of person who doesn't talk about work outside of work because that type of person doesn't have a fulfilling personal life and thus resorts to work talk. I talk to a handful of people about work outside of work and it doesn't make me feel good, which means the identity angle is working as it should. I will probably try to reinforce this.
What’s wrong about closed doors meetings at home?
Sometimes your kid needs to have a feel of privacy for a hard conversation and it really helps to seclude from the group and talk behind close doors.
Sometimes you have disagreements with your wife about how to deal with behavior of your kids, again, the conversation you better leave for the time kids are asleep or not around.
Agreed important at times to have closed door meetings but don't you agree work is maybe 90% closed door meetings and home should be maybe 5% closed door meetings?
My kiddos are both under 2yo so closing a door on them isn't really a possibility, I was imagining into the future which is bad. Sounds like you have more experience here so I could be wrong.
I would say that for good workplaces the difference is smaller. Surely, especially in managerial position, you'll have to help lots of people with their psychological issues, insecurities, troubles, etc... I would say that about 30% of my meetings are closed door, other happen in common spaces. In most of the cases when the meeting is closed door, it's to provide the other person with privacy and feeling of security.
My oldest one is 6 and sometimes he really needs some privacy and thus we do sometimes close door behind us. It's not as often as at work because a) I have less kids than employees, b) I suspect older he gets more private talks will he want to have.
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