The Power of People-First: How Bringing Your ‘Self’ to Work Can Boost Workplace Culture

People-first is a term that’s been thrown around for decades. It means many things. For some organizations it’s a ‘buzzwordy’ addition to the website to attract better talent. For others it has been a foundational philosophy impacting all areas of business operations. For most, it’s somewhere in between.

However, over the past few years the global conversation has been shifting from employee engagement to human thriving. This is a great positive step towards the people-first workplace of the future.

Along with this shift has come greater clarity on the challenges that prevent teams from engaging and truly thriving. Two of these challenges are disconnection and low-value collaboration. We are not connecting on a deep human level with our colleagues, and the time we spend working together does not produce the value it should. And according to the most recent Gallup Global Workplace report, this disengagement is costing the global economy trillions.

Many products, tools, methodologies and frameworks seek to solve these challenges in different ways. And they usually fall in two main categories: tool/product focused and experience focused.

Often, a tool or process-focused approach is where these solutions start. “If only we had more visibility on tasks and better work breakdowns this would be going better.” But optimizing workflows without considering the uniqueness of the people within them can lead to burnout and further disengagement.

The other group focuses first on changing the experience. “If only we were having more fun, we could forget how hard this is.” However, moments of fun punctuating an unchanged landscape of disconnection won’t make a lasting difference.

Both of these approaches are valid, but given their drawbacks, we (Crewjoy) sought out another way to approach the disconnection and low-value issues. And we came to this conclusion: solving these challenges starts with putting humans at the center of our work.

But what does that mean — to put humans at the center of our work? How does human-centricity become more than a buzzword, more than a shiny statement on the virtual values list?

That’s a big question that can be answered in many different ways. Here’s one way that we propose.

Teams put people first by creating space for humans to share who they are with their team.

This is where a whole bunch more questions may be bubbling up for you. Humans are incredibly complex — what is relevant to share in a work context? What if it’s not safe to share with my team? What if I’m a private person by nature? What if I don’t really know who I am? How does this help anyway?

Each of these questions could represent a lifetime of study. So here we’ll focus on one thing: a simple model for bringing our “selves” to work. At Crewjoy we choose to focus on four elements: story, personality, EQ, and preferences.

Story

Story is powerful. Not only in its ability to entertain and engage, but also in its capacity to inspire empathy, build connections, and catalyze positive change. Some of us enjoy sharing our stories while others wish that everyone would stay a bit quieter about what’s going on in their lives.

There are ways available to us already to tell our story. Last century’s kickstart of social media fundamentally changed the nature of storytelling and provided a swath of new platforms on which to do so. But what does this mean at work? What is the story that you should tell and how do you do it?

Well, for starters, you get to decide. When telling your story there is no wrong answer. For someone it may look like making connections to your broader life story: family activities over the weekend, hobbies, or pets — I guarantee many of you work on teams where the ‘pets’ channel is the most active by far.

For another it’s about the career journey: experiences of the past, struggles of the present, and hopes for the future. While for someone else it’s about sharing real time statuses: “here’s what I’m experiencing and feeling right now”. For still others, it’s vitally important for those around them to understand the story of how systemic biases have played a part in their journey.

The common thread is this: when telling your story you are communicating an irrefutable part of who you are, where you’ve been, and what’s important to you.

And if this sounds fluffy or like a distraction from work priorities, don’t miss that the research is quite clear: owning and telling our story with our colleagues has a huge impact on our sense of agency and belonging, two of the biggest contributors to engagement in the workplace.

Storytelling is a powerful way to build empathy and connection with your teammates. It actually rewires the brains of both speaker and listener, and builds the type of deeper human connection that has been eroding in our global work culture.

Personality

Most of us are familiar with one (or ten) personality tests. Many have a deep history of research and psychology behind them. However, many have also been debunked in recent years, with often justified claims of embedded discrimination and unscientific foundations.

Without going down that rabbit hole, I am sure you may have experienced the process of answering a number of questions and being presented with a surprisingly accurate description of who you are and what your personality is like.

Being understood is a primary building block of psychological safety. And it feels good. When somebody else ‘sees you’, understands who you are and where we are coming from, it lays a foundation for deeper connection.

This is part of why it feels great when you read your personality test results and what you see resembles yourself. “Finally, somebody gets me!” We appreciate that so much that we value it even from a decidedly unhuman printout of our test results.

Our personality is a core part of who we are, it’s something that doesn’t change quickly, is critically important for our teammates to have a better understanding of, and yet is still something that we make massive mistakes about.

So many unhealthy interactions from my working past stemmed from poor assumptions I made about others. These were often related to assumed negative motivations behind actions rather than personality traits.

For example, I spent three years believing that a certain colleague was persistently angry at me, rather than realizing the simple fact of their default state of facial expression. In another instance I couldn’t believe it when another colleague continued to seemingly claim ownership of my work. But over time, I came to realize that instead of attempts to nefariously steal credit, these were misguided steps to assuage a deep personal need for validation — a validation that I was neglecting to provide! This was a part of their personality that I did not rightly understand.

These are just a few examples of the myriad of personality factors that, once better understood, could radically change what your teamwork looks like. By creating space to bring more of our real human personalities to work, we can create deeper empathy and understanding, and along with them the opportunity for much richer collaboration.

EQ

Emotional Intelligence is rightfully claiming a growing place of awareness in the workplace. Unlike personality, which is more of a description of our inherent characteristics, many frameworks suggest that one’s Emotional Quotient (EQ) is a skill that can grow and change more quickly. It is defined as our ability to recognize and manage emotions in ourselves and others, and use this understanding to better respond to situations.

Whereas in the past the role of emotions was downplayed, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that ignoring the impact of emotional intelligence in the workplace is like trying to juggle with one hand tied behind your back.

There are a number of different models for defining Emotional Intelligence, but most include concepts like empathy, self-awareness, impulse control, and assertiveness. It’s probably clear that these are useful skills to have in the workplace, but what does this mean in the context of sharing more of ourselves at work?

Well, if the idea of knowing a person’s more static personality traits as a way to better understand and work with them resonated, how important would it be to know about your teammates growing and shifting ability to respond to the emotional content of each situation?

In fact, if you rely too heavily on assessing a colleague’s behavior based on their personality traits, you might be guilty of attribution bias: the tendency to explain others’ behavior through the lens of their character, rather than situational factors.

Your EQ, and your understanding of colleagues’ current EQ, can help you to better distinguish between situational factors and inherent factors when working closely alongside teammates. Thus EQ is both a thing to grow in and utilize, as well a thing to share and communicate about. It’s both the cutlery and the food at your work picnic.

Preferences

I’ll get a little vulnerable here and share a bit about myself. I’m highly introverted. I don’t like being in the spotlight. I’m actually quite poor at expressing my emotions to others, often failing to recognize the moments where that would best support others’ needs. I’m also very private. And my story is full of behind-the-scenes moments and roles. These are a number of factors from my story, my personality, and my EQ that might lead you to believe that I would prefer asynchronous communications, and more work-focused conversations. But here’s the thing: I greatly prefer to connect with people in-person, and dig into deeply personal and emotional factors.

Sometimes we just prefer what we prefer.

While there are certainly many linkages between the other areas discussed above and our preferences (and much research done on preference formation), we simply can’t easily predict what preferences those around us will have. And thus it’s critical to share with our teams what these preferences are.

We have preferences about different things, often failing to realize just how many things. And here is the challenge: we also often don’t recognize how many of these preferences, while being very important to us, are not accommodated well by our teammates and work processes.

How to connect. When to meet. Preferred levels of visibility. Favorite methods for feedback. Channels of communication. Tools for getting work done. Desired balance of asynchronous work. These and a hundred other things, if better understood by ourselves and our colleagues, would make our work lives far more enjoyable and far more productive. But instead we get stuck inside workflows that assume we’re all the same, or worse, want us all to be the same.

What if your teammates, leaders, and direct reports all had a deeper understanding of what makes you tick? How to work with you in a way that better meets all of these preferences? Sharing your preferences with others directly can radically improve your sense of connection to them and raise the value of your collaboration.

Summary

Each of the areas above could improve your sense of connection to your team, and equip you for much more valuable collaboration. But together they could radically transform what work looks like and the value that is created by deeply thriving teams. A holistic approach is needed.

These four areas are not some magic formula. They overlap in many ways, and they also don’t represent the total picture of who you are. Humans are much more than even these things.

For example, hard skills are conspicuously absent from this model. And when your skills are not matched well to your work, disconnection and low value collaboration are inevitable outcomes. But these are more deeply explored challenges, with many successful historical approaches and many new startups tackling the future of skills taxonomies. At Crewjoy we’re more focused on the other parts of our “selves”.

Joining a team represents an unspoken contract of sorts. A commitment to connection and collaboration that produces value. So why withhold the very things that will help you, your teammates, and your organization achieve this vision? Well, as it turns out there are a number of reasons why this is hard, sometimes risky, and can backfire.

How to do this in safe ways, with empathy, and without judgment will be the focus for a future article .

But for now my encouragement is this: consider how you could bring more of yourself to work and how you could create the space for your team to do the same.