I’ve always taken issue with the idea of “bringing your whole self to work”. It’s a pretty meaningless statement that is normally espoused by the kind of sugar addicted character who will also bounce into a room and start a sentence with, “I know this is probably TMO, but..”

The first reason I dislike it is the base logic, or more the lack of it. There are many things that people do in their lives that would be highly inappropriate to share with most other people, never mind in the workplace. The second reason I dislike it is that it takes the kind of “radical candour” approach that many feel uncomfortable and suggests that if you don’t comply, then somehow you’re repressed or restricted rather than making a perfectly reasonable choice to keep things to yourself. If I don’t want to bring my whole self to work, then that should be entirely my choice and totally acceptable to others.

But over the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on some of the debates that we’ve seen about organisational behaviour and the stances taken on social issues and I’m starting to see a much more problematic issue with this approach. Some organisations are increasingly moving away from employment policies and are straying into social policy, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

Our job should be to create safe and inclusive workplaces, where people can come and perform their work without fear or intimidation and go home at the end of the day to their private lives. We should be creating environments that aim to reduce and remove discrimination, we should make sure that our workplaces are legally compliant and we should foster respect and understanding. But I wonder if making bold stances on our positions on social issues serves us, our employees and society well.

As we increasingly see “culture wars” break out on a whole range of topics, is the workplace somewhere that should provide a safe space away from them? A place where active positions intentionally aren’t taken, but that acceptance of all is a requirement. The alternative seems to me to be that we either risk alienating employees through stances that they don’t agree with but feel unable to challenge, or we engineer our organisations so that they only accept people with certain social views and beliefs.

Ultimately this means working alongside people who might have completely different views and beliefs to us, that will hold opinions that we do not agree with and will challenge us and who will maybe do things in their lives that we find difficult to accept. But we recognise that at work we don’t bring these aspects with us, that they our part of our private lives and we respect the right of everyone to have a private life, which is entirely separate to how we behave at work. In a funny way, that could actually be more inclusive.