Employees often receive conflicting advice about sharing personal information in the workplace. They are told to “bring your whole self to work” but also to keep it professional and not share too much personal information with colleagues.
In this research, Ashley Hardin explores how work relationships change when employees develop a more holistic understanding of their colleague’s life outside of work. In other words, does seeing our colleagues as more ‘human’ improve the quality of our working relationship?
The study shows that seeing others as more human (humanization), is not the result of one act of self-disclosure. Instead, humanization is a result of the total amount of personal knowledge gained over the course of the colleague relationship (via self-disclosure, workplace gossip, workspace personalization, incidental learning, and social media posts). Professional knowledge was also predictive of humanization, even when accounting for personal knowledge. This highlights that knowing about a colleague’s work identity, work history, performance, and skills also leads to a more holistic view of that colleague, resulting in viewing them as more human
The results show that personal knowledge can increase humanization of and responsiveness towards others, even when accounting for perceived similarity, trust, and relationship length. Therefore having an extensive amount of personal knowledge about a colleague and a high-quality relationship with that colleague result in positive effects on the relationship.
The findings also show that humanization—a recognition of uniqueness, depth, and emotion—is less reliant on exactly what is known about someone and more reliant on the accumulated amount of personal knowledge.
Practical implications
The findings in this paper suggest that employees should feel comfortable allowing colleagues a deeper window into their life outside of work. There is a positive effect of allowing a broader range of personal information to be known by colleagues, and the effect is not dampened by interpretations of that information.
With the understanding that personal knowledge can improve relationships, managers and organizations may seek to increase the level of information flow, rather than overfocusing on the content of each disclosure. Specifically, organizations may adopt practices that signal safety in sharing more personal information such as Google’s “One Simple Thing” practice. In this practice, individuals in teams share a personal goal for each fiscal quarter. Shared goals could include a manager’s desire to have breakfast with their children three mornings a week or an analyst’s desire to make it to a music lesson a few nights a week. Not only can adopting these practices directly encourage the sharing of personal information through vocalizing the goal itself but it can also indirectly signal an acceptance of discussing and knowing about teammates’ personal lives.
You can access the original article here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/orsc.2021.15606
