Beyond the ‘Whole Self’

Is it time to rethink how we all contract for work?

Beyond the ‘Whole Self’

Is it time to rethink how we all contract for work?

The topic of employee activism has recently surfaced when several staff were fired for protesting their companies’ products being used in a military context. This gave rise to an article published in the Wall Street Journal wherein a consultant suggests organisations might consider returning to the 1950s in response to employee activism. Here’s an extract from this article:

“No longer are bosses as likely to encourage employees to bring their ‘whole selves’ to the office. Instead, many are taking a ‘1950s approach,’ said Jenny Dearborn, chief people strategy officer at management consulting firm BTS and an author on HR issues. ‘Work is work, outside life is outside life.’ And for those who don’t get the message, she said, the answer is: ‘Shut it down.’”

The Boss Has Had It with All the Office Activists - Chip Cutter and Lindsay Ellis Wall Street Journal August 28, 2025

Organisations have long encouraged employees to bring their ‘whole selves’ to work, not necessarily due to altruism, but because this can drive an organisational productivity bonus, especially from salaried workers. People are so committed to the organisation they work additional, unpaid hours.

Clearly, the world of work is changing and this recent focus on ethics is a symptom of a deeper shift that includes issues around pay disparity, work from home, workplace environment and unpaid overtime to mention just a few.

How Organisations Have Used the ‘Whole Self’

Liking, trust, and personal bonds are part of our discretionary, relational humanity. Organisations have happily utilised this as a resource, turning relationships into currency, to get work done, which can also benefit employees, to a point.

When organisations bring in pool tables, gyms, interest groups, and wellness programs, these initiatives are framed as care, but they are also mechanisms to leverage relational instincts that benefit the organisation’s bottom line. They evoke the law of reciprocity and other psychological influences.

In addition, organisations utilise people development via a Psychological Differentiating Lens (1), with programs aimed at the individual’s makeup, often framed as ‘improving’ employees so the whole self is a ‘better self’. Again, this can serve both the organisation and the individual, to a point.

Employee improvement, offered as development (non-technical training), usually has a variety of aims. One of the key ones, particularly in the leadership space, can be to increase vulnerability.

Vulnerable employees are seen as more open to feedback, more willing to admit mistakes, more likely to be fully present and engaged, and more deeply connected to others and the organisation’s goals (2).

Relationships as Organisational Currency

Employees are asked to increase interpersonal cooperation and invest in emotional ‘bank accounts’ with colleagues. Engagement, autonomy, and discretionary effort are closely tied to relational work.

Showing your humanity makes you more effective, whether influencing or leading others. Organisations have struggled to find the right measure. Many resort to a ‘we are a family’ analogy to describe how they operate.

But families can break up, and the analogy stalls when people are discarded, often with greater emotional injury than they might have suffered had they not bought into the ‘family’ idea (3).

If the family analogy isn’t used, organisations often lean on high-minded values that are almost impossible to live up to.

A recent example is JLL, which for the past 18 years claimed to be one of the most ethical companies on the planet, yet had to fire its CEO, launch a major investigation, and suggest ‘culture change’ following allegations of unethical behaviour by some of its most senior executives. (4)

Cracks in the Psychological Approach

Well before this call in the Wall St Journal to ‘return to the 1950s’, the psychological approach which paired with the whole self-mandate was showing cracks.

Some of the biggest and most financially successful organisations have spent millions, if not billions on programs to upgrade their employees’ psychology, often talked about as a ‘mindset change’. Separate from the ethical issues this raises, organisations continue to encounter many of the same dysfunctions.

This surfaces most sharply when poor performance has to be managed, or when economic or market forces shift, requiring downsizing of the workforce.

Engagement and Measurement

Many of these measures track how much of ‘the self’ the individual brings to work, how committed, involved, and satisfied they feel.

Organisations have become heavily invested in measuring engagement. Leaders are often evaluated and rewarded based on these scores. I have even heard of leaders suggesting employees provide positive scores to maintain their bonuses.

The Contradiction: Emotions In, Ethics Out

Paradoxically, some organisations expect employees to build relationships, collaborate, and invest themselves fully while drawing a line when ethical concerns are raised. As demonstrated when employees are fired for activism. These organisations get caught between their desire for the relational and emotional component of the human, but not the ethical one, or only ethics that align with the organisation’s stance.

A further conflict arises when diversity and inclusion are espoused as values, but in practice, diversity is only embraced within a narrow spectrum.

The result is a lack of congruence between what organisations say and what they do. For younger cohorts armed with sharper BS detectors this gap could prove fatal.

Further Distinctions

This is a pendulum swinging. If organisations don’t want to again polarise and suffer the consequences of extremes, they need to look for a different perspective.

Not a return to the old territory of embattled industrial relations, or the fantasy of the 1950s à la Mad Men, invoking the cynicism where workers just show up, do their jobs, and go home without any investment.

· Work can provide meaning beyond a pay cheque; engagement can benefit both parties.

· Workplaces should not be designed to create false intimacy and co-dependency that extracts discretionary effort; this is not sustainable and leads to toxic workplaces. Where everyone suffers.

· At its core, work is a contract: an exchange of labour for money. Relationships should be outputs of shared endeavours, not inputs curated for exploitation.

Towards a Better Work Contract

While we can acknowledge our humanity, it becomes negative when organisations exploit it for their own ends, only to abandon people when it suits.

That is not helpful, healthy, or sustainable for either party.

The contract needs to be fair and equitable. We need a new way of seeing work relations. Not a return to the 1950s, and one that sees the end to borderline ethical ‘psychological tinkering’.

When we shift the focus from the psychological to a role basis (5) it affords us the opportunity to see the work contract differently.

This perspective offers a more sustainable approach, one that is fairer to both parties, and less likely to produce the double binds and unintended consequences that damage people and organisations alike.

The above mentioned article was published in the influential Wall Street Journal (6) and it seems to offer organisations the option to return to the 1950s, as if that’s even a serious possibility.

Change will not come about using the same thinking that created the current situation. Instead, rethinking the work contract through a new perspective, which requires a different way of seeing the world. A new perspective means being clear-eyed about what is failing in the current system and reimagining the contract as an adult-to-adult arrangement, with fully discussed undertakings and boundaries that are agreed and fit for purpose.

This article is written by Peta Bayman - AI edited not generated.

See article The Role of Role to more fully connect with a role-based approach, and Being and Seeing the Systems for a deeper dive on organisational systems, on this Substack: Liveworklead.com.au

References

1. Borwick, Irving. Organizational Role Analysis: managing strategic change in business settings. Coaching in Depth Edited by Susan Long, John Newton, Burkard Sievers. London : Routledge, 2006.

2. Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, Ramesh Srinivasan. How leaders can tap the power of vulnerability. McKinsey Quarterly. November 4, 2024.

3. Luna, Joshua A. The Toxic Effects of Branding your workplace a ‘family”. 2021, Vols. October 27,. Reprint H06JYR.

4. Bashan, Yoni. JLL CEO sacked amid cultural reckoning. [Newspaper] s.l. : The Australian , 2025. Margin Call 26 August 2025 .

5. Bayman, Peta. Role of Role. Substack. [Online] 2024. https://substack.com/home/post/p-170954849?source=queue.

6. Cutter, Chip, and Ellis, Lindsay. The boss has had it with the office activists. s.l. : The Wall St Journal, 2025. August 28.