She made my life hell and picked at everything I did, all day, every day,” says New Zealander Ali Hanan, describing her experience with an English boss when she worked in publishing.
Ali Hanan is one of many people who’ve felt they had to adapt their behaviour in order to fit in
“She mimicked my strong kiwi accent, loathed my dress sense and berated me in public saying I was stupid when I hadn’t heard of the word ‘sybarite’,” explains Hanan, who now runs the diversity and inclusion consultancy, Creative Equals.
“I always had the feeling of not being enough. I was low paid and I never felt I had a voice.”
When Hanan left the role and moved into her next job, she adopted an English accent, wore new “high street” clothes and invested a full week’s wages in a pair of Dr Martens cherry-red brogues – just to fit in.
This kind of experience isn’t a rarity. Within many organisations, employees at all levels are forced to “code-switch” – hiding their identity or faking a new persona to conform with the dominant work culture.
To understand code-switching, we must first define authenticity
But what is our true authentic self? Is it a constant set of behaviours that are consistent with everyone we interact with?
Organisational psychology expert Anna Sutton, from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, says authenticity is far more nuanced than that.
She says it’s about “both knowing and being ourselves, and involves a dynamic process of personal growth and development rather than trying to maintain an unchanging personality profile.”
Writing in The Psychologist magazine in a piece titled “Awesome work”, she explains: “Imagine that our manager starts out in a new job by behaving in what she sees as a professional manner, being fairly reserved and formal with her staff.
“But she notices that this approach does not seem to work with this team and is concerned that it is alienating her staff. So, she adapts her approach to be more friendly and personable, building relationships with her team.
“It is not that she is behaving in-authentically at either point but that she is engaged in goal-directed behaviour: she is trying to get the best out of her staff and able to adapt her behaviour to meet this goal. She is being true to herself by being an effective, high-performing manager.”
However, most people code-switch to survive
Most employees aren’t using code-switching as a nifty business hack but as a necessity to keep their jobs – acting as a way to debunk the negative and degrading stereotypes they’re subjected to.
London School of Economics’ behavioural science researchers Odessa Hamilton and Teresa Almeida say this is because organisations are “often filled with inherent bias towards a narrow selection of characteristics, that are perceived as professional, and that limits the number of people who can be truly authentic at work, resulting in code-switching, assimilation, and self-segregation.”
For example, research shows that Black women in the UK are the least likely demographic to be in the top third of earners, and often feel the pressure to change their hairstyle or the way they speak to appeal to their organisation’s culture in financial, professional and tech industries.
And.... switch. This 2012 clip of President Barack Obama adjusting his behaviour when he moves from an assistant basketball coach to NBA player Kevin Durant has become one of the most famous examples of code-switching.
One Black woman who is at the top of the business world is Sandra Wallace CBE, who grew up in a working-class Jamaican family in Birmingham and is the current joint managing director at global law firm DLA Piper.
She says code-switching around colleagues can be caused by a fear that you will be treated worse for being different to everyone else. As she puts it: “Do I tell them I went to Wolverhampton University? Do I tell them my mother was a cleaner and my father was a painter and decorator? Are they going to see me differently? Are they going to treat me differently?”
These doubts can follow an employee throughout their entire career, causing mental and emotional distress.
It’s an effort to feel like you’re putting on an act and you’re not bringing your full self to work. It’s tiring.
Sandra Wallace CBE, partner and joint managing director of law firm DLA Piper, and former commissioner and co-chair of the Social Mobility Commission
And it’s costing companies millions
Organisations that fail to build and maintain an inclusive environment where everyone feels valued, fall behind.
Companies that get inclusion right, by comparison, are twice as likely to meet or exceed financial targets, six times more likely to be innovative, three times more likely to be high performing, and eight times more likely to achieve stronger business results.
That’s partly because employees feel better about themselves, their team and their work. Research published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology shows employees in highly inclusive companies are more likely to report high wellbeing, trust their colleagues and be engaged in their job. Also, 74 per cent of millennials – who will make up three-quarters of the global workforce by 2025 – believe their organisation is more innovative when it has a culture of inclusion.
Five ways to counter code-switching
- Take tangible, visible steps to embed inclusivity in your organisation
- Encourage leaders to be empathetic and good listeners
- Encourage managers and leaders to acknowledge if they don’t understand issues
- Make sure that inclusivity is a shared endeavour
- Make sure everyone has an equal share of voice
How to create an inclusive work culture where no one needs to code-switch
Unlike diversity, inclusion is hard to create and measure. Without inclusion, you frequently see companies hire plenty of diverse talent, but struggling to keep them for longer than a year because they are neither valued, welcomed, or respected for who they are. Although there is goodwill from many employers to get this right, Wallace says they need to do more to drive inclusion and take tangible steps to make sure it’s integral throughout the fabric of the organisation.
In addition to well-written policies and tough punishments for serious offenders, Wallace says employers must have an open mind and be empathetic to the experiences of others. “You need strong values as an organisation. What marks you out as who you are? If your values are all about meeting client metrics or hitting targets, then you’re not putting people at the heart of the business. What are the values that you articulate as a business?” she asked.
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Authentic leaders are needed “who are prepared to listen, admit when they don’t understand things well and are hungry and curious to understand who their people are and what makes them tick,” she says.
Ali Hanan and Sandra Wallace agree that organisations must give people the space to speak
Hanan believes that inclusion should be a responsibility for everyone within an organisation.
“It’s everyone’s job to know what a ‘microaggression’ is and to be able to call people in or out when they see these happening,” she says.
“One practice we always recommend is ‘equal share of voice’ and giving people space to speak right from their onboarding.
“This is as simple as going around the room, setting agendas beforehand so everyone is prepared for a meeting and afterwards providing a channel for those who need time to digest their thoughts and feedback as a means to do so.”
These steps take time and won’t be achieved by the flick of the switch, but with the backing of the whole organisation, it can yield a new code that supports everyone.