New year, more you: 2021 is the year to completely be yourself at work.

• Author: Foreman, Kelsie

FOR DECADES, creating a fake "work persona" to keep aspects of oneself hidden while on the clock was the norm, says Maggie Kruse, vice president of people and strategy with Nav. "When I grew up in organizations, you never showed any kind of emotion. You left all of your struggles at the office door [when you walked in in the morning] and you looked at these people in positions above you and their lives seemed perfect," she says. "There's so much guilt and shame about not being perfect at work."

Though creating a second, emotionless work persona might seem like a great way to increase productivity, it actually does quite the opposite, according to a study from Frontiers in Psychology. In fact, when employees are forced to create fake personas, they're less happy, less productive, and less likely to spend extended periods of time working with any one company.

Fortunately, the culture behind fake personas in the workplace is changing as younger generations enter the workforce, and working from home becomes the norm. Over the past year, it has become evident in online job postings and company mission statements that companies actually want you to bring 100 percent of yourself to work.

"We ask our employees to bring their full selves to work because this allows us to find solutions to difficult problems," says Jason Meredith, vice president of operations with Northrop Grumman, a company that explicitly asks employees to bring their full selves to work in their job postings. "Our goal is to really have these employees come in and provide these wildly different perspectives."

Despite efforts put forth in job postings and mission statements, the study says as many as 61 percent of employees are still uncomfortable showing their "full selves" in a work environment--even if that is starting to change now that bosses can be seen in their homes, meetings take place in sweatshirts, and kids can be found lurking in the background of conference calls.

TOSS THE HEADSHOT

Like many professionals using Linkedln, Lauren Griffiths, an HR consultant with Cisco in Raleigh, North Carolina, had a staged corporate headshot as her profile photo, complete with a power suit and stoic expression. But since Griffiths was now at home--tasked with raising her children while working full time during COVID-19--she didn't feel like her headshot was representative enough of the person who was now appearing on her webcam for Zoom meetings.

So she ditched the staged corporate...