The 4 workplace freedoms we desire
Today’s workplaces face significant challenges in supporting employee engagement, well-being, and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), especially as momentum for DEI efforts wanes.
Based on two decades of research in organizational psychology, I suggest focusing on the 4 workplace freedoms employees desire:
- The freedom to be: bringing our full, authentic selves to work.
- The freedom to become: improving ourselves and our situations.
- The freedom to fade: periodically stepping back from the spotlight and performance pressure.
- The freedom to fail: taking risks, experimenting, learning from them, and receiving coaching for future opportunities.
When these workplace freedoms are present, employees are more authentic, actualized, agentic, and agile, benefiting their alignment with work tasks, organizational commitment, mental and physical health, learning, and growth, as well as positively impacting their coworkers and the organization’s mission and culture.
However, leaders often struggle to balance these freedoms with company expectations, and employees feel tension between expressing their workplace freedoms and meeting performance standards.
Additionally, these freedoms are often unequally distributed based on gender, race, sexuality, and other factors, undermining equity. More powerful groups typically enjoy greater freedom in self-expression, career advancement, job crafting, and taking on high-risk assignments with support for recovery and growth.
How can we cultivate these 4 workplace freedoms so all employees thrive? Here are insights from my research, graduate business teaching, organizational consulting, and executive coaching.
01. The freedom to be
Authenticity at work isn’t simply about choosing to be oneself. Research shows it’s often complex, involving calculated expressions, strategic disclosures, and sometimes presenting facades. Many of us hide aspects we feel aren’t valued, making it harder to feel truly free at work.
Suppressing differences means missing opportunities to use our strengths fully. Authenticity fosters coherence and well-being, benefiting organizations by sharing diverse perspectives genuinely.
Being authentic means expressing oneself thoughtfully, not disregarding others. Leaders can support this by creating inclusive environments that recognize diverse expressions and identities. Embracing these differences can enrich workplace connections and insights.
Striving for authenticity means showing your true self to build meaningful connections with diverse perspectives.
02. The freedom to become
The term ‘best self’ often leads people to think they must be the absolute best to fulfill their potential, driving a competitive urge to overwork and aim for the top.
True workplace freedom and flourishing, however, come not from being the best but from self-actualizing into our personal best. Another misconception suggests we must fix all flaws to achieve this.
To cultivate this mindset, we should shift focus from weaknesses our brains obsess over and ask: How can we develop in our strengths to become our best selves?
Normalization involves discussing strengths and successes as personal rituals and shared practices. Labeling individuals as high-potential fosters positive expectations and a self-fulfilling prophecy of success.
Yet, those struggling with identifying strengths often lack feedback, mentorship, and sponsorship. Organizations must equally emphasize strengths and weaknesses across all levels for individuals to reach leadership potential.
Advancement isn’t a zero-sum game. The freedom to become benefits everyone committed to achieving their true potential.
03. Freedom to fade
The workplace freedom to fade resonates with those facing burnout, juggling multiple roles as workers and caregivers, feeling overwhelmed and lacking support in both. Managers struggle as their teams seek more say in setting boundaries and building flexibility into work routines, challenging due to diverse preferences.
Those in dominant groups navigate workplace dynamics and schedules more easily, while marginalized groups feel compelled to be ever-present due to performance pressures and stereotypes. This cycle exhausts those with limited control over their roles and others’ responsibilities.
Marginalized individuals must exceed standard expectations, contradicting the idea of fading. They believe they can’t take breaks for fear of failure without recovery opportunities.
To promote this workplace freedom, organizations can start by structuring flexibility more equitably. For example, viewing parental leave not just as physical recovery post-childbirth but also as bonding time broadens access, benefiting adoptive parents, foster parents, and fathers. Paternity leave by men reduces stigma around breaks, normalizing caregiving for all.
Without deliberate efforts to restore balance and energy, burnout may lead to feared outcomes of unproductive failure, impeding both personal and organizational recovery.
04. Freedom to fail
Failure in workplaces is daunting—mistakes can be costly, leading to lost customers, missed career opportunities, and even organizational decline. However, essential for organizational improvement and survival, experimentation inherently involves errors, unintended outcomes, and learning from failure. Despite fears and resistance toward failure, true workplace freedom comes from overcoming this fear and embracing productive failure.
Yet, like other freedoms, the freedom to fail is unequally accessible. Racial and gender disparities in performance evaluations show that errors are more frequently identified and penalized among lower-status groups.
For instance, in an experiment, attorneys evaluating a legal memo attributed more errors to the memo supposedly written by a Black author, despite it being identical to the one attributed to a white author.
Recent findings from Textio also highlight widespread inequities, with women and people of color receiving lower-quality feedback reinforcing negative stereotypes, while their white male counterparts receive more constructive guidance.
When discussing the 4 workplace freedoms, members of dominant groups often find the freedom to fade particularly thought-provoking. For them, stepping back can challenge the myth of meritocracy, as it may seem like accepting mediocrity.
Conversely, marginalized groups, like Black professionals, struggle with the freedom to fail due to feared repercussions. Yet, without embracing failure, there can be no growth or flourishing. Courage, insight, and strategic risk-taking are crucial for navigating this freedom.
Freedom at work encompasses a range of needs and aspirations related to expressing our humanity in professional settings. While some may perpetuate the myth of individual pursuit of freedom, the 4 pathways show that true workplace freedom requires community support and commitment.
By broadening our perspectives to embrace diversity, organizations can reshape practices and policies to foster flourishing through workplace freedom. As attributed to poets and activists Emma Lazarus and Maya Angelou, “None of us are free until all of us are free.”
