Emotions at the workplace

I remember those early days when I started ‘working’.. it was voluntary work for a cultural organization primarily comprising of college and post graduate students monitored by professors. The one sermon that our Professors kept preaching to us to ensure that this organization actually worked … was “Be professional in whatever you do. Don’t bring emotions into the workplace”
A sermon that I am sure many of us have lived our lives with… grown and prospered as ‘Professional’ people.
Lately, in my role as Diversity Education Lead in one of the Leading IT organizations of the world, I started exploring the concepts of “Frame of Reference” the “Insider and Outsider” feelings. With this came the realization of how hollow and empty the sermon sounded: “Be professional in whatever you do. Don’t bring emotions into the workplace”

As an HR professional, I cannot but agree that organizations need to hire people simply on the basis of competence, capability and experience. That, we need to try and neutralize all biases that can crop in if we give way to emotions at the point of hiring.

However, once we have hired a human being into an organization, can we ask her / him to everyday swipe her / his badge at the gate and come in only with his / her competence, capability and experience and leave the rest of him / her outside? Sounds silly right?
We hire a complete human being into an organization. One human being, who is complete with competence, capability, experience and emotions. We expect several such complete human beings to stay and work together in a confined space (at times very large confined spaces) for several hours and yet we preach – “Don’t bring emotions into the workplace”

On the other hand, most of the workplace conflicts arise out of different emotions having being expressed at the wrong place. Stands true not only for negative emotions, but also for positive emotions. Several harassment cases come up when one employee ends up expressing positive emotions inappropriately.

Emotions are largely generated from the limbic brain which each and every human being has. It is that part of the brain which makes relationships possible even in animals. So how can we mandate that emotions be banned from the workplace!!

Therefore to maintain a healthy workplace I think each and every manager and employee in all organizations first need to acknowledge that there is no escape from emotions at the workplace.
This realization and acceptance will not only help managers look at managing people and therefore work more smoothly and humanely, but will also help employees deal with work related stress and strain so much better.

Therefore, we need to understand this whole thing called “emotions” a little better from an organizational perspective.
I am an HR practioner by profession. Started my career as a HR Generalist. As many HR generalists would know in their heart, HR bashing is often a fashionable thing to do in organizations and often people end up doing that even without thinking.
Initially it would enrage me greatly to see an insensitive bashing coming my way through nasty emails. I would immediately write back an equally nasty one. Often there would be a whole volley of such mail exchanges before they would get escalated and come back to me in the form of a reprimand from my manager.
Then my manager told me to be professional in whatever you do. "Don’t bring emotions into the workplace”. I asked .. How? He told me: “When you are angry and want to respond to the nasty emails, write back a note with all the feelings you want but don’t send it. Save it in your draft and go have a cup of coffee. Come back, reopen the draft item, re read the mail and then send it” I started practicing that. Very soon I realized that the mails I finally ended up sending were completely different from the originally drafted emails. The result was number of escalations went down.
However in a few months’ time, I realized that there is another voice speaking inside me whenever I send those mails out, and that voice kept telling me... “Ishita... you are a backbone less creature” I kept feeling that “My God!! That bugger got way by saying all those nasty things to me (HR) and I said nothing in return!!”
So that did not work.
Till I came across a book called Non Violent Communication – a language of life, by Marshal B Rosenberg. This is how I can summarize my learning from that.

Pardon me, for using the following analogy, but, this is just the way I see it.
Emotions are like a grenade. One can actually do a few things with a grenade:
- Pull the plug and throw the grenade at somebody / anybody who happens to be around. The result: Devastation for the person on whom the grenade land. Similarly, when at work some people get too “emotional” and get angry over things, they use bad words, abusive language and in extreme cases end up hitting other people!!! Result: just the same – devastation for the person on whom these emotions were unleashed. Therefore obviously not a right way / a productive way of using emotions.
- Pull the plug and hold the grenade close to yourself. The result: Devastation for yourself. In our current 'achievement' oriented society and corporate culture, this is one practice which is highly prevalent and often recommended. However the results are also visible in the form of high number of corporate citizens with diabetes, hyper acidity, depression, insomnia, sexual malfunction, suicidal tendencies… and the list continues.

There has to be a third way:
- Instead of expressing the emotions / bottling up the emotions we need to practice “Discussing” about emotions.

This is a new concept for people like me who have been in this corporate “no-feeling” culture for so long. We have forgotten the vocabulary to use if we want to “discuss” about our feeling - a big difference from “Demonstrating” the feeling.
I am sure you are very familiar with phrases like “I am impressed”, “I am misunderstood”, and “I am ignored”.
How many times do you hear words like “I am happy” “I am sad” “I am annoyed”?
The basic difference is, in our quest to appear “feeling less” we look for and often find someone / something to blame for feeling a certain way. The first sets of phrases are not really feelings they are, only an excuse to feel a certain way. The moment we use these words we end up making some enemies / we end up hurting some more people.
On the contrary if we can get comfortable using the true feeling words like “ happy” “sad” “annoyed” “upset” “concerned”, we are taking ownership of our own feelings. In this way, we are helping others to see the impact of their insensitivity on us and our productivity. By owning our emotions, we legitimize it and make it more acceptable to others. This lowers workplace conflict, emotional stress and improves the overall organizational climate and environment.
As Bertrand Russell said “ We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs”.
The corporate jungle is our environment of existence and as we need purer air to live, we also need a better organizational environment to exist. Therefore whatever we can do or learn to help live a little better in the corporate world the happier a generation we will be.