Creating a Culture of Authenticity: 34 Tips for Fostering a Welcoming Workplace

One practice, and it is not a values workshop: we pay people for what they actually did, even when they forget to ask for it.

We are a cleaning company in the San Francisco Bay Area with W-2 crews. Our people fill out timesheets and our vehicles have GPS. If someone leaves the travel time blank on their sheet, our rule is that we pay the full recorded drive time anyway. We do not quietly keep it. That happens more often than you would expect, and usually with the people most reluctant to look like they are padding hours.

That one rule did more for openness than anything else I have tried. Here is why. In a workplace where the employee earns an hourly wage and the owner controls the record, the whole self does not show up because of a poster in the break room. It shows up when the person concludes you are not looking for a way to shave them. Once someone believes that, they start telling you things: that they are struggling with a difficult client, that they need to leave early for a kid, that a job was badly underquoted and the crew has been quietly eating the difference.

The pattern is that trust on a frontline team gets built out of small financial decisions that go against the employer, made at moments when the employee is not watching and could not enforce it anyway. Culture initiatives that run top-down and cost nothing get read as marketing. A rule that costs you money on a Tuesday for no reason other than fairness is understood by everyone on the crew within a week.

My advice to other owners: find the place in your operation where you currently benefit from your employee’s error or modesty, and give it back. Then say nothing about it. They will notice.

My honest advice is that this starts with logistics before it starts with values. We run a team across Morocco, Dubai, and the US, with different religious calendars and different weekends, and no amount of stated culture matters if the actual schedule doesn’t accommodate who people are.

The practice that made the biggest difference was building Ramadan working hours into our standard calendar every year rather than treating it as a special accommodation someone has to request. Our Moroccan team shifts to shorter, earlier hours for the month. It’s on the shared calendar by default, so nobody has to explain themselves in a client call or ask permission. The first year I did this, one team member told me it was the first job where she didn’t feel like she had to choose between being visibly Muslim and being seen as fully committed to work.

What I’ve learned is that “bring your whole self to work” becomes a real practice, not a poster on the wall, the moment it shows up in the calendar instead of the mission statement. People don’t believe a value until it costs the company something or requires the company to change a default. Everything before that is just language.

My advice is simple: employees decide whether it is safe to be themselves by watching how leaders respond.

One effective practice is for leaders to model vulnerability openly. I regularly talk about the fact that every strength can also create a weakness. I share the areas where I am still growing, acknowledge mistakes, and say when someone else has an idea I had not considered.

That matters because leaders set the emotional tone of the workplace. If employees see that mistakes are met with curiosity and respect rather than embarrassment or blame, they are more likely to speak honestly, contribute ideas, and ask for help.

I never want someone on my team spending energy worrying about whether they said the wrong thing, trying to read my mood, or hiding part of themselves out of fear. I want them focused on doing great work, learning, and contributing fully.

Creating that environment does not mean lowering expectations. People should still work hard, take accountability, and deliver results. But they should also know that they will not be shamed for being imperfect or for approaching a problem differently.

A culture where people can bring their whole selves to work is built through daily behavior, not a statement on a wall. Leaders create it by showing self-awareness, admitting when they are wrong, responding respectfully, and making it clear that being human is not a liability.

I built my team around a principle we apply to our products. Nobody should have to sacrifice one part of themselves to satisfy another. That idea carries into how I run day-to-day operations.

One practice that has worked well is giving people ownership of cross-functional problems that sit outside their job title. When someone on my warehouse team flagged a packaging issue that was affecting customer reviews, I pulled that person into the conversation, gave them a seat at the table for the fix, and let them present the solution to the rest of the company. They brought context nobody else had because they touched every box that went out the door.

When my people see that their perspective shapes decisions, they share observations from their real life, their background, and their instincts. Find the person closest to the problem, hand them the mic, and make sure leadership acts on what they say.

With over three decades in social services and a Master’s in Counseling Psychology, I lead a team at LifeSTEPS serving more than 100,000 residents across California. Dealing daily with heavy challenges like homelessness and substance abuse recovery means our staff must feel psychologically safe enough to bring their empathetic, whole selves to the job.

One effective practice we utilize is establishing regular, structured “peer-led debriefing circles” where staff can openly share the emotional weight of their casework without professional judgment. In these spaces, personal vulnerability and lived experiences are treated as vital expertise rather than liabilities.

This practice builds deep trust within our team, which directly translates to our high-impact results, such as helping our staff achieve a 98.3% housing retention rate in 2020. To build a similar culture, create dedicated, non-evaluative spaces where your team can voice their real human experiences in the face of work challenges.

I’m not convinced that ‘bringing your whole self to work’ should literally be a goal. We don’t bring our whole selves anywhere. We behave differently with our children, our friends, and our colleagues, and some boundaries at work are healthy.

A more useful goal is to create a workplace where people don’t feel they have to hide or distort relevant parts of themselves in order to succeed.

One effective practice is to make constructive dissent an explicit part of important decisions. Before a decision is finalized, ask someone to challenge the prevailing view: What are we missing? What do you disagree with? What would make this a bad decision?

The important part is what happens next. If leaders become defensive, dismiss the challenge, or subtly penalize the person raising it, employees learn that openness is encouraged only when it is comfortable. If leaders engage seriously with dissent and occasionally change their decision because of it they create evidence that speaking honestly is safe.

That matters because culture isn’t created by just telling people that they can be themselves. It is created by the conditions people experience every day: what gets rewarded, what carries risk, and what leaders actually tolerate when stakes are high.

So I wouldn’t promise employees they can bring their ‘whole self’ to work. I would build a workplace where they don’t need to edit out the parts of themselves that help them contribute, challenge, question and do their best work.

In my field this comes down to something narrower than it sounds. People are only bringing their whole selves to work if they can say the unflattering thing about their own work without it costing them. Everything else in a culture conversation is downstream of that.

The one practice I would name is the senior person going first, out loud, by name. Not a general statement that mistakes are learning opportunities. The specific version: I was not sure about this, so I stopped and asked. Nobody below you admits uncertainty before somebody above them does. Once a leader has said it in front of the team, the cost of saying it drops for everyone in the room, and that shift happens in a single meeting rather than over a year of messaging.

We hold that in place with something ordinary. Every engagement carries a written list of what remains unresolved, and the person doing the work is the one who writes it. That makes “I do not know” a normal entry on a document rather than a personal admission in front of a manager. Institutionalizing the sentence matters more than encouraging it, because encouragement still requires courage and a form does not.

Two things I would warn against. First, comfort is not the same as informality. Firms reach for social atmosphere, events, casual dress, first names, and none of that makes a person comfortable saying something difficult. What creates comfort is predictability. People are not afraid of a manager’s standards, they are afraid of not being able to predict the response. Consistent reactions do more for candor than any amount of warmth.

Second, whole selves cannot quietly mean no standards, and pretending otherwise makes the whole thing sound insincere. The distinction I keep is between how a person works and what the work has to be. Wide latitude on the first, none at all on the second. Saying that plainly is what makes the latitude believable, because people can tell the difference between a boundary and a mood.

If you want to know where you actually stand, watch who speaks when the news is bad. If it is the same two people every time, that is your answer, and it will not be solved by an offsite.

Dr. Pellumb Kabashi, DBA, MBA, EA, CFE, CES, Founder and CEO, Tax Expert Today LLC, Naples, Florida

We don’t have separate transparency practices at Nika Finance because there are only three of us. Every conversation is by default transparent because there’s nowhere to hide information. That’s not a virtue. It’s a structural fact.

But here’s what that forced us to design: complete ownership transparency. Every one of us knows exactly what the other two are building, what’s broken, what shipped yesterday, and what user feedback came in overnight. We share revenue numbers, infrastructure costs, every user complaint, every technical debt decision. There’s no filter layer between the person who hears the problem and the person who can fix it.

When we closed our $2M angel round, I didn’t present a sanitized deck to the team. We all sat in the same calls with investors. They heard the same questions I did about our routing architecture, our non-custodial model, our timeline. When an investor asked why we route perpetuals through Hyperliquid instead of building in-house, the engineer who built that integration answered directly. No translation layer.

This creates a specific kind of safety. People bring their whole selves to work when they trust they’re operating with the same information as everyone else. The opposite of psychological safety isn’t conflict. It’s information asymmetry. When one person knows something another doesn’t, you get politics. You get people trying to read signals instead of just reading the actual data.

The practice is simple: if it affects the product or the business, everyone sees it at the same time. User reports go into a shared channel the moment they come in. Technical architecture decisions get discussed in real time, not after someone’s already built half of it. Financial runway conversations happen with all three of us in the room.

Most team dysfunction comes from people filling information gaps with assumptions. We don’t have information gaps because there’s no organizational distance to create them.

A powerful practice is giving people language for respectful self disclosure without making it feel dramatic. Short phrases such as I need a little more processing time, I am at capacity today, or I communicate better in writing can change the tone of a workplace. When leaders model these statements naturally, employees learn that honesty can be clear, calm, and professional.

I have learned that many people stay guarded because they think authenticity must be emotional or overly personal. It does not. Often, it begins with simple clarity about needs and preferences. Once that becomes normal, employees stop spending so much energy managing perception and start contributing with more confidence, steadiness, and trust.

A strong culture begins when we separate personal disclosure from psychological safety. People should never feel pushed to share private details just to feel included. They need to know they can speak honestly about workload, background, communication style, or personal limits without hurting their credibility. When we create that trust, people feel more comfortable sharing useful ideas and concerns.

One practice that helps is adding decision reviews to our management process. After staffing decisions, promotions, or new assignments, we ask if familiarity influenced the outcome more than ability. This helps us notice bias before it becomes a pattern. When fairness is clear through our actions, people feel safer sharing their judgment, experience, and different perspectives at work.

I make a conscious effort to get to know my employees personally, and I encourage my other leaders and managers to do the same. I ask about their interests and passions, and I extend the olive branch of talking about my own personal life (where it’s appropriate, of course) in the hopes that in doing so I encourage my employees to do the same. Then I make sure that I remember what my employees tell me about themselves, so that I can intentionally reach out and ask them about those things from time to time. All of this goes a long way toward creating a company culture rooted in getting to know and caring about one another as people, as individuals. That in turn helps encourage everyone to feel more comfortable bringing their whole selves to work, because they know their whole selves are who we all want to get to know.

We treat listening as a leadership discipline instead of a personality trait. Employees speak openly when they believe we will hear their views without dismissing them or rushing to solve every issue. Many leaders ask for honest feedback but respond with defensiveness or quick answers. That approach makes people hold back instead of sharing what they really think.

We create space for regular skip level conversations with no agenda other than listening. We ask what is helping, what is making work harder, and what people want leaders to understand better. We pay close attention to what we hear and look for practical ways to respond. When employees see their feedback lead to real action, trust grows stronger and people feel more confident sharing their ideas.

Over nearly thirty years of leading Netsurit, I’ve focused on a simple belief: put people first, customers second, and profits third. This mindset helped us win multiple Global Business Culture Awards for our healthy, supportive workplace.

Our most effective practice for encouraging authenticity is the “Dreams Program.” This program is designed specifically to help employees set and achieve their personal, life-long goals.

We provide structured coaching and connect groups to support our team’s personal aspirations, showing them we value who they are outside of their IT roles. When you invest in your employees’ personal dreams, they feel safe bringing their entire selves to work.

A workplace where people bring their whole selves is not built by telling everyone to be authentic. It is built by making it safe for people to work in the ways that actually let them perform.

One practical habit is to ask new team members how they do their best work before there is a problem. Do they think better async or live? Do they need time to process before making decisions? What drains their energy? What kind of feedback helps them improve? Those answers should shape how you manage them.

People open up when the environment proves it can handle the truth. Culture is not what you say in onboarding. It is what people learn they do not have to hide.

One practice that works is rewarding early speaking up, especially when the message is uncomfortable. In security, the cheapest risk to fix is the one raised early by someone who noticed something subtle. Healthy workplace culture follows the same pattern. Employees bring more of themselves to work when they see that raising a concern, naming a blind spot, or offering a different perspective leads to curiosity instead of penalty. Psychological safety becomes credible when it protects honesty before consensus forms.

I have found that leaders should publicly acknowledge people who surface tension early, even when the issue is incomplete or inconvenient. That recognition teaches the organization that truth is valued more than polish. It also improves execution, because teams solve problems sooner and build trust at the same time.

The most underrated practice is giving employees language for identity, values, and work style before conflict appears. In many companies, personal expression is encouraged only in theory, while operational conversations stay narrowly task based. I have seen stronger cultures when managers run structured onboarding sessions where people share how they prefer feedback, what environments help them do their best work, and what pressures tend to shut them down.

That creates a reference point teams can use later without awkwardness. Instead of guessing motives, colleagues understand patterns and respond more thoughtfully.

It is especially useful in fast moving organizations where cross functional friction can feel personal. Trust grows when self expression is documented early and treated as useful operating information.

The single practice that does the most work is specific, out-loud recognition. When a leader names exactly what someone did and why it mattered, in front of the team, it signals to everyone that being seen here is safe and normal. People bring more of themselves to a room where they have watched others get appreciated for real contributions, not just output. Keep it frequent and honest. A quick shout-out in a Monday meeting or a handwritten note does more for that comfort than a once-a-year award ever will.

One effective practice is to model and normalize authenticity so team members understand their whole selves are welcome. I made this point in a 2025 podcast interview, where I encouraged therapists to be fully themselves rather than trying to fit a single image. Practically, leaders should share their values and work styles, set clear boundaries, and invite staff to express their preferences and strengths. When hiring and evaluation focus on fit and quality instead of a narrow persona, people feel safer showing up as they are and the practice becomes more sustainable.

This is simple. Say “NO” to jerks in the workplace.

The fact is that despite hoping that Values & Culture slides in Orientation & Onboarding make the culture so. Despite Values & Culture posters being strategically placed throughout the office(s), your culture becomes whatever the worst behavior that’s tolerated allows it to be. That is when you see people shrink, go quiet, & start protecting themselves.

The reality of the culture with jerks at work (even the brilliant ones) is that people can’t feel comfortable letting their guard down. Most people want to do their best work, enjoy their colleagues & the community of work, and feel like they’re accomplishing something. When two or three (or more) bad apples create friction & culture-disruption – it doesn’t matter how much you “hope” people can work as their whole selves around the bad actors – they won’t. And they shouldn’t have to.

Eliminate the jerks at work, create conditions for everyone to thrive, and you’ll find better productivity, higher discretionary effort, less absenteeism, stronger engagement, higher ARR per FTE & people will feel better about bringing exactly the right amount of themselves into the workplace.

One of the most effective practices leaders can adopt is modelling calm, values-driven, purpose-focused responses to everyday challenges, friction, and setbacks. Over time, the way leaders show up when things get tough shapes the culture around them. Consistently responding with composure, accountability, and clarity builds trust and psychological safety. When managers lead in this way, team members feel more confident raising concerns early, sharing risks, and respectfully challenging ideas without fear of blame or judgment.

One proven approach I use with corporate clients to build psychologically safe, high-performing cultures is helping individuals cultivate greater present-moment awareness. For team members who may feel uncomfortable speaking up or bringing their whole selves to work, I encourage a simple yet powerful practice: before responding to something that triggers them, challenges their perspective, or creates discomfort, take a slow breath and count to twelve. This brief pause creates space between stimulus and response, helping people regulate emotions, access clearer thinking, and respond more constructively.

Combined with structured reflection practices, this approach enables leaders and teams to remain grounded, emotionally resilient, and consistent under pressure. Training managers to model these behaviours openly, while establishing clear expectations for respectful challenge and accountability, creates an environment where diverse perspectives can contribute more fully to innovation, better decision-making, and collective success.

Any entrepreneur looking to create an environment that allows employees to comfortably bring their whole selves to work, needs to prioritize the social wellbeing of employees.

Especially in a world where more employees are debating on how to stay most productive – working from home or from the office, it’s important to create an environment of cohesion and psychological safety that happily co-exists with the work ecosystem.

The way to do this (in my opinion) is to provide an environment where team members can interact without fear of negative consequences, for example, providing a small gaming table or facility. Research shows that collaborative gaming at work increases office productivity by up to 20%.

Probably because this helps build authentic social bonds (social cohesion) and trust, which significantly reduces workplace anxiety and fosters genuine interpersonal connection. This also helps to decouple team bonding from high-stakes work pressure. When employees feel that their every action is judged or that failure carries severe career consequences, they tend to hold back their authentic selves, withhold creative ideas, and conform strictly to perceived expectations.

I’ve been a licensed counselor in Pennsylvania since 1997, and in attachment-based and trauma work I’ve learned this: people don’t become open because you tell them they’re welcome. They open up when they see you protect dignity in real time.

One effective practice is a “name-and-repair” norm. If someone is interrupted, stereotyped, mocked, or quietly excluded, the leader pauses the moment and says something like, “I want to come back to what she was saying,” or, “That comment may have landed disrespectfully; let’s slow down and repair it.”

I’ve seen clients carry anxiety, isolation, and self-doubt from discrimination and subtle exclusion. A workplace that wants whole people has to address those small moments before they become culture.

The key is consistency. Don’t make employees prove harm before you act; model respect, repair quickly, and make it normal for people to say, “That didn’t sit right with me,” without fear of being punished for honesty.

I think one of the most effective practices is to regularly give employees a safe, anonymous way to share how they’re really experiencing the workplace.

Anonymous questionnaires can uncover things people may not feel comfortable raising in a meeting; whether they feel heard, supported, included, overwhelmed, or simply what they wish the company did differently. The important part is not just collecting the feedback, but acting on it and communicating what changed as a result.

When employees see that honest feedback can lead to meaningful improvements without putting them on the spot, trust starts to build. And to me, that’s the foundation of a culture where people feel comfortable being themselves. It’s rooted in psychological safety that is backed by action.

Hi, I’m Rinn, founder and creative director of Echo Omni Studio, a creative studio that does many things simultaneously. Burnout and uncomfortable conditions have a high chance of arising at any second here.

But it almost never happens. Everyone is always happy and excited to start the day and get into their tasks. Basically, they stay productive all the time, because I try to make them as comfortable as possible.

With a team of only three, not yet big, but with so many tasks to split, I always have early-week meetings. I set expectations, ask them when things will be done, and discuss whether it makes sense based on the production timeline. I’d rather things go slow than compromise the quality of the output and stress everyone out. So I never make crazy deadlines. I always ask about their capabilities, how hard a task is for them, and whether it’s possible to be done sooner. It might sound mediocre, and other people might do the same, but I always check in on whether they’re good, how their mental state is, and whether they feel okay. I really care about how they’re feeling, because when they’re happy, the output is at its best.

I set hard boundaries and fully stop them from working outside their working hours. If they message me outside of work hours, I’ll say, go touch grass, watch a K-drama or something, stop working. I don’t want anyone to overwork, and I want everyone to keep the balance. Weekends are no-work, full stop. We plan everything ahead so we can fit all the week’s tasks into the weekdays. Since I’m a dev, I also map out all the edge cases and if-else scenarios upfront, basically killing the question before it even happens.

Everyone is equal on my team. Even though I’m the founder, I welcome being corrected. There’s no right or wrong, only what everyone agrees is a good output and result. This is the flow and the fundamentals I apply to keep my team always comfortable and productive.

Leaders must intentionally blur the line between their professional personas and personal identities to build a culture where employees feel safe bringing their whole selves to work. In high-pressure environments where performance is often reduced to metrics and dashboards, it is easy for team members to feel like replaceable components in a machine.

The most effective practice to counter this is a mandatory five-minute human check-in that precedes every operational or KPI review. Before discussing service levels or ticket volumes, share a specific update from your life outside the office—perhaps a challenge in your garden or a recent photography trip. By leading with your own non-work interests, you create a permission structure signaling that an individual’s identity is not confined to their job description. This practice transforms a rigid data review into a community dialogue.

When employees see leadership as multifaceted individuals who value behavioral psychology or music as much as operational efficiency, they feel safe enough to share their own perspectives and challenges. While technology is necessary to scale operations, only genuine empathy and personal connection can scale relationships. A team that feels seen as whole people will consistently outperform a collection of data points.

The best advice is to stop treating authenticity as a branding idea and start treating it as a design choice. One effective practice is auditing where employees feel they must edit themselves to be seen as competent. Look at hiring, onboarding, meetings, feedback, promotion discussions, and informal recognition. The goal is to find the moments where the culture rewards conformity while claiming openness.

I would start with promotion criteria, because people believe the standards tied to advancement more than any internal message. If the only people rewarded are those who mirror one leadership style, the culture teaches self protection, not belonging. When advancement reflects different communication styles, backgrounds, and ways of solving problems, employees receive a credible signal. Inclusion becomes part of how the organization grows, not just how it talks about itself.

Employees feel safe being themselves when difference does not create an unpredictable career cost.

One effective practice is making flexibility and accommodation decisions through clear job requirements rather than personal judgments about who appears committed enough. In one management situation, we reviewed a transportation benefit according to the employee’s actual ability to travel and the needs of the role instead of applying a superficially identical rule to everyone.

Employees also should not be pressured to disclose private experiences to prove authenticity or participate in every social activity.

A workplace becomes inclusive when people can share or remain private without being penalized, and when managers address disrespect early rather than waiting for a formal crisis.

If I had one sentence for our culture, it’s that we’re collaborative and supportive. We’re all friends here. That sounds soft, but on a small remote team it’s the thing that determines whether someone tells you they’re stuck or hides it for three days.

The practice I’d point to is letting people’s actual lives be visible rather than tidied away. I was on a recorded call recently and my virtual background dropped out mid-conversation. I started apologizing and moving coats out of the frame, and the person I was speaking with said it showed a human element and made everyone more comfortable. She was right. The polished version wasn’t better.

The same principle applies to bigger things. Our support guy in a band gets his Friday afternoons for shows, and we built the coverage around it. He didn’t have to pretend music was a hobby he’d outgrow. What I’ve found is that people match what they see. If leadership performs perfection, everyone performs it back, and you stop hearing about problems while they’re still small. Work isn’t about perfection anyway. You just keep coming back and doing it again.

One effective practice is letting employees help choose the local causes and community projects the business supports. It gives people a safe way to bring their interests, connections and values into work without asking them to share personal details. In a regional business, it also strengthens the link between the team, customers and the communities they serve.

One practice that has worked well for us is our Wednesday team meeting, where we nominate people to share their wins from the week, both personal and work-related. It gives everyone an opportunity to express themselves and lets the team learn more about each other outside their day-to-day responsibilities. Over time, we have noticed that people become more comfortable sharing because they see others doing the same when their turn comes. We also strictly enforce our inclusion policies and do not tolerate bullying, because people will only open up when they genuinely feel safe and respected. My advice is to create regular opportunities for people to share, but support that with clear standards around how everyone should treat each other.

When employees do not feel forced to behave a certain way in order to be accepted as credible, they feel freer to be themselves. Leaders can assist by providing alternatives for conveying ideas. It can feel uncomfortable to speak up, so providing an alternative to that includes sending feedback before the meeting or talking 1-on-1. That is, everyone gets a chance to pitch in.

I also suggest focusing on the value people create and less on their loudness or presence. Sometimes people perceive that someone is contributing more just because they talk more, but silence doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have any input. In the talent and events industry, people connect with others in various ways, through different personalities. The same is applicable in the work mode. Humans do their best work when they each leverage individual strengths!

There are three things in particular that our organization does to holistically support employees.

1. On a monthly basis, our CEO holds an open forum session. The session is voluntary and any employee is able to attend. While our company does have an open-door policy, this meeting presents a unique opportunity for employees to meet with the leader of the organization in order to discuss anything that is going on with their work, the company as a whole, and/or any external factors that are impacting them either professionally or even in some cases personally. It allows for a direct pipeline to the CEO and fosters greater collaboration, as there are times where multiple people are experiencing the same thing that they want to share with the CEO.

2. Our company has a Morale & Wellness committee that focuses on multiple dimensions of wellness. The committee is voluntary but we often see repeat employees choosing to attend the meetings and/or participating in various initiatives. This allows employees to really take ownership of the aspects of wellness that they feel will be most beneficial to them and/or they most need support in.

3. Finally, our organization is a big proponent of Employee Assistance Program (EAP) Services. This is something that we continually emphasize to employees. Whether they are experiencing a loss, family issues, mental health concerns, financial challenges, etc. — these services are something that we continually bring to the forefront of our employees’ attention. In addition, we will periodically bring a licensed counselor (through our EAP) on site for group counseling sessions, if our employees are particularly going through a rough patch, either due to things happening at work and/or things that may be happening outside of the workplace.

In order for organizations to successfully support their employees, they have to be willing to invest time, energy and resources for such initiatives to not only be possible but effective as well.

Leaders should ensure that thoughtful disagreements and diverse work styles and needs are both acceptable and not viewed as a threat to professional standing. In other words, managers must be open about their own flexibility and willingness to address different perspectives, so that the culture is not based on ‘turf’ – a feeling among employees that they can only be accepted if they appear to have no differing views. Finally, managers should be just as thorough in documenting their decisions and limitations as they expect subordinates to be, when it comes to policy and procedure.

The second step is making inclusion ‘normal’ through processes that allow employees to test the culture, such as scheduling, feedback mechanisms, mentoring, and other routine decisions that show people if their values will have to bend in the face of more pressing organizational needs, including time constraints and conflicts. Leaders should refrain from pressuring people to share aspects of their lives beyond what is relevant for work. In other words, cultural change is most effective when people feel free to participate at the level they are comfortable with since respect is the cornerstone of positive relationships.

My advice is to build safety through predictability. Employees are more likely to bring their whole selves to work when they know how difficult conversations will be handled before those conversations happen. In many offices, people stay guarded because the response to honesty feels random. A strong culture replaces guesswork with a reliable pattern of listening, clarification, and follow through.

One effective practice is adopting a response rule for managers, first acknowledge, then ask, then act. If someone shares a personal constraint, cultural consideration, or communication need, the leader first acknowledges it, then asks what support would help, then explains the next step. I have seen this reduce fear because people are not left wondering whether openness will be dismissed, debated, or quietly remembered against them.