Society has evolved along with the saying “Keep your personal and professional life separate”, and the belief that we need to appear invulnerable and pristine in the context of work. While it is imperative to keep up a professional front when engaging at work in certain spaces, and benefits us to be neutral, it is also important to acknowledge the blurring of the personal and professional boundaries itself in the last few years, and the overflow of work time into all aspects of an individual’s lives. Given then, that a person may be spending most of their day at work or interacting with people from the workplace, can we really expect employees to silence or make invisible certain aspects of their lives entirely?

What about caregivers, parents or persons who are neurodivergent or differently abled? To assume that their “problems” are manageable outside of the work context may trivialize an individual’s lived reality and erase their unique requirement for support . It would benefit the organisation to create spaces for vulnerability, emotion, hopes and dreams in the context of work through upskilling and capacity building of leaders and managers and through provisions for medical and mental health support at work.