Details tell you what a workplace major is.

Profession is a very annoying word, which summarizes your work attitude, achievements and professionalism ... but the basis for judging whether you are a major is not so professional. Now that I realize this, why not use some tips to make myself look more professional? Gradually we understand that professionalism is actually a packaging addiction in the workplace.

Emily Shiffy is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Boston University. For her and her colleagues, this view is untenable. Perhaps the key to being regarded as a professional or not lies in how we define success in the United States, and the reason why some people can't become professionals depends on their attachment to social norms. Shi Fei and other researchers have also carried out a study on "the possible cultural connection between people and their workplace norms" with the miniature of people's life outside work as a reference.

They adopted two research methods:

First, they investigated how people relate their professional knowledge to the appearance of employees' desks.

Secondly, they studied how recruiters from two different countries evaluate employees who have the potential to have children or start a family.

In the former method, they provided a small room with no decoration for the research participants:

Described a nonexistent employee:

Eric is in his thirties and has worked in the company for five years. Now, he is the manager of the company. He is married and has two children. Eric's performance evaluation has always been good, and others think he is very professional.

Participants will be asked to choose stickers to decorate and design this small room according to what they think Eric's office looks like. Some stickers are obviously related to work, such as folders, some are relatively neutral, such as cartons, and some have nothing to do with work, such as children's paintings or toys. Eric's company is usually like this:

However, once a sentence in Eric's description changed-"others think he is not very professional", Eric's office in the eyes of participants became like this:

The difference is small but obvious. In others' eyes, "professional" and "unprofessional" Eric has office supplies and photos of his family, but "unprofessional" Eric also has some casual decorations, such as Elmer's posters or walkman. Shi Fei told me that it is remarkable that there are almost the same number of items in two different scenes. In other words, you can't say that a layman's behavior will be a mess.

Shi Fei and her colleagues also asked participants to do the same for a female employee named Stephanie. Interestingly, they also found that there was no significant gender difference in the measurement of professional level:

However, the different working hours of participants in the United States will lead to significant differences in their professional judgments:

This shows that the office is full of items closely related to work "from life experience in the United States, not a universal cultural feature of appropriate workplace behavior."

So, why is this important?

First of all, it highlights that religious thoughts are still deeply rooted in the United States today. Xifei and * * believe that the unique "unemotional, polite and impersonal behavior in the workplace" in the United States comes from psychology called "Protestant ideology". Basically, Marx Weber, a political economist, first developed this theory based on the need to put aside personal affairs and devote himself wholeheartedly to realizing people's moral and spiritual calling. This may sound outdated, but it affects today. For example, a recent paper on unemployment found that "the psychological damage caused by unemployment to Protestants is 40% more serious than that to ordinary people." Another example is that women with children claim that they will be treated unfairly when they violate the pattern of "doing paid work without being disturbed".

How cultural customs affect today's increasingly globalized business environment is related to this, perhaps more important. Just as "working" is no longer "staying in the office from nine to five", working does not mean that Indian businessmen must stay in India or American executives must stay in the United States. The author of the study wrote: "The globalization trend of bringing workers from different countries together more and more makes people doubt this established so-called norm." This will "lead to confusion and misunderstanding." In fact, in the new culture, one of the most important things people should do in their work is to "discover and respect the norms in the new environment, otherwise they will bear the consequences themselves."

But now, these consequences unfairly force or at least crowd out non-Americans.

What about Americans working in foreign countries?

Shi Fei talked about the lack of academic literature on workplace norms around the world. She explained, "How do people measure professionalism in other countries?" We have no answer to this question. In America, because of Protestant ideology, you must devote yourself to your work. We have no similar theory about why other countries are different from the United States. "But according to the table above, we can guess that they may be the same.

The second half of the above research provides evidence for this hypothesis. Researchers asked participants in the United States and India to evaluate job seekers according to how they build relationships with potential customers. Under one setting, the candidate mentioned the customer's family; In another case, the candidate will only talk about the location of the office or the view of the window. Participants will then answer whether they would recommend hiring the employee.

In the latter scenario, although there is no statistical difference between Indian and American participants' answers, the researchers found that "American participants with recruitment experience will give negative comments on candidates who have always mentioned non-work parts, while experienced Indian participants will not." In addition, "for Americans, if job seekers talk about things unrelated to work as little as possible, their chances of entering the next round of competition will increase, but for Indians, this is not the case."

Shi Fei said that more research is needed in this field, including these possible situations: When and under what circumstances will the cultural ideology of professionalism change? Do men and women feel different room for manoeuvre when placing personal belongings in the office area? When people understand professionalism, will office objects or different types of discussions, such as sports or family-related topics, trigger different reactions?

Although I have no reservations about my colleagues who use walkman.

Gretchen Goefft, Associate Editor of Harvard Business Review.