Inside the movement redefining and resisting professionalism

What does it really mean to be called “professional”? Is it someone who does what they’re told, who sticks around after hours, and leaves their personal life at the door?

Chances are that being told a person “behaves professionally” or is “a true professional” is a compliment in this world. Acting in a professional manner can evoke praise or even spark promotion. There’s a largely positive association to the trope of being a professional.

But there’s a rising movement against professionalism, as the future of work is being reconfigured and redefined. Traditional ideas of what it means to be professional and workplace etiquette are now being called out as harmful and regressive, especially to marginalized people. Others believe that professional practices are holding workplaces back, preventing potential. And some companies are engaging with new ways of working, some rendering professionalism a concept of the past.

The people rejecting professionalism

Omny Miranda Martone, the founder and CEO of the Sexual Violence Prevention Association (SVPA), an organization dedicated to preventing sexual violence systemically, has fostered a workplace without the cornerstones of professionalism. “Professionalism is racist, sexist, classist, and ableist,” they tell Mashable.

“As a disabled queer nonbinary survivor, I have had many harmful experiences with professionalism,” Martone says. “In previous workplaces, professionalism has prevented me from taking care of my mental health, forced me to perform gender roles, and caused me to feel unsafe existing as myself.”

“Professionalism is racist, sexist, classist, and ableist.”

Following Martone’s experiences at other organizations, they intentionally built the SVPA according to a set of values they deemed “not compatible with professionalism”.

“Thus, we were founded with an explicit opposition to professionalism,” they add.

Martone says that professionalism “is intended to deny opportunities, exploit labor, and force conformity”. Martone has also seen many of their friends “directly harmed by professionalism”, especially those who are women, LGBTQ, disabled, and people of color.

“I didn’t want to replicate the same structures and systems that hurt me, my loved ones, and my community. Creating an organization that replicates oppressive power structures would directly contradict our mission,” they say. Martone stresses that it would be “hypocritical” of their organization “to simultaneously work to address sexual violence while maintaining a toxic work environment”.

Catherine Warrilow, managing director at ticketing site Days Out, says her rejection of professionalism stems from a similar place to that of Martone’s. Warrilow tells Mashable that “a few rocky experiences” in the workplace during her twenties pushed her to embrace “non-corporate values and behaviours”. For example, she was told her curly hair was “scruffy”. In another instance, a colleague said she “would never succeed” because she had dropped out of university.

The team at Days Out rebelled against a corporate structure and values, she says, which has brought happiness to the office and the team. “Of course, expectations and outcomes [at work] still need to be clear, but people are coming up with far more interesting ways to collaborate and come up with great ideas,” she says. She stresses that being able to be “authentic” in the workplace can do wonders for employees and the work they produce.

“I think this softening of the work environment is beneficial for everyone but in particular for anyone who needs some quiet time away from a busy social office,” Warrilow says, emphasizing the support this can lend to autistic people. “The choice to structure your day in a way that matches your own energy peaks and flows is a huge advantage.”

Both Warrilow and Martone touch upon the fact that professionalism has ingrained notions of ableism. For example, offices are vastly designed with neurotypical people in mind, rather than neurodivergent people, or those whose brains function differently in one or more ways than is considered typical. Professional services network Deloitte released a report on neurodiversity in the workplace in January 2022, noting that “the neurodivergent group is often overlooked” within the professional world, whether in conversations, hiring efforts, or once employed.

“In an effort to create a more diverse workplace, organizations may need to challenge their traditional workplace processes in several ways,” Deloitte’s report reads. The firm suggests everything from creating a more conducive and flexible working environment, tweaking the interview process, and allowing for better work-from-home or hybrid arrangements. Such choices are aligned with the push against professionalism, carving space for inclusivity and fostering a healthier culture.

How professionalism has caused harm

The idea that professionalism has resulted in harmful practices and discouraged workers is an interesting one. To many, being professional has meant creating a positive working environment; exactly what constitutes professionalism is hardly spelt out or discerned. But simply put, it’s accepted and often uplifted as the way to be a “good” employee.

Now, however, more people are dissecting the essence of professionalism and its consequences. Professionalism can lay the groundwork for microaggressions, which in turn have led to toxic work environments and burnout; traditional professional standards can also be the force behind bias in the workplace, whether conscious or unconscious.

Microaggressions in the workplace, for example, have notably and disproportionately affected women of color and other groups that have historically been oppressed. Global consulting firm McKinsey surveyed over 65,000 people about their workplace experiences, and in particular, analyzed those of women, concluding in their 2021 report that “women of color continue to face significant bias and discrimination at work”, facing microaggressions that “undermine them professionally”.

“While all women are more likely than men to face microaggressions that undermine them professionally — such as being interrupted and having their judgement questioned — women of color often experience these microaggressions at a higher rate,” the report reads.

Other findings in the report pointed to linked experiences of burnout or lack of opportunity for certain groups of people. Women of color, for instance, are two to three times more likely to have a colleague express surprise at their language skills or general abilities. The Harvard Business Review addressed this idea in 2021, writing that women of color often find themselves in precarious situations at work, stemming from marginalization and leading to imposter syndrome.

“For women of color, self-doubt and the feeling that we don’t belong in corporate workplaces can be even more pronounced — not because women of color (a broad, imprecise categorization) have an innate deficiency but because the intersection of our race and gender often places us in a precarious position at work,” the article reads.

Black women, in particular, feel less supported by their managers more than women or men of any other race, the McKinsey report also found. Discrimination against natural hair, for instance, has been noted. Take the UK: race-based hair discrimination has been illegal since the Equality Act 2010, but reports of such incidents — and the connected pressure to conform to “professional” appearances — still occur. A 2020 study by Michigan State University found that Black women with natural hair were considered “considered less professional and less competent and received fewer recommendations for interviews” when compared with Black women with straight hair or white women with any sort of hair.

The undercurrents of the Great Resignation and quiet quitting also sit underneath the rising resistance to professionalism.

These sorts of workplace standards are fueling the movement against established forms of professionalism. Martone agrees that concept of being professional can be “easily traced to racism”, and this is one of the reasons their organization aims to foster an anti-professional environment. “All marginalized communities deserve to feel welcomed and celebrated,” they tell Mashable.

The urge to redefine the corporate — and fight bias — may also fit into a larger trend. The Great Resignation is a testament to this: the now ubiquitous term for the tsunami of people leaving their jobs to improve their mental health and personal lives. Gen-Z and millennial employees are largely behind the tide of people quitting, oftentimes a result of a toxic working environment or failure of senior management to recognize their work.

Then there came “quiet quitting”, or the most recent office trend of workers doing the bare minimum while retaining employment: logging off at five on the dot and completing tasks without going above and beyond. Survey firm Gallup has confirmed that half of America’s workforce is quiet quitting in this moment. Those actively disengaging with work in this manner are also fighting against burnout and mistreatment.

The pandemic also caused a major shift in WFH culture, disrupting the status quo. And while considerations for working parents, people with mental health conditions and disabilities have always existed, the general attitude towards hybrid working models has changed. The door has opened for more, and necessary accommodations, to be made and this is a fight that is ongoing.

The undercurrents of the Great Resignation and quiet quitting also sit underneath the rising resistance to professionalism. The movements are shedding light on values and systems of power, with its participants hoping to fight against oppression in the office.

The replacement for traditional corporate values

So, how does anti-professionalism play out in the workplace? The ways in which companies are implementing this might look different, but they share a common goal: to ensure respect and happiness.

“The choice to work the way you want is key,” Warrilow says. “An informal workplace should remove stress and tension, allowing people to think more freely, communicate better and problem-solve more easily.”

Martone also explains that they aim to take away the strains that professionalism places on an individual. The pressure to conform to professionalism can indeed manifest itself in “the pressure for code switching, autistic masking, and emotional labor,” Martone says. This can, in turn, effect both a company and an individual deeply.

At Days Out, there are no enforced performance reviews or set hours. The company has also put into place several activities that have replaced “corporate policies and goals”. The tone of these are largely friendly and lighthearted: they encourage weekly “mental soup” sessions, in which employees can brain dump anything on their mind (without veering into to-do list territory). They also encourage people to “openly share fails and to enjoy them”.

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At the SVPA, employees are told that there is “no pressure to share your trauma” and “no need to change your speech patterns”.The SVPA upholds a non-hierarchical structure, even when it comes to Martone’s role as CEO. Titles such as CEO are also just for the sake of clarity. The organization’s handbook outlines this: “When we first started, we didn’t use any titles but that became extremely confusing. Now, we have position titles but they are purely logistical and do not reflect a system of power or authority”.

Their Research Director, for example, is not in charge of the research team, but instead facilitates the decision making processes within said team. This means that leaders are there for organizing broader logistics and supporting the wider team, rather than sitting at a distinctive position of power above other employees.

“For us, leadership is about coordinating logistics, facilitating community-led decision-making, and ensuring all voices are heard. Everyone with a leadership position is briefed on strategies for rejecting professionalism,” Martone says.

They also note that their anti-professional policies and rejection of hierarchy are discussed during the interview process with any potential employees, and later, during the ensuing orientation: “We tell all of our team members about our views on professionalism and what that looks like in practice”.

Both the SVPA and Days Out also do not enforce a dress code, pulling away from formalwear and convention. Warrilow’s place of work, for instance, sees a lot of “Crocs, jeans, jumpsuits, band t-shirts, and Vinted finds”. Policies around dress code have increasingly become more flexible across companies and industries, especially post-pandemic. Hoodies and T-shirts have allegedly been embraced in even the most traditional of workspaces (think: private equity shops, law firms, and banks). Silicon Valley, meanwhile, has long held a reputation for more relaxed forms of dressing, to the point where its dress code is an aesthetic in itself.

Ultimately, Martone says, redefining and resisting professionalism “allows people to exist as they are comfortably.”

“In many cases “professionalism” is intended to exploit labor, often at the expense of people’s physical health, mental health, loved ones, community, and passions. [Rejecting professionalism] empowers people to self-advocate more freely, without fear of judgement or punishment,” they say.

As office life evolves, our relationship to professionalism is changing. The movement against professionalism has immense power: to simultaneously dismantle harmful practices and uplift those who have felt marginalized and dismissed in the workplace. The benefits can be colossal, and perhaps more companies should take note.