The argument for just not talking about politics in the workplace
The argument for just not talking about politics in the workplace
It’s yet another contentious election season, and this fall, the “Marketplace Morning Report” team is examining political polarization in the workplace as part of our ongoing Office Politics series.
Now, with less than four weeks to go until voters head to the polls, company executives are facing so thorny challenges regarding politics in the workplace: Do we take a stand or stay out entirely? And what about banter that turns political in the office?
When it comes to politics, it can be easier said than done to prevent talks around the water cooler or in Zoom chats to turn into a family Thanksgiving-style showdown. So … what if those conversations just weren’t done at all?
That’s something that Sean Westwood, director of the Polarization Research Lab out of Dartmouth College, is proposing. He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: So, if an employee speaks up respectfully and says, “Look, that topic is inappropriate for the workplace,” they won’t be seen as an outlier or a freak. There’d be like a framework where other employees know that’s kind of the approach that the company’s looking for.
Sean Westwood: Exactly. I think the idea is to set a norm of corporate political neutrality. So the workplace isn’t going to be a place to have debate on policy, and the company isn’t going to try and support one side of an issue over another, knowing that no matter what it does, it’s going to alienate some segment of the workplace. Instead, it’s just going to say, “That’s not what we do here.”
Brancaccio: Is there something in your research that leads you to believe this could actually work? I mean, it’s essentially sort of everyone’s suppressing themselves, sublimating. It’s often not healthy psychologically, but maybe it is healthy when you’re talking about organizations.
Westwood: So, I don’t think we’re saying that you should suppress yourself; I think what we’re saying is that when you want to have conversations about politics, you should do so off the clock or with your friends or your family, and not necessarily in the workplace or with your coworkers. So, I’m not suggesting that individuals deny their political preferences or their political identity, but just to say that, in certain situations, it might be healthy to turn it off for a moment.
Brancaccio: You know, when you think of other very deeply held values that employees bring to the workplace, one would be their faith, their religion. And we often do recognize that that’s not something we really want to start discussing in the workplace, because you could inadvertently offend somebody. You certainly can’t be seen to be proselytizing in the workplace, so maybe that’s an analogy that helps us.
Westwood: We’ve decided that certain things are just going to generate tension and that are going to be counterproductive, religion being a good example of this. Politics, I think, should return to where it once was, when it was part of that list. For a long period of time, you didn’t talk about religion or politics at work. We’ve just softened the boundaries a little bit and allowed politics to creep into the workplace.
Brancaccio: It just interests me that you still have some optimism that you can pull this off. I mean, even universities haven’t been able to pull this off on certain hot-button topics in the last six months.
Westwood: Certainly. Universities have been a national embarrassment, I think, when it comes to how we’ve handled political debate and political tension. But there is a strong push to return to institutional neutrality at the university level: Harvard has made some advances there. The University of Chicago has long held that position. One could argue that the tensions that we’ve observed are because we’ve abandoned that framework and that we have moved to a system where universities are commenting on social divisions in a way that’s going to inflame one subpopulation on campus and anger another. I think if we were to have had institutional neutrality in place, there would have been a much healthier university experience in the spring.
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