Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom

AP journalist Joyce Rosenberg wrote about election talk in the workplace. Choosing to write on this topic during the election is smart and helpful. Well done. Her approach was less so. Consider this.

She focused on what employers could do to minimize any potential negative impact on productivity, which strikes me as the central concern we might expect in Pravda or The People’s Daily, ripe with instructions on how to manage worker thinking.

In a democracy the more important concern ought to be how we can all learn to engage more productively in these types of difficult dialogues. Our democracy depends on more of us mastering this skill set, particularly in the shadow of the most uncivil candidate in our life time being a heartbeat away from the White House.

A second choice to reconsider, in my view, is her choice to focus so heavily on employment law. This is a cultural and political challenge. The law is not irrelevant in establishing outer boundaries and guiding principles for evaluating situations that cross the line.

The contentiousness of this presidential campaign is spilling into some workplaces. Employment lawyers [recommend] rather than trying to control what people are saying, owners should focus on whether the work is getting done in an atmosphere that isn't hostile.

Of course we should not encourage employers to try to control or silence conversations among fellow citizens. Further, we should celebrate, not fear, whenever our interest in selecting our leaders is so high that the conversations spill into the workplace.

Our author then notes that the one employer she was using as a prop chose to call a meeting and “everyone agreed not to focus on it during work hours.” This strikes me as a fear-driven, undemocratic, missed opportunity.

Why not organize brown bag lunch conversations that include local experts from both parties coming into the workplace? Use coffee breaks to encourage those interested to meet one-on-one with the express purpose of listening to the reasoning behind an alternative perspective they currently do not understand?

Some employers do want to “ban political talk altogether.” Bad idea, as our author notes, but only partially because “this could land the employer in legal hot water.” The law is a good starting point here: employers determining what their workers can talk about is crosses a line. But the law only gets us so far in figuring out how to ‘be the change we want to see in the world’ here.

Rather than explore options for celebrating and supporting this amazingly democratic impulse in the workplace, our author’s narrow focus on the legal exposure of employers leads her to then turn to a focus on how political talk can create a hostile work environment.

Only when we lack the citizenship skills needed to engage with others who disagree with us. This is not a trivial caveat. The threat here is not the desire to talk politics, but our fear of talking politics that has resulted in a public pedagogy that has consistently de-skilled us in precisely the tools we need to do this in a productive and democratic and civil way that focuses on problem solving.

Our author’s narrow legal lens then brings us, of course, to enforcement questions.

"Enforce the fact that you're running a business. Political discussions at break time are fine as long as they're respectful," says a consultant. But make sure employees know they shouldn't get into political discourse with customers. If a customer is offended by a staffer's political beliefs, the company could lose that person's business.

We should absolutely reject any effort to ‘enforce’ conversational parameters here. But alienating customers is an interesting question to consider…perhaps a business would earn well-deserved customer satisfaction points if it were known as a place where conversations, on any compelling topic of the day, were always civil and thoughtful and respectful?

At the end of her piece, our author adds another reason not to focus on silencing these conversations.

Political conversations that remain friendly "can be just as much of a morale-builder as that baseball game or football game," says another consultant. Discussing the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the workplace was a bonding event.

I applaud the choice to address this question and even much of her contributions to the conversation. At the same time, it seems to me there is more to say and reframing this to focus on celebrating the latent opportunity marks the democracy-strengthening path forward.