Amid polarisation, some employers seek to prohibit or rein in political discourse on the clock. Others let it fly.
In mid-April, dozens of employees at Google were sacked after staging a sit-in-style protest in the company's California offices, demanding an end to Google's contracts with the Israeli government. Earlier that month, National Public Radio (NPR) suspended senior editor Uri Berliner after he published an essay accusing the news outlet of political bias. (Berliner later resigned.) The New York Times has launched an investigation into its own staff after information leaked pertaining to their coverage of the conflict in Gaza.
Similar tensions are simmering in workplaces across the globe, splitting employees and putting pressure on companies to act.
“Politics is increasingly something that is not confined anymore to just the political arena,” says Edoardo Teso, associate professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Northwestern University, US, adding that personal opinion can “spill over” into the workplace.
As elections take place in dozens of countries this year – including in the UK, the US, India, Pakistan and Belgium – political discussion may well crop up in workplaces around the world, leaving business leaders to determine how this will be handled, and what circumstances cross the line.
‘In the wrong place at the wrong time'
In 2020, leaders at global software firm Intuit began looking for ways to help employees talk constructively about political matters. They noted an increase in politically charged discussions as Covid-19 broke out, and workers disagreed about healthcare guidance and vaccinations. Following the murder of George Floyd, employees spoke heatedly about race relations.
Intuit subsequently put in guardrails for how employees can talk about divisive topics on company channels. “We want you to focus on how you're feeling and how things are affecting you as a person, and less on using our internal channels as a platform for your political views,” Intuit's chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, Humera Shahid, tells the BBC of the company’s approach.
There are moderators, usually HR or people who lead employee resource groups, who monitor the company's messaging channels to flag “language that could be hurtful or exclude”, according to company policy. Posters are asked to take down content that might be incendiary. “We find 99.9% of the time, the intent is very good,” says Shahid. “They just don't recognise that they may be causing harm to another employee.”
Some employers are altogether prohibiting political discussions at work. One of them is the tech company 37Signals, which owns the project-management platform Basecamp. In 2021, CEO Jason Fried asked the company's employees to refrain from political talk in company communication channels. Roughly one-third of Basecamp's employees quit as a result.
“It caused a lot of pain for people,” says Fried. “I felt bad about that. We anticipated there would be some backlash internally and probably externally, but not quite as much. I think it destabilised the company for a short period of time.”
Fried says he took the decision because many workers got tired of being pulled into political discussions on the clock. “Some people were like, ‘look, I have my opinions, my co-workers have their opinions, but I don't want to debate and discuss world events at work'.” Those were the ones who stayed following Fried's announcement.
The policy hasn't changed, and Fried stands by his decision from three years ago. “It was the right decision then. It would be the right decision now,” he says. “It was a harder decision back then, just given the climate. It was probably one of the best decisions we've ever made. We're far more focused now. There's no conversations that are way off topic, and we're just here to do what we do, which is build project management software. We don't stop for [politics].”
The company added its new policy to not only the employee handbook, but also its open job postings. “We respect everyone's right to participate in political expression and activism, but avoid having political debates on our internal communication systems at work. 37signals as a company does not weigh in on politics publicly, outside of topics directly related to our business.”
Since then, “we've not had a single situation where we had to say something to anybody internally”, says Fried. “The people who were very opposed to [the policy] ended up leaving early on, and those who stuck around totally agree with the point of view. It's been pretty much smooth sailing since.”
GrowthScribe, a small marketing software firm based in the US, also took the decision to blanket ban politics in the workplace. Founder Kartik Ahuja says employee relationships went sour for his team in 2022 when two workers got into a debate about US President Joe Biden. Disagreement turned into name-calling.
That's when Ahuja shut down the discourse. “It was happening at the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says, adding that such conflict interferes with client work. Ahuja says the policy has been largely well-received and there was no immediate resistance to the initial prohibition on talking politics. But when another argument occurred, like at 37signals, Ahuja added rules to the employee handbook: “Harassment and exclusionary behaviour are unacceptable, including… discussing political parties.”
‘It's part of the dialogue'
In some cases, political discussions are unavoidable – even part of the day job. But some say these conversations need governing, too.
Quorum, a company that makes software for public-policy professionals, is well-accustomed to this. The firm – which has roughly 400 employees across the US, Brazil, Belgium and the Republic of Moldova – gives its employees leeway to talk about political matters and tricky topics on the job.
Brook Carlon, Quorum's chief people officer, says because of the company's work, political talk among workers is expected. “Most are very interested in the political environment, how policy happens, how laws are made and what candidates are doing,” she says. “It's something that's been part of the dialogue all along.”
Workers tread lightly in some areas, she says. For instance, conversations tend to be about policy choices rather than endorsements of specific candidates. Yet disagreements do flare. One topic that reached a boiling point is the Israel-Gaza war. Among employees, support for one side of the conflict was seen as wholesale condemnation of the other.
The company quickly stepped in to issue rules: be aware of how your statements could be received by someone who doesn't agree with your views; link to a document with a longer opinion so the channels aren't clogged; and if you're unsure about your language, HR can review it.
Some employees are more likely to make use of Quorum's open forum. “Our US-based employees are much happier to engage in this dialogue and have these conversations than our team members in Moldova or Brazil,” says Carlon.
Wider implications
Beyond the way political discussions can complicate employee relationships, some researchers have also found that alignment – or misalignment – among workers and leadership can even affect employment decisions.
Scholars studying the relationship between employment and politics in Brazilian workplaces showed business owners are more likely to hire people who share their political affiliations. The researchers found that workers who share a political affiliation with an employer are 48% to 72% more likely to be hired than those who don't.
They haven't determined exactly why employers discriminate in favour of their co-partisans, though Teso of Northwestern University – one of the working paper's authors – suspects that some employers think that a workplace where employees share similar political beliefs is likely to be a productive one. “This is probably the reason why many firms prohibit talking about politics at work, because they think that may lead to conflict.”
Though Teso expected to see some favouritism along party lines, he's been surprised how influential politics can be in hiring. Political alignment seems to be a stronger determinant of employment decisions than race or gender, he says. “The magnitude is something [we] didn't expect to find.”
