Broaching political disagreements in the workplace

In the run-up to the election, we’re looking at political polarization in America — specifically, the role companies play in intensifying or easing political divides — in our Office Politics series. 

Earlier this week, we heard about the varied results that companies get when they push to discourage on-the-job talk about politics and other controversial issues. Today, we look at what happens when those topics come up among colleagues, and how we’ve seen more people become entrenched in their own ideologies when they hear from those with opposing views.

Alison Taylor, executive director of the think tank Ethical Systems, has seen this phenomenon play out in the workplace. She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: There’s a term, a phrase, that I’m interested in understanding. It’s called “affective polarization.” Have you come across that term?

Alison Taylor: Absolutely, and there’s a lot of data showing that there has been a dramatic rise in this affective polarization in the U.S. over the last few decades. And one of the issues is, as we know, we’re increasingly divided into red states and blue states. And very, very often, the workplace is the only place we might run into people with very different beliefs than us.

And I did a study on workplace culture in an era of affective polarization a few years ago, and people I interviewed would say things like, “I work with this guy, and then I saw him in a MAGA hat on Facebook and now I don’t want to work with him anymore,” or “My boss is soft pressuring me to donate to Black Lives Matter and I don’t want to, but I feel I’ll be retaliated against if I don’t.” So there’s this interesting outcome where one group of employees might have far too much psychological safety, and another group none at all.

Brancaccio: Yeah, and there are people listening right now to us saying to themselves, “I want to be open to other people’s ideas. I want to be respectful. I want to be a deep listener, even if I disagree with the person.” Then you actually mention the issue — it might be reproductive rights, it might be immigration — where people say, “All right, that’s a line I won’t cross. I can’t respect a person who thinks differently.” It’s a very nettlesome problem.

Taylor: One thing I think companies can do is to really try and encourage us and train us on this idea of respectful discourse and disagreement. For example, Allstate Insurance runs a project called The Better Arguments Project that is precisely about managing this kind of respectful disagreement, and we all need to get a lot, lot better at this. If I were running a company today, I think I would make it one of my promotion criteria to say, “If you want to be senior in this organization, you need to have a track record of working with people with different backgrounds, beliefs, cultures, and that you may even personally dislike.”

Brancaccio: Where does efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion within companies fit into this idea of helping to ease polarization? Or perhaps it contributes to it? In theory, DEI should help people learn to work with people who see the world differently, but that term, at least, has been politicized to the point that some conservatives use DEI when they see a person of color in a news story.

Taylor: If we’re talking about inclusion, we’re talking about having workplaces where people feel free to say what they think. We’re talking about having companies and leadership teams that look like the company’s customer base, that look like the rest of society. Then, I don’t think any of this is particularly controversial. Now, how we go about putting DEI programs in place is very difficult.

There’s quite a lot of evidence that DEI isn’t actually helping the people it is supposed to help; it is also causing resentment. You know, there’s a lot of evidence, for example, that white men now feel that they are being discriminated against — which is not true if you look at the empirical evidence.

So I think there’s been a tendency to treat DEI as a legalistic tick box. “Let’s have a certain number of this certain type of people in the senior leadership team, and the problem is solved.” Whereas what we actually need to do is to be able to bring more perspectives to the table, have better discussions and make better decisions — not least because it helps us manage risk. So, it’s very unfortunate the way it has been reduced to the discourse that we’re seeing in the news today.