Employee Politics has a whole new meaning!
What happened three weeks ago in Washington DC was horrific, what’s been happening virtually every night since May in Portland, Seattle and other American cities is just as horrific. Perhaps less symbolic, but more devastating in terms of property damage and human lives.
Whatever your political persuasion, I don’t believe your business can scale in an environment where our basic social contract is so broken:
- A mob can break down your doors at any time, destroy your retail store, with almost no consequence.
- Another mob can storm government buildings, demanding their feelings be adopted as law.
- One of your employees can cause a boycott against your firm, not for doing anything, but for belonging to the wrong group, or being on the wrong social media.
- A group of employees can demand (!) that you cease doing business with this customer, or that government agency because they FEEL threatened.
Skynova, a software provider, surveyed 434 small businesses. Their goal was to understand business leaders’ opinions on sharing political leanings and if businesses were comfortable shunning customers who held opposing political views. It’s not surprising that business owners who identified themselves as conservative or liberal actually held the same point of view. But what was surprising was that both sides agreed that refusing to do business with someone who they disagree with politically is fine.
This political/business activism has smashed into employer – employee relationships. In California, a woman was fired for attending a march in Washington DC. No indication that she was part of the riots, she has not been arrested for anything… She was just there, on her own time, at her own expense, petitioning the government for redress of grievances.
In New York, another employee was fired for having an account on Parler and Gab. These are alternatives to Twitter and Facebook. Again, no indication of anything she said or did that was wrong, apparently, she held the wrong political orientation and was therefore fired.
I’ll leave it to the lawyers reading this to opine on the lawsuits that have been or will be filed. I know that neither organization is a government agency, so the Constitution’s protections would not apply here. But the companies involved are now very well-known and have pissed off half their actual or potential customer base.
I’m sure all of you have heard the story of the bear and the campers… A bear wandered into a campsite and seeing several campers, began to chase them. One camper said to the other, “I hope we can outrun the bear,” to which the other one answered, “All I have to do is outrun you…” A great article by Mark Tapscott put it best, “Cancel Culture’s Crocodile May Eat You Last, but It Will Eat You.”
My opinion is very simple… unless you are dependent upon the government for virtually all your revenue, and you can pivot with each incoming administration (at the local, state or federal level), leave your political leanings in the parking lot. Now, as a manager who had almost 200 people in my business unit, I strongly encouraged my team to get out and vote… and made sure that they could adjust their schedules on election day to get to the polls. BUT I never asked, and my employees knew that I would not ask whom the voted for. That’s just not my business. And it’s not yours either.
And it’s not their business who I voted for, or how anyone else voted. I would encourage you to take a stand… that your business is not involved in politics unless a very specific issue (zoning for your new building for example) directly impacts your company. Make this part of your employee orientation, and your employee documentation. Stick to it, even if it means you are less involved in the civic space than you would like to be… maintain your distance, to protect your company.