On Talking Politics At Work (“Let’s Kick That To HR, Right?”)

A month before supposedly “the most consequential election in human history,” what’s happening inside the offices and cubicles?

We will get most of our information for this post from here:

A Large Public

There are a lot of interesting pull-quotes in the first section of that post regarding politics at work and how prevalent it is — I don’t mean office politics, but rather people discussing national politics and ideology while on the clock — and here is one to look at:

For instance, compared to workers who encounter general conflict, those who have experienced a political altercation are:

5.6x as likely to say their productivity is impacted

4.9x as likely to say their mental health is impacted

3.5x as likely to say their physical health impacted

What’s more, four in five employees who have faced political conflict at work are actively job-seeking — that makes them 1.6x as likely to quit as other employees.

The problem is worse for desk-bound workers, who are twice as likely as their deskless counterparts to have experienced a politics-fueled conflict in the past three months.

Makes sense. I think we have known this for a while. There are sharp dividing lines on discussing politics at work. Most Executives and VP-guys I’ve known are two-faced about it, because they don’t want you to discuss politics while on the clock, and yet they will subsequently let their entire business freeze up for…