We Should Talk Politics at Work
Disagreement needn't be inflicted on each other if it's conducted with each other
Gaza. Lviv. Port-au-Prince. Chicago. Jerusalem. Beijing. Each of these places evokes a different set of political questions that roil our campuses and blur our news cycles and spin our brains. And, let me add, complicate our workplaces.
Your job is unavoidably a space of civic disagreement. One business owner told me recently that politics “comes up no matter who I’m talking to, because we run into conversations about the economy or laws that lead people to talk about the government.”
We can probably agree that the problem is not that we talk about politics at work, but how. The business owner I just cited explained, “Until I know someone is on ‘my side’ I’m always doing this dance—and so is the other person—where subtle things are said to feel out if we’re on a similar page so we can speak freely.”
After reading that, I asked Mode/Switch readers to describe the political dance moves they’ve seen in their workplaces. They didn’t hesitate to share.
Political Approaches That Don’t Work at Work
Conversation-Stoppers : Some people regurgitate what they’ve heard on cable news, or so says one Gen Z restaurant employee. Similarly, a Boomer manager described “self-appointed stewards of truth” who announce which conspiracy theory explains which economic situation. These approaches tend to shut down political exchange rather than extending it.
Side-Steppers: Other people keep their politics private. One of my consultants suggested that politics feels more chill in the workplace today than it did in 2020. But it’s still fraught enough that another reader simply responded to my question by saying, “I’m an avoider!” Still others wish that there weren’t so many avoiders.
Eye-rollers: Some people see themselves as above political disagreement. I learned about this mode from a manager who noticed that some of his coworkers hold others in secret contempt without engaging them in honest conversation.
Assumers: One millennial business owner wrote to say, “I run into people who just assume I’m on the same political side as them and will just carry on saying things I completely disagree with with seemingly no doubt that I feel the same way.”
Pickers & Choosers: Still other employees prioritize one aspect of political identity over another. For instance, some people find it easier to wear a rainbow pin than to talk about racial reparations. Neither of these sets of issues is more important than the other, but neither do they carry the same level of political risk. Think of the George Orwell character in Animal Farm who insisted that everybody’s equal—but some are more equal than others.
Why We Keep Talking These Ways
Let’s concede that these modes make a certain amount of sense. Why? Because…
…we’re digitally overwhelmed. We can’t keep up with all the podcasts, all the newsfeeds, all the posts, all the takes. We use modes to cope with the excess of it all.
…we’re worried about losing our jobs. Miroslav Volf used to compare political exchange to an embrace. You open your arms and wait to see if the other person opens theirs. But all too often opening your arms puts a target on your back.
…we’re all doing too much. The expansion of job descriptions, the hyper-specialization of fields, and the instabilities of institutions compel us to do more than we can or should—with the result that talking about politics feels like an emotional labor we simply don’t have energy for. Sometimes, working remotely means we have little time for meaningful conversation.
What All These Modes Have in Common
Each of these modes, different as they seem from all the others, tends to share more in common than you’d think. It’s really strange. People who trounce others in political conversation and people who avoid political conversation altogether agree on this point: politics is something we do to each other.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Conducting citizenship in the workplace often comes down to the practice of persuasive speech, and persuasion tends to go better, not when we inflict it on each other, but when we make room for people to persuade themselves.
That’s the mode/switch I’m recommending this week: treat workplace citizenship not as something we do to each other but as something we do with each other.
How to Talk Politics at Work
Ask people why they think things. I learned this simple tactic from David McRaney’s book How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. Let’s say you’re convinced that your county should increase the millage for mental health care. But one of your coworkers hates the thought of increasing taxes in any shape or form. Try identifying their political conviction with a “So-what-I’m-hearing-you-say” statement to make sure you understand them. Then ask, “How did you come to believe that?” This question usually sets people back on their heels. “Yeah, where did I get this idea?” Often, their political convictions come from difficult experiences—and hearing those stories will help you to be a compassionate coworker. But knowing those stories will help you share how other people have very different experiences. McRaney argues that the more people probe where their beliefs come from, the more they are willing to evaluate their beliefs’ validity.
Allow people to be inconsistent. I learned this practice from Todd Deatherage of the Telos Group. He suggests that it’s entirely possible to hold onto opposing truths simultaneously. The Telos website includes this wisdom: “As humans, we experience our shared reality differently. Engaging the views and experiences of others, even when they do not reconcile with our own, unlocks the ability to better identify causes of and solutions to otherwise intractable conflict.” It’s not inconsistent for your coworkers to to feel sorrow for Israeli hostages and to advocate for Gazan refugees. We always want to pare things down to one truth or another. But multiple things can be true at the same time, and learning to live somewhere between and among those tensioned truths is a big part of what it means to be a human at work.
Focus on the local rather than the national. Lately, I’ve been going to gatherings with a political organization called Together West Michigan. I’ve been impressed with the ways this association refuses to advocate for particular candidates and instead focuses on issues that matter in the neighborhoods of our county. Not that it’s always easy even to talk about local politics! Recently, someone accused this nonpartisan group of speaking as blue-staters to blue-staters. I felt stunned by this criticism: since when did local civic engagement become anything but a purple-state practice? Still, I get it: political projects have an incredibly short shelf as nonpartisan ideas. All too quickly, a political issue gets lumped in with national parties that, in November, we might not even support.
Remember that few are as extreme as they seem online. There’s a sense in which we always carry multiple identities: we have our public personas and our private personas, and there’s often a gap between them. But when it comes to social media, those identity gaps contort and distort. During the upheaval of 2020, I remember, more than once, seeing truly kind people speaking online in ways I could hardly recognize. I wanted to say, “You two would love each other if you met in real life!” But as Ezra Klein and Salman Rushdie discussed in a recent podcast, “many of us in an internet age…have to contend with our many shadow selves.” And in the remote workplace, where we run into unrecognizable versions of ourselves, employee citizenship entails giving each other grace to our sundry doppelgängers.
My hope is that this week’s newsletter encourages you to speak up politically at work. But I also hope it’s given you a sense of why workplace citizenship takes a lot of practice. It’s hard to be both compelling and curious. If we seek only to be compelling, we fall into coercion. If we treat each other as curiosities, we fall out of community. Keeping those values together on the job is quite a job.
Want to read up more on how Americans think about politics in the workplace? Check out these two studies—and note what has changed even in the course of a couple of years!
