This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Politics in the workplace: how to deal with opposing views

Octavius Black
I was talking to the head of diversity at a very well-known West Coast-based technology company. He said, “One thing I cannot do is work with Republicans.” I said, “Oh my goodness, you are the head of diversity and inclusion at this major global organisation. Is that really the case? You’re ruling out half the American population, that people you could work with.” And so we find time and again that diversity and inclusion can mean only certain factors, be it race and gender, but not a range of other things that’s just as important, like social class.

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to working it with me, Isabel Berwick. Today we’re talking about the politicisation and polarisation of the workplace. It’s become a hot topic in recent years, and one survey found that four in 10 US employees have left a job because they feel their values are stigmatised. We saw many CEOs putting black squares on their social media accounts after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. And they’ve made very public commitments to diversity and inclusion. But what’s driving that change? Black Lives Matter was the spark for a lot of this, but what’s the wider trend going on? And what will that mean for us and our workplaces in the next few years? To find out more, I spoke to Octavius Black. He’s CEO and co-founder of MindGym, which uses behavioural science techniques to improve culture and performance for companies and their staff. Essentially, Octavius is an expert in how people behave at work and he sees firsthand how that’s changing.

Octavius Black
I think there’s two slightly separate issues here. One is the politicisation of the workplace and the other is the movement towards greater diversity and inclusion. On politicisation, the main driving force in most cases is employees. There’s an element in some consumer-facing brands that they feel it’s important to have a position in order to generate better consumer interest. And arguably on the response to Ukraine, that was more driven by consumers than, for example, Black Lives Matter or Roe vs Wade. But in most issues, it’s employees and the very tight labour market that we have at the moment, and the shortage of skills which is driving CEOs and their co-leaders to make statements that will appeal to the employee base.

Isabel Berwick
So I know you talk to a lot of CEOs and leaders off the record or privately. What are their real views on what’s going on in workplaces?

Octavius Black
Well, their real views are diversification is incredibly important and they recognise that partly because of a talent shortage and also because of the variety of views and opinions. What they also suspect is that what they’re doing to help improve diversification isn’t actually working, and therefore they’re slightly cynical about all the initiatives around unconscious bias training and ERGs. Is this really making us more inclusive? And to be honest, they’re quite right to be sceptical. We published a report in 2012 saying it didn’t work. Unfortunately, no one was listening at the time, but now I’m very glad to say that they are. And you often get a backfire effect. It can make things worse, or in most cases makes no difference at all. $29bn a year is spent on diversity and inclusion training, most of which is unconscious bias training. What is good news is that certain organisations have spotted this and are changing the conversation. So that’s where we recognise there are certain things that we’re born with or had in early life that make life harder. So if we really wanted to build inclusion, we probably measured people’s Ace scores —-adverse childhood experiences —and they’re a very reliable predictor of life chances. Were you put up in a household with alcohol abuse or where you have a particularly ugly divorce or extreme poverty, and therefore we help people set up in those situations to compensate for that in the workplace.

Isabel Berwick
So that’s a really, a deep dive into people’s pasts. Are people happy to give up their data in that way or is it more subtle than that?

Octavius Black
I think it’s a bit more subtle than that. I think it’s where we start to recognise that there are many factors that help and hinder, and the more we can do to use the ones that have helped us — I was born a man, that potentially is an advantage — and to recognise that those hinder me and probably others have got those just as much, if not more. Then I start to take responsibility for building an inclusive workplace. Once you move from it being someone else’s problem to be my responsibility, then you start to build inclusion.

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Isabel Berwick
I’m joined from New York by my FT colleague, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the FT’s US business editor. Andrew, welcome to Working It.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Thank you, Isabel. Great to be here.

Isabel Berwick
You’ve been reporting on the corporate world for a long time. Are we really entering a new age of very polarised and divided workplaces, and why might that be?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Well, that’s certainly what I’m hearing here from US CEOs and the people who advise them. And I think there are two different factors going on. One is that the outside world has become more politicised. You know, here in the US, the Trump election of 2016; in the UK, the Brexit vote were moments that just galvanised the population into speaking about politics, obsessing about politics in a way that they haven’t necessarily done in previous years. And then I think there is that other issue that Octavius touched on, which is the way in which a new generation is looking to bring their whole selves to work, as the cliché goes, and just doesn’t have the same barriers between their work life and their home life, and maybe the pandemic has also accentuated that.

Isabel Berwick
I was also interested in what Octavius was saying about adverse childhood experiences, or Ace, which is something I hadn’t heard of until a couple of years ago. But now I’m seeing it everywhere and it’s coming into the corporate environment. Do you think we should consider people’s adverse childhood experience when we’re managing them at work?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Yes, I’ve heard very few people coming up with solutions for doing that at scale. I think that comes in more to the individual conversations that managers have with members of their teams.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. And I’m interested also in this backlash against unconscious bias training because Octavius is obviously ahead of the curve if he published a report 10 years ago saying it didn’t work. But I mean, people are still doing it, aren’t they?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Well, if CEOs that Octavius speaks to are slightly cynical about unconscious bias training, then I think the cynicism among their teams goes much, much deeper. I think there is a lot of eye-rolling at best in the workforce when people are dragged along to unconscious bias training. Polling we see suggests that, particularly on the right of the political debate in the US, a lot of people feel that this is in some way worse than eye-roll worthy. This is in some way preaching at them. It’s lecturing them to be something that they’re not.

Isabel Berwick
Yes. It’s sort of counterproductive, isn’t it? And something I’ve noticed in recent years is that when people make missteps, particularly leaders, perhaps they say something that’s a bit off or clumsily worded that can go viral on social media. And it’s a part of what’s often called “cancel culture” and people do lose their jobs. So I asked Octavius: is there a more subtle way that we can think about making the distinction between missteps at work and outright discriminatory comments?

Octavius Black
In our report on the Get It Together, we have four cornerstones that should be the bedrock of any contemporary diversity and inclusion strategy. And one of them is forbid and forgive. And if you only forbid, you create a culture of one’s walking on eggshells and you end up making some terrible decisions. But if you forgive everything, you’re too permissive. You haven’t got any controls either. So you need to find the right balance between those two. But quite often the world has moved on and people haven’t necessarily caught up. And therefore helping people recognise, learn from their mistakes is far more effective than immediately forbidding and leading to their removal. I mean, three years ago more CEOs were fired for ethical and behavioural transgressions than for financial underperformance, which showed it is at its peak. I think we’re now seeing a much greater level of willingness to learn and to adapt, and organisations having more confidence in people to be able to change.

Isabel Berwick
And I wanted to talk to you about what’s often called productive disagreement or, you know, bringing colleagues together who have different views. And I obviously spent far too much time on LinkedIn ’cause I’m always seeing posts that are, you know, talking about “Let’s talk things through; we can all make it better”. But in my limited experience, people’s minds don’t change, and it quickly gets heated. Are these things actually worth doing?

Octavius Black
I mean, we should be really careful about forcing people to debate issues that aren’t work-related, but really encourage them to debate different views that are work-related. Should we launch this product? Should we move ahead with this investment in this bit of technology? These are exactly the things.

So we need to get comfortable with conflict and comfortable with dialogue and dialect, but resist the idea that there are a whole range of issues that aren’t work-related that we should bring into the workplace and debate that. And what we want to do is to create workplaces that are safe spaces. And by that I mean that you don’t end up having to have conversations that might cause offence to you or to somebody else, or you just say something you might later regret. So this is perfectly fine to have walking in the park after on the way home from work or wherever else you might happen to be. But it is not right to have it in the workplace.

So to a degree, this has been a consequence of being in an economically prosperous stage where actually the labour market has been very tight. And as we move to economically more challenging environment and probably a slightly different labour market, we may find that the priorities in businesses change somewhat.

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Isabel Berwick
Andrew, I know you’ve written about companies where they’ve imposed a sort of explicit outright ban on political talk. I think Coinbase and Basecamp are two recent ones. Do you think bans can work? There was a backlash in those companies, wasn’t there?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
These are two businesses which around the time of the 2020 election told their workforce that they shouldn’t be discussing the extremely polarising politics of the moment. We’ve also seen companies like Goodyear Tire & Rubber tell their workforce not to wear political clothing like a Trump-supporting Make America Great Again hat to the workplace. And that is — particularly in a country which cares about free speech — seen as an infringement on people’s free speech, and it tends to go badly. I think these top-down solutions, which are imposed often by CEOs rather than by individual managers, very rarely will work.

I think the CEOs I’ve spoken to who feel that they have handled it better are the ones who, after a big fraught event — be it an election, the Brexit vote, the murder of George Floyd or any of these other big sort of flare-up moments that we’ve had in recent years — have actually pulled their teams together, either in person when they’ve been able to do that or on a giant Zoom call. And they’ve told the teams, “I’m listening. What should I know?” And that if you can set boundaries on these conversations where people can be respectful with each other and actually hear out the other side and understand this is not a debate that one side is gonna win. This is the discussion where we try to understand each other better. Those conversations can be more productive.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I think that’s perhaps what Octavius was alluding to when he talks about safe spaces at work. Do you think bringing your whole self to work is a phase that will pass, or do you think it’s here to stay?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
I think there’s a reason that companies have encouraged this. There was in the old, very compartmentalised world, a pretty strict division between home and work. And there was such a range of subjects on which you could be accused of being unprofessional if you talked about them. You know, having to leave early for the kids’ school play or something like that was often seen as being less than committed to the workplace. So I think there are definite advantages in this drift towards encouraging people to be themselves at work. I think though, there needs to be a fundamental understanding that the workplace is not where we’re going to settle all of our differences as a society.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, and I’m interested in this current tough economic climate and after, as we’ve mentioned, a long pandemic where many people rethought their lives. I asked Octavius whether priorities for staff are changing and maybe even moving away from identity and political issues and perhaps inward.

Octavius Black
I think they are much more interested in areas like wellbeing. So we predicted a wellbeing precipice initially after the pandemic in which everyone got involved and wanted to contribute, and then we saw a massive drop-off in wellbeing. And what we’ve discovered is most of the wellbeing initiatives that organisations do actually have zero impact on BMI, sleep, physical health, mental health. But there are things that companies can do that will make an enormous difference. And it’s all about integrating wellbeing into the flow of work.

Isabel Berwick
So not just offering an app.

Octavius Black
The apps don’t do much, I’m afraid, and in studies it show not to make any difference at all. We looked at one study of a big organisational retailer with warehouses and 20 per cent of the organisation went through up to 12 different wellbeing programmes, and on 78 out of 80 measures they were no better off than the people who had not been through those wellbeing programmes. So what we’re currently doing doesn’t work. But what does work, interestingly enough, is five conditions that if you create then you increase people’s wellbeing. One, for example, is certainty. So in a world where so much is uncertain, what the employer can do is have bosses who don’t change their minds the whole time or are very moody. And that greatly affects decisions. By focusing on what’s gonna make a difference to make us more inclusive, rather than what I need to do to win awards or to do virtue signalling or to be shown to be have made an effort. And as in so much of the people agenda at work, there’s a big gap between what looks good and what actually has an impact.

Isabel Berwick
Looking ahead a bit in five years’ time, I don’t think workforces are going to be any less polarised. There seems to be a bit of a crisis of leadership at the moment. What qualities are gonna set leaders right for this future?

Octavius Black
You may be right that society will be no less polarised, but I certainly hope workplaces are and I think leaders can do an enormous amount to contribute to that. And so we advise CEOs very much in the language that they use and how they frame the conversation. I was in a meeting the other day and the gentleman at the beginning of the meeting said, “I have to leave early because I have to go and babysit”. And you can’t really imagine a woman saying that she had to leave early to go and do childcare. So I said, “That’s very interesting. Whose child are you going to babysit?” He said, “Well, my own”. (Laughter) I said, “In England, we call that being a father”. (Isabel laughs) Everybody laughed and it was just also then that he realised he’d slightly overstepped. So it is quite often ways we can notice and record and pivot the conversation without having to make an enormous hullabaloo about it.

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Isabel Berwick
Andrew, do you think changes in language will help leaders make workplaces less polarised? I’d certainly like to see less jargon.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
I do. I think what’s been missed in a lot of these discussions coming down from on high is that leaders shouldn’t really be trying to solve all of society’s problems inside their own workplaces. What they should be trying to solve is tensions within those workplaces which are actually holding the organisation back and most importantly, leaving some of their employees feeling at a disadvantage or worse.

Isabel Berwick
And I also wonder, going into this sort of very tough economic climate as we are, I wonder if very basic issues of pay and conditions will start to come through as really important ones for everyone as we hit hard times ahead. Are you starting to hear that?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Absolutely. I mean, that’s what you’d call table stakes. There is a series of surveys by an organisation called Just Capital which asks people what’s getting in the way of you trusting business. And the number one issue year after year is, do these businesses pay a fair wage to their teams? The number one consideration that most people have is, am I being paid fairly? Am I being treated as fairly as the person I sit next to? And I think if you haven’t got that right, then all of these niceties about the kind of culture you’re trying to create and the kind of safe spaces you’re trying to create for difficult discussions are slightly irrelevant. If you can’t show that equity is baked into your thinking about who you hire and how you reward them and how you promote them, then the rest is really a bit of a waste of time.

Isabel Berwick
Andrew, thanks so much. I’ve been quite concerned about this sort of idea of polarisation in the workplace for some time, and I’ve noticed that a lot of diversity efforts are not bringing everyone along with them. And there’s a big question mark about how we address that. You know, those of us who are interested in advancing equity in the workplace, how do we do it? What works? And some of the things that Andrew and Octavius were talking about there seem small, but they might make a big difference. Things like setting boundaries about what you can talk about at work, trying to encourage debate about work-related things like, should we introduce this new product? Get people to understand that it’s okay to disagree, but maybe set a limit on what that disagreement can be about. And also for leaders to be listening more. We did hear a lot about active listening in the pandemic, but I wonder how much of that has been implemented. So, you know, small changes. But yeah, this is a huge long-term demographic shift driven by younger people coming into the workforce. It’s not gonna go away anytime soon. And I’m really fascinated to see where this goes.

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Thanks to Octavius Black and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson for this episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And please do get in touch with us. We’re at workingit@ft.com or I’m @IsabelBerwick on Twitter. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our Working It newsletter. We’ve got behind-the-scenes extras from the podcast and stories you won’t see anywhere else. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. Working It is produced by Novel for the Financial Times. Thanks to the producer Flo de Schlichting, executive producer Jo Wheeler, production assistance from Amalie Sortland and mix from Chris O’Shaughnessy. From the FT we have editorial direction from Manuela Saragosa. Thanks for listening.

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