Navigating Politics in the Workplace: Preparing for the 2024 Election

With the 2024 election approaching, there are bound to be political conversations that enter the workplace. As HR leaders, we are tasked with proactively addressing the potential impact of political discourse on workplace dynamics. This roundtable discussion will explore what to expect during election season, tactics for maintaining a respectful and inclusive work environment, benefits to support employees during a highly emotional time, and communication strategies necessary to navigate this politically charged period. Join us to share insights, learn from peers, and develop a plan to manage political discussions at work effectively. What you'll learn Preparing for the Election: Understand the potential impact of the upcoming election on workplace culture and employee relations. Benefits Considerations: Explore benefit-related strategies that can support employee well-being during politically sensitive times, such as mental health resources and leave policies. Communication Tactics: Develop communication strategies to foster an inclusive environment where employees feel respected, regardless of their political beliefs.

Transcription:

Ilana Mauskopf (00:09):

Hi everyone. I met a lot of you. Thanks for joining. My name's Ilana. I run the people team at Nava Benefits. Many of you have met Ed one of the hosts of the conference and we hosted the fireside chat earlier, so I get the pleasure of working with him along with some other folks here. I also get to choose our own benefits at a benefits company, so no pressure. And I've also had a lot of conversations internally and with our community on politics in the workplace. So excited to lead this round table to share some insights and learn from all of you. This is meant to be time for all of us. I'm just the facilitator. So let's see if we can get my slides maybe.

(00:58):

So the way that this is going to work is I'm going to start with a 10 minute introduction to share some context. Here we go. We'll split out into breakout groups for 25 minutes of discussion, and then we'll end with sharing and learning from each other what you've all discussed. So context, why we're all here. This is probably obvious to some of you, but thinking about the potential impacts of politics in the workplace, it's a really emotionally charged time. There can be conflict, polarization, and exclusion when talking about politics in the workplace, as I'm sure many of you have dealt with. It can also impact productivity. There's the endless news cycle, people checking what's going on and lots going on this past election cycle as well. And then there could also be an impact on emotional wellbeing and mental health, which we'll talk more about.

(01:46):

So as HR people, we need to balance workplace politics with also maintaining a healthy company culture and values, freedom of expression, and maintaining a safe and respectful workforce. No easy task. I think of this as really three key pillars as HR folks that we can do to support employees and the company at this time. One is really around preparation and policies. So thinking about how the election is really going to impact your specific workforce, what things might come up and making the policies to help support your workforce too is really around leveraging benefits. It's an emotionally charged time. We have great benefits. Let's share how folks can use them during the time of need. And then really just focusing on communication around policies, resources, et cetera. So I'm going to dive into these a bit more and then during the discussion we'll break out and talk more about them amongst each other.

(02:42):

So first is preparation and policies. When I was first thinking about the election, like oh, the election day, but really there's a lead up, the election and the aftermath and each has its own challenges. So during the lead up, you'll have folks reacting to the news, you'll have heightened advocacy, you'll have politics potentially coming up in client conversations, right? If there's a debate, it's going to come up naturally. The next thing in the morning client meeting. And then during the election, folks are going to need time off to vote. People are going to be monitoring election results. We all remember following the news and updates and there might be potential delays. We might've all blocked this out of our memory, but four years ago in the election, we didn't get the results overnight. It took a long time and it's a very stressful and distracting period.

(03:26):

So there could be a distracted workforce for maybe not just the day of the actual election, but over the coming weeks. And then there's also the aftermath. You're going to have happy and upset employees. It's a really divided political landscape right now. So that means people are going to be happy and people are going to be upset. And there also might be political implications on your business that you're going to have to deal with. So when thinking about all of that, you want to put that together and think about how it might impact your workforce and come up with a policy. And I think there's really important considerations to think about. And when I say policy, it can be as simple as a casual talk track or an actual written policy At Nava, we just talked about all this stuff in a town hall kind of in a casual way just to address it.

(04:10):

So you're going to want to think about your company culture and values. So how does your policy align with your values? Is a great place to start. You're going to want to think about legal compliance. What are any state and federal regulations that you have to comply with? You want to think about your time off to vote policy. You're going to want to think about inclusivity and respect. So how do we make sure we're being respectful of folks who are bound to have different political opinions? You're going to want to think about different forms of political expression. So it's not only speech, it's social media, it is wearing different logos on shirts and posting on slack, things like that. You're going to want to think about workplace boundaries. So is it okay to talk about politics on Slack? Is it okay to talk about politics in a work meeting?

(04:57):

Is it okay to get people together during working hours? It okay to talk to clients? There's lots of different mediums and you're going to want to address that as well as employee wellbeing, which we'll talk more about conflict management and resolution. So who should folks go to if and when something comes up as well as resources. How do we have respectful conversation? How do we agree to disagree? Things like that. So leveraging benefits as a second pillar for HR folks between assassination attempt, I think this should be attempts a little old slides, president Biden's campaign exit and seemingly endless political commentary, emotions are really high and never changing. And given that a third of our lives are spent at work, these emotions are bound to bleed into work hours. So there's a really big impact on wellness. Nearly three quarters of respondents to this American Psychiatric Association survey said that they're feeling anxious about the election and I'm sure many of us are too.

(05:56):

And when asked about lifestyle factors that are potentially impacting health, most adults said stress and sleep, which can take a toll on your productivity at work as well. And then on top of that, among adults who have mental healthcare this year, more than half are worried about losing access to mental healthcare and are also 39% are worried about losing their health insurance. So it's like a double whammy of one, the stress of this and then worried about your own insurance and how you're going to have care moving forward depending on the election. So it's really important time to leverage your benefits. And I think there are four things to cover here. One is just reminding folks about the amazing or the coverage that you might have and access to doctors, psychologists, therapists, maybe virtual care. Your carriers might also offer proprietary mental health resources like stress, anxiety, self management.

(06:50):

If you don't know what your carriers offer, good time to ask your broker and they can get the info for you. I know budgets are tight this year, so there's also a lot of amazing free benefits that we can just educate employees about. The Elections Group put together an amazing wellness resilience toolkit for elections officials, but it's actually a great resource for anyone. There's free meditation apps, they use Dharma Seed. We can encourage movement by sending out desk exercises and getting creative. There's also amazing national and local hotlines like the Suicide Prevention Hotline, California Crisis Hotline. And then a great time to also remind folks about mental wellness benefits that you might offer. Benefits like Lyra, spring Health, Talkspace, Headspace Calm or your EAP. Again, just bringing benefits to the attention of folks when they really need them. And then it's all really about education.

(07:45):

So reminding folks how to find network therapists through companies like Headway or Alma reminding folks about PTO policy and importance of taking breaks. You can come up with wellness initiatives like walking Challenges like we heard about earlier today, getting out in Nature challenges and you can also have incentives to try and get people to participate in those, but as you might already have your benefits set in place. So it's just a really great time to remind folks and kind of brag about some of those benefits that you offer and get folks the help that they need. So last pillar is really around communication. To kind of wrap this all up, really important to proactively set clear guidelines before it becomes a problem. Acknowledge that this can be an emotionally charged time at Nava. That's kind of how we started the conversation and I think it really resonated with people just to say, we hear you.

(08:40):

We're in this kind of all going through it at the same time and just acknowledging that it's going on. Reminding folks about PTO policies, communicating with their managers and offering any support resources to them who are going to be supporting your employees, and then ensuring that folks know who to go to if conflict arises so that they feel comfortable and prepared. So with those three pillars, we're going to break out into discussion and learn from each other. I split it out into three different topics based on preparation and policy, supportive benefits and communication. Again, this is all time for you. These are guiding questions. You also don't need to go through them. Bring up what is top of mind for you, what are the challenges that you're facing? What do you want to learn from your peers? And I know we're not all HR leaders, but I think getting the employee perspective is really helpful too. So great place to transparently share what you're going through and what it's like from an employee perspective. And then at the end going to ask one volunteer from each group to share one to two minutes of the key learnings from that group so that we can also learn from each other and hear what's top of mind and what you've thought about.

(09:51):

Everyone could start off with intros, that would be great. Share your name, role, company size as well as one concern about the impacts of politics in the workplace that you're thinking about or navigating. And I will pop into the different groups to learn from you all. How Fox. I'm going to have you guys go first. Can I have one of you go first? No pressure. Do you want to go first? I'll make them go first. You go second. Can you kick us off? Can you kick us off? Yeah. Alright. All right everyone, hold on. Collect yourself. I do. I wasn't ready. Alright everyone. I know we could have endless discussions on this topic. We're going to kick it off with Nick and then go around to each table. So

Audience Member Nick (11:02):

Awesome.

(11:02):

Hi everyone. I'm Nick. Can you hear me? Cool. Alright. Hi. We were talking about potentially just keeping politics out of the workplace as a whole and really not just bringing it up but understanding that it's so relevant in all of our lives. A million dollar question is do you take preemptive measures to get out in front and bring it up or is that going to throw gasoline on a fire that's already just pretty intense and everyone's always thinking about it on a daily basis right now? Another way is just reinforcing company values. So bringing up company values, keeping in mind hopefully you have good values as a company, but as a way to reinforce it. Just remind employees to respect one another and bring up politics that way. But that's kind of it.

Ilana Mauskopf (11:55):

Thanks Nick.

Audience Member Nick (11:56):

Cool.

Ilana Mauskopf (12:00):

Yeah.

Audience Member 2 (12:02):

Hello. So we talked about some of the common challenges that employees face, kind of like she had outlined the pre during and following elections and some of the mental health challenges that one of our individuals here, their employees had faced even after the election, kind of needing some time off beyond just a couple days, really feeling that stress. So I think in terms of the resources, that's very key. We also talked about the myths of freedom of speech in the workplace, the difference between the public sector and the private sector. I think there's some challenges there.

(12:48):

Two of us are in the HR space and so freedom of speech and having a manager just out there asserting their political position is a challenge and can impact their ability to lead and manage employees. So we talked a little bit about that, talked about what happens outside of work on social media and Twitter and those sorts of things if people are sharing those views outside of work and how that might apply back in the office. So tying it back to our policies, code of conduct, things of that nature. And then last communications being proactive with employee communication around being respectful in the workplace. And then tying into that some, we kind of came up with the idea of sharing a manager communication, reinforcing our resources and reinforcing our expectations of managers and how they need to mitigate things that pop up. Thank you. I love a microphone.

Ilana Mauskopf (14:03):

Oh, is it loud? You were great. Thanks for sharing. I think you bring up an important topic that we didn't bring up about power dynamics, the manager employer relationship. Definitely important to keep top of mind. What about this table?

Audience Member Mary (14:20):

Okay. Hi, is this okay on? Alright, so my name is Mary and I work at the University of Minnesota. We have about 25,000 employees and I think we'll just kind of start with a little story about the U of M experience that the table thought I should share this. I dunno. So one thing that's different for us is we're university and you really want your US universities to encourage open dialogue and expression, freedom of speech. And so we have our employees that we prefer them to be a little bit more quiet on these topics at work. So it's not disruptive to their coworkers, but you have these students that are going to protest, they're going to do whatever they want, it's really healthy. They're finding who they are at this point in their lives. So you want that. Then we get a lot of visitors to campus.

(15:11):

Some want to get a little bit more problematic cause a little trouble. And so we've been planning for months because our whole thing is we don't want to be Columbia. They had this issue last year and so we have a lot of anxiety around what's going to happen on campus and college campuses are saying this fall is going to be worse than anything that we saw all last year. So we're prepared and we have policies on what you can do and when you cross the line. And so we have more policies on that than a lot of other places. So we've reread them, freshen them up, then turn them into a little cartoon handout almost of do and don't. So they're kind of little pictures that people can have posted in hallways and they're online and so forth and a lot of planning's gone on with that.

(16:04):

And then it even gets into the place for us, we are not going to arrest our students. Things like these conversations are kind of big, but the thing that the team was talking about at our table was it's just unfortunate that people, students and employees and people are all holding so much more anger and they're holding so much fear. And then we started talking about how social media, we all know we're all at that place because of it probably and only getting one side of an opinion and how hard you have to work to get anything good, any good message from the other side of the aisle. And that's not right because there's great messages on both sides. So we're just talking about how social media has helped with this polarization problem and the anger and the fear. And then we talked too about our resilience because we've seen crazy elections like we talked about the gore bush election with the dangling chads and we didn't know for weeks and we all made it.

(17:13):

And there's maybe a younger generation that hasn't, they don't know that or someone said they don't know how the country came together and unified around 9 11. We have people in the workforce that they don't remember nine 11, they weren't old enough to remember it. And that was a great example of how we came together. So there's just moments like that where you've got generational differences and people's ability to navigate through it because they know we've come out okay before. So then we talked about mental health resources and not only for our employees but for dependents. We talked about even older employees who have young kids who maybe have more anxiety over the election, how they could get plugged in with groups. A couple of us work with Lyra. So we're talking about how Lyra can come in and they've got resources around election anxiety.

(18:09):

I can plug in with a therapist. You can plug kids in, your younger kids in with a therapist if they're worried about the outcome of the election. Then the last thing, and we thought this was kind of a mic drop moment, so someone at the table said, it's really interesting because you got all this emphasis on DEI and what is different for each person and what we bring and who we are. And we would never come into work and have, let's use the word such. Well hopefully you would not come to work and have a hatred for someone of a different religion yet we might have that politically, we just might have that. And why do politics get a different rule, apply to them for DEI than race, religion, gender under. So I don't know, it's too bad we probably didn't have more building conversations around equity and inclusion companies that have maybe had those have a little bit more muscle around how to talk about things and understand who people are and why they have the opinions they have. But we're probably a little late if we haven't done that. It might be kind of working from a place of deficit maybe a little bit.

Ilana Mauskopf (19:27):

Thanks for sharing lots of hot topics there. And I love the idea of the do and don't list. Talking about politics in the work or not talking about politics in the work is such a gray area of what's political, what's not. So I think that's a super helpful resource and I'll pass it over to you guys.

Audience Member Germany (19:44):

Hey guys, my name is Germany and main key that we shared here was communication and just being proactive, how to be reactive and send out that communication to our employees and the expectations. And if you have a policy in place, don't talk about it in the workplace. And then just being respectful. This first table here really hit literally everything that we talked about. I think we were all a part of the same group, but social media, respectful policies, and really just the communication, how we even type up that communication or how we deliver it to our employees to make sure that we stay neutral so that it doesn't seem like we're swaying one way or the other, but just reminding them of the policies, the importance and things like that.

Ilana Mauskopf (20:38):

Awesome. Yeah, we talked about, well the timing of sending a message is that after certain news comes up and what kind of message does that send you don't realize how complicated communication can be until you're actually about to send a message. Yeah. Last but not least,

Audience Member Kristen Reed (20:55):

Hi, Kristen Reed with UC, San Diego. Interesting. Our table is half public sector and half roughly private sector. And the mic dropped rolled to our table for a couple of things. I'll explain that in a moment. We took a slightly different take on what I've heard from other tables and that was kind of the deal we're making with the future of work. The deal that we're making is that we bring our whole selves to work and we have much more flexibility choice. We want to be authentic. That doesn't mean that we can just check some of our feelings at the door. We can't suppress some of the things, what we're feeling deep down about our beliefs, our values, our views, different things. So what do we do about that at a public university? We're grappling with that same balance of free speech, freedom of speech, and also respect and order and how do you have that happen?

(21:50):

I mean us many had quite a difficult summer around that. But then how do you not put so many policies in place or make it a company problem when it really has to start with each of us individually? And how do we, you think about at least in organization dynamics, the individual, then the team, then the organization. And we have to know ourselves first and be comfortable with that. And how do we start to build understanding because we'll never have the same beliefs nor should we in a well-functioning democracy. But how should we each understand individually our beliefs, our responses, our biases, things like that. And then to be able to have the conversation and make space to say it's okay, but here's some rules maybe around how to, or here's some great tips around constructive or very candor around that. So I'm going to pass it to my table mate to add a couple of things.

Speaker 7 (22:48):

Well, I think this has been really interesting and I think for all of us, it's good to appreciate. I don't think we've ever seen such a tense time in politics probably in the US and it's for sure one of the most tense. And so it's not like every other election. And I think all of us realize that the US plays a huge part in the world as a whole. And ultimately what we were talking about really is what do we want work to be like? And I think all of us agree that one day we want to be our authentic selves and to be ourselves. And so obviously that's not something that we achieve in a week and we kind of get it done, but we kind of have the idea of where we want to go.

(23:33):

So the important thing is not just to set a couple of rules, which could be a short term solution, but ultimately it's like how do you sort of go deeper within yourself to understand this is how you treat people, this is how you interact with people and not judge other people based on their beliefs, but understanding that everyone has their own background, their own beliefs, and so they become this kind of person. And I think what the real problem is, is that we have all these loaded emotions towards I believe this and if you believe something else, I already attach all these sort of things towards you and I almost dehumanize you. You're no longer a human to me or just something else. And so I think it's going much deeper about if we're all one sort of, which we always forget, but we're just one big family.

(24:22):

Ultimately we're all here together. And of course we have these political choices, but ultimately we're all human. And I think having that understanding and having that respect towards other people is the baseline for you to be able to have a normal conversation and be like, okay, you have a different opinion. Let me understand why do you have this different opinion? And it's just a conversation. And of course it's hard to not have emotional load because there's a lot of important topics. But I think the more you sort of dive deeper in yourself and understand yourself and other people and you respect other people, it becomes easier to just be your authentic self, to have normal conversations and build ultimately a culture where people can be understanding of others.

Audience Member Kristen Reed (25:08):

I forgot one more quick. You brought up, and this reminds me of as we've been talking about multiple generations in the workplace. And this would be a great opportunity I think for companies to tap into. I'm going to use age baby boomers or a little bit earlier, and those who remember the tumultuous decades of the sixties and 1970 up to 75 when Ford attempts were made on Ford's life. And just to give us some perspective on what was it like during those very difficult times, tumultuous for different reasons. So that might be a great way to just bring some of your organization together and have people just learn about each other and learn different ways to interact across those generations.

Ilana Mauskopf (25:50):

Thanks. I think a great way to end thinking about respect and learning from each other. And then I guess the last thing I'll say is let's continue this conversation. We talked so much about supporting employees, but we're also going through the stress of election and we're having to deal with other people's emotions. So let's have this be the start of the conversation, connect with folks on LinkedIn, let's all learn from each other and be there for each other as we just get even further into election season. And feel free to reach out directly to me if you ever want to chat as well. Really appreciate everyone joining and being so open and hopefully everyone left with one nugget that they can take to make the election season a little bit better.