Your youngest employees are talking politics at work. What leaders need to know

Leaders: Prepare for more political discussions at the water cooler.

Sixty-one percent of workers say they’ve discussed politics at work in the past year, according to an October survey from Glassdoor. Once taboo, political discussions in the workplace are only expected to grow, says Glassdoor chief economist Aaron Terrazas, with ongoing geopolitical strife and a national election year ahead.

Some employees are more comfortable wading in the political weeds than others, though. The survey revealed that men are more likely than women to engage in political talk with their colleagues, and Gen-Z workers are more eager to join these discussions than their older colleagues.

The vocalness of younger workers shouldn’t be a surprise, Terrazas says. “To some degree, young people have always been politically engaged,” he says, “but the outlets for that engagement and the expectations around that engagement have changed.”

But at the same time, younger workers are less comfortable working in politically diverse workspaces, according to the survey–and that goes all the way to the top. Forty-four percent of Gen-Z workers would consider leaving a job if the CEO supported a political candidate they didn’t agree with.

Executive views could also be a barrier to new candidates, as almost half of Gen-Z workers said a difference with their boss’s politics would keep them from applying to open roles at a company. Age isn’t the only factor here: Hispanic and self-identified Democrats are also more sensitive to whom their senior executives support, according to the survey.

“Companies and leaders have become kind of vocal on these issues, and we’re now starting to recognize that that has downstream consequences for the types of employees that they’re able to retain and engage,” Terrazas says.

In addition to sharing their own political views, company leaders must also carefully consider if and when the company takes a public stance. Overall, workers want to hear from their company: Sixty-four percent said they “feel supported when their company takes a public stance on political issues that they care about,” per the survey.

But their views become more complex depending on the issues. For instance, less than half of workers surveyed think employers should take public stances on issues like abortion, immigration, or LGBTQ rights–some of the most pressing and current political issues of the year.

Thus, there’s a “double-edged sword” present in the data, Terrazas says: Employers know that employees want them to be vocal but, depending on their stance, leaders run the risk of alienating current employees and job candidates.

“Particularly going into 2024, it is important that executives and company leaders have a good pulse on where their employees are on these topics,” he says, “and equally encourage their employee communities to have a learning-focused kind of conversation.”

(c) 2023 Mansueto Ventures LLC; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.