As results of the 2024 election roll in, workplaces “are going to be feeling a lot of emotion, a lot of internal and team conflict,” Tina Beaty said. To diffuse the tension, “We need to give each other a moment of grace and space.”
During the year leading up to the election, incivility increased in society and the workplace, fueled by sensitive topics such as abortion, religion, and politics, said Beaty, chief brand and marketing officer at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
SHRM’s third-quarter Civility Index showed a 27% rise in workers who say clashing political viewpoints are causing incivility on the job. According to the research, U.S. employees collectively experience nearly 200 million acts of incivility daily.
Some 84% of survey respondents said the current political climate is teaching Americans to see one another as the enemy. However, communicators have “the power to shift the tonality and the words that we use” to mitigate the us-versus-them mentality that has pervaded the country, Beaty said.
She was PRSA’s guest for a special Election Day episode of Strategies & Tactics Live on LinkedIn.
“We are hearing from workers and managers [who say] that people are disagreeing so much that they’re asking to come off of projects,” Beaty said. “It’s not just the moment of the heated disagreement between a Republican or Democrat or any other labels that disagree. Hours, days and weeks later, they are not able to come together as colleagues and work on a project. We’re seeing companies lose money because of this lack of productivity.”
According to SHRM research, most employees, about 68%, would like to see their managers do more to promote and model civility in their teams, she said.
A new responsibility for communicators
John Elsasser, editor-in-chief of PRSA’s Strategies & Tactics publication and host of Strategies & Tactics Live, asked what steps business leaders and internal communicators can take to maintain workplace civility in the days after the election.
“The role of internal and external communications is hyper-critical,” she said. “It’s not just about doing what’s right for your company or for your product or service in the market. It’s about every single story, every single email that we as communicators put out there. Are we adding to the incivility, either directly or indirectly, or are we helping to [provide] a peaceful resolution against incivility?”
This new expectation to maintain civil discourse puts more responsibility on the shoulders of communicators, but PR professionals should “step back before we finalize any document and think through whether we have an opportunity to reduce discord, depending on the topic” at hand, she said.
Her organization offers a playbook and other tips for cooling down political disagreements among coworkers. PR professionals who advise CEOs and other business leaders should try to model civility, Beaty said. Setting that example starts with realizing that, as Americans, we have more in common than we might think.
Here, Beaty discusses the implications of an organization that might decide to put into place a no-political-talk-at-work policy:
Watch a playback of the episode here.
[Illustration credit: Danudet.C]
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