It’s tempting to think of this in terms of Democrats vs Republicans or right vs left, but that’s not really the domain of the most problematic employees. The most problematic employees are the ones who have given up on the notion of reasonable debate or disagreement and instead have become convinced that the other side is committing acts so terrible that fighting them at every juncture is the only acceptable thing to do. Strangely enough, the “other side” isn’t just far-right or fad-left people, it becomes centrists, or people who don’t vote, or people who don’t want to engage in politics at work.
When you’ve reached the point where a small handful of employees are fomenting outrage at their company for not putting a BLM statement on the company Twitter account, for example, the situation has arrived at a “with us or against us” false dichotomy.
Generally, the only way to win with politics at the office is to not play. However, when one side decides that not playing is equivalent to being evil, everyone is forced to play. When everyone is forced to play by a handful of disgruntled employees, everyone loses.
Paying to remove these people from a company makes a lot of sense. If you don’t do something to remove them, the people who are sick of being dragged into political debates at work will slowly diffuse out of the company. The hyper-political employees are a loud minority, but the people who just want to do their jobs and remain professional are very much more common. Don’t let the tail wag the dog.
I think most business owners would say this is not at all sensible. If someone is a troublemaker you don't normally pay them to leave. You fire them. Brian is being very generous here, almost inexplicably so except for the fact that they're based in the Bay Area. Most CEOs would tackle it in two phases:
1. Tell people they may not attempt to bring social activism into the work place.
2. Fire anyone who keeps doing it.
Payments wouldn't enter the picture!
By using the carrot instead of the stick, you protect yourself somewhat from these disgruntled employees tanking your public image.
There was one manager in particular who really tried to do the right thing in supporting this employee. The manager convinced the marketing folks to make a pro-BLM post on LinkedIn, but then this employee got upset that it had not gone far enough and was too weakly worded. A good friend of the employee and former coworker at this company actually called out the company in the comments of the post on LinkedIn for not taking a stronger stand. The manager also convinced the executives to have the company donate money, and this kicked off a broader giving back initiative where they wanted everyone to vote on causes that the company could support in various ways. This caused even more backlash, because it had now lost site of the BLM focus and become a broader thing.
By the end, the company was just cluelessly walking on eggshells with no idea how to not make things worse in their attempts at support. The employee was extremely frustrated, struggled to regain any level of respect for the company and stopped really performing in their job and ended up leaving a couple months later. I still very much believe nobody was in the wrong here, nobody involved was a bad person or even an insensitive person. It just proved to be very difficult to navigate this situation, there were too many ways for it to go wrong and the company didn't handle everything absolutely perfectly and so they just made things worse.
Anyway, in the end I'm very convinced that everyone, including the activist employee, would have been much happier under the model as stated by Coinbase. And even if this person left or had never joined this company to begin with because of that policy, the result would have been very similar in the end, but without the weeks of frustration and stress and lost productivity all around.
This just doesn't strike me as reasonable. The employee was in the wrong. Clearly. Just because the thing you support is a moral and good thing to support doesn't mean you get to foist your activism upon everyone else around you. I care about endangered species conservation - but if I did what this person did and held the organization hostage to my demands I'd be looked at sideways, and rightfully so.
It's not that there's no place for activism in the workplace, it's just that the line should be drawn at the point where it starts harming the organization as a whole.
I honestly do not understand why people socialize at work. Can someone who holds a contrary viewpoint shed some light on why this is so common place in corporate environments? My guess is that it has to do with various kinds of personalities.
I also just happen to share similar interests/perspectives with my boss, and we trust each other a lot. I count him as a friend instead of just a coworker.
I only talk politics obliquely, and tend towards analysis and hearing what people have to say. I try to come off as friendly and tolerant of other perspectives, and my conservative coworkers tend to return the favor.
They released a statement. Kind of a milquetoast, bland statement, but still unambiguously supportive of BLM.
But not supportive enough for some employees, particularly those of color. Lots of complaints, and a lot of non-racial issues started boiling up to the fore as well. They've since amended and re-released the statement to be stronger, and included statements for battered women, Native Americans, and a full-on separate statement for at-risk immigrants.
It's utterly paralyzed the organization -- and is totally unrelated to their primary mission -- and will likely lead to at least one lawsuit. It sounds like a manager or two may be a rebuke or termination as well.
I ultimately agree with the parent and OP -- create a safety valve or squash the discussion, because there is no way to function as an org if you're 10 minutes from screaming at, or stabbing, or suing your coworkers
This. And like another commenter pointed out, it's not unique to one side or the other. Anyone who defines their entire existence in this left/right dichotomy is suffering from media-induced mental illness.
Your company should be 100% political activists, but (at least during work hours) they should be focused on advancing the mission of your organization.
Even within activist groups you have the exact same problem that Joe is talking about, e.g. at some point in the 90s Adbusters went from lobbying against advertising to just generally supporting any leftist cause. And that's why every highway (except in Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine) is still lined with billboards 25+ years later. The only way for an organization to accomplish its mission is to actually focus on solving the specific problem they're trying to solve, not to get distracted by trying to fix every random problem that exists in the world.
There are reasons that might work badly, though. Without the org continuing to generate political pressure, public awareness, or money, the originally-achieved goal state could backslide. But ... change is inevitable. Perhaps at that point you try and get the org back together,; if you can, you can, otherwise you accept the world has moved on.
Easier said than done.
Growing up, politics was private outside of the family dinner table. Any dedication to an injustice or a good cause was done through donating or volunteering. No yard signs, no shouting, no blaming.
I understand that dramatic actions bring attention, but I just hope that we can start focusing more on doing our own part and leading by example rather than preaching and focusing on how much others are doing. This goes for everyone on the modern political spectrum.
It's a nice thought, but my mother in law has original presidential campaign pins and bumper stickers from as far back as the early 60s.
> leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation
and it was actually a case of misguided political activism rather than legitimate whistleblowing? I suppose maybe in slaughterhouses or animal testing laboratories, but definitely not with tech.
> In a highly sensitive market like crypto, you don't want to gain unnecessary regulatory attention, and activists like this will be the first to testify against the company with their biased interpretation of internal operations.
It is very difficult to not read this as "sometimes crypto companies need to break the law to make that cheddar, and you really don't want any of these radical 'companies should obey the law' activists getting in your way."
Assume good faith https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A conservative guy who generated headlines because of being discriminated against because he voted for the GOP?
Also some sort of whistleblower who got fired for speaking out against anti-union activity (but may have been a personal / non-union issue)?
Aside from the combative toxic environment they generate, they are also often the source of disgruntled rogue employees that will generally behave improperly, misrepresent coworkers, leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation.
In a highly sensitive market like crypto, you don't want to gain unnecessary regulatory attention, and activists like this will be the first to testify against the company with their biased interpretation of internal operations.
They're just poison. In the best case scenario, they are just a huge distraction - and in the worst they will cost you 10x their salary in legal drama.