Episode 94: Political Tension in the Workplace: When and How to Address the Team about Political Disagreements

Paul: In this episode, we’re talking about political tensions in the office. There are some legal considerations. There’s actually some regulations out there, and it tracks with everything that we’ve told you about HR in the past, which is for every problem you’re trying to solve, there’s probably some law or regulation that you need to take into account. So we put this podcast together to discuss the challenges that we’re all facing. We are seeing lots and lots of discourse and discord between employees over the current political situation. I hate to say it, but what’s going to happen is it’s going to keep going. So even after the election, all the way up to the inauguration and beyond, we’re probably going to have this stuff going on. It is impacting people and it is making it hard at work sometimes. And we have a few thoughts on that for everybody. Hope you enjoy.

Voice Over: You’re about to listen to an episode of What the Hell Just Happened. Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss interesting HR topics and solve some of our listeners’ submitted questions.

Paul: And occasionally I’ll go off topic to talk about whatever I want. Think barbecue, space exploration, growing your business. The things that interest all of us.

Paul: Hey, in this episode we’re going to talk about a pretty hot topic. It’s political speech in the workplace. We’re gonna talk about what you can and can’t do as a manager, as an owner. It’s as complicated as you might think it is, but I think we can give you some really good guidance.
So what the hell just happened is we’ve got an employee at a practice and she’s posting some pretty inflammatory stuff and the other employees are complaining and they’ve come to the owner and said, ‘You got to do something about this’. I’m joined by Jeff from our marketing department today. So I brought Jeff in because he’s an HR novice. He’s learning about what CEDR does and I think he also has some kind of cool stuff to add to this conversation.

Paul: Hey everybody, welcome to today’s podcast. As I told you in the introduction, and Jeff’s with me. Sometimes I do the podcast where I like to have is kind of an HR novice. Jeff, how do you feel about that label?

Jeff: I feel great about it because I really don’t know anything and it’s a great opportunity for me to learn.

Paul: Okay so that, you’ve just pointed something great out here and something for people take out there who have a business, who have managers, who have employees. I like to involve different people on different teams and all aspects of the operations of CEDR, so that for instance, you’re in our marketing, you’re on our marketing team. You need to know as much about the company as you can practically understand, and generally that can take quite a bit of time. You know, there’s just a lot of different departments, people doing things. At some point we just want to start involving people across the board, across all departments. So in this case, you’re in here and today’s podcast, by the way, everybody is going to be a little bit lesson-y. Meaning there’s going to be a bit of a lesson in it. Also, if you hear panting in the background, it’s not Jeff.

Jeff: Not yet.

Paul: Who is this?

Jeff: He’s my dog Ghost. He’s a Siberian husky. So he’s joining us today, too.

Paul: There’s this principle that we have here at CEDR when we’re meeting. By the way, this has nothing to do today’s podcast. I just want to share. It’s called positive focus. I learned a long time ago. Jeff, the basic principle is, it’s a little hard to go into a session where you’re wanting to focus on things that are working or things that are not working. So we’ll just call it the morning huddle. That happens in some practices where you need to be critical, a little bit critical about what’s not working so that you can make the corrections and the tendency is to turn it into this….it’s an HR term, into just a bitching session. You know, everybody’s complaining about what’s not working and so you want to offset that and start the meeting in a different way and really end the meeting in a different way. And we use something called positive focus. One of my positive focuses would be that people quickly learn when they get a job offer here that they can bring their dog to work. And it’s really good for us, and it’s okay to have a dog panting in the background.

Jeff: It’s nice. It definitely is one of my positive focuses being here as well. It brings the entire environment to a state of calm and serenity when you get to pet other people’s dogs. It’s really great.

Paul: I know. And they all learn who’s got the best treats and they kind of walk around the office.
So anyway, I will start with that positive focus and we’ll end this, well I’ll try to remember to end this with a positive focus as well. Okay. So on something a little less positive, something we’re gonna have to talk about. What the hell just happened is that an employee somewhere in someone’s office has been on Facebook and they have opinions about politics. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, Jeff, because a lot of misunderstandings out there among people in the world as to who has rights, where Second Amendment rights, who can say what, when and how. And when we look into CEDR’s ticketing system and into our community, we see a lot of these requests coming in from our members, and those requests are to our experts to say, ‘How can I handle this? I have this concern, I have this issue that’s coming up about politics’. One of the most common ones is, is a couple of employees are reporting that another employee has posted something that they consider to be disturbing on Facebook. And it’s related to politics. So, I mean, that’s just that’s just how it turns out. So we’re going to talk about that today and kind of break it down. You know, when this happens, I think of it kind of like a three fold thing. This is from a practical approach. As a business owner, we don’t forbid people from talking about politics around here, but we don’t generally talk about it. I think you probably noticed that, right?

Jeff: Absolutely.

Paul: I just ask you, there’s this old adage that a lawyers have, is never ask a question that you don’t already know what the answer is going to be when you’re talking to somebody. But do you feel like you can’t talk about politics here or why, you imagine this is not running through our culture. We can’t possibly all be that aligned.

Jeff: No, I think especially working in this environment with a ton of trained HR professionals, we kind of understand that politics is just a naturally divisive topic.

Paul: Yeah

Jeff: We work really hard to stay connected to each other and and be positive towards each other. And so I think it’s just not in the frame of mind for a lot of us here.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don’t spend any time on my employees’ Facebook pages or their Instagrams or anything. I don’t accept a friend request from them. I just it’s a different. I have a different relationship here with people and it’s quite personal. And frankly, quite functional. I mean, if anybody understands CEDR, they know one of the things that we’re about is like providing this amazing customer service. And so that was one of the, when I said there’s probably these three or four things that cause your problem. One of them is this kind of upset and any kind of upset, but this kind of upset can really mess with your business’s operations and people’s ability to work together and that it immediately impacts the patient’s treatment. And, you know, anything else that’s going on in the business. We didn’t get you out of the military, but you spent some time in the military and I’m a military brat. How does the military handle politics?

Jeff: Yeah, it’s very interesting you ask. So I served in the Navy and then I also did contracting with the Department of Defense for quite some time.

Paul: Wait a minute. I can’t ask you any details, though, because you’d probably have to kill me, wouldn’t you?

Jeff: Yeah, exactly. So super secret spy stuff.

Paul: Okay, good.

Jeff: When you’re in the military, specifically, you’re in it even when you go home. So how you represent yourself is how you represent the company, right? And the company being the military. To some degree that goes, as far as how you dress, how you act, what you post. And obviously that’s becoming more prevalent as time goes on with social media. So it’s really important that you feel you have the right to your opinion. However, what you do is a reflection of where you spend your time. And you know in the military, that’s all your time. So it’s kind of the same logic that I apply to any business I’ve been at thereafter, which is my personal conduct is my own. However, I want to hold myself to a level that reflects well on my employer.

Paul: Right, right. Not everybody understands that. And the military teaches you that and somewhat enforces that to a degree.

Jeff: Right.

Paul: You know, regardless of what your opinions are, you still have to do your job. You would never think of…I mean, it’d be a little bit ridiculous, but you would never think of not supporting the person standing next to you in a firefight because of their political views, right?

Jeff: Right. And that’s that’s become a hot topic, too, because especially when you are in a war zone that is something that is a possibility. You could get shot at and you have a teammate next to you. And that’s obviously a lot more dramatic than a lot of office spaces that we’re in today. But certainly it does give you the opportunity to consider that person as a person and not left or right or red or blue.

Paul: So for our listeners, unlike the military for you, where they can literally make up rules, enforce rules they can have. They can want you to feel however they want you to feel, but they can also tell you you can’t do something. And so that’s where we don’t we don’t have that in the private sector. And so that’s part of today’s discussion is to kind of address what you can and can’t do and why you might say something or when you have an obligation to kind of get into the fray. And when I say get into the fray, I don’t mean you’re going to try to fix anything or convince anybody in your direction or anybody else’s direction, but you got to get in there because what you’re seeing or hearing or being reported to you is causing problems. And then, as you said, Jeff, I’m just going to touch on it one more time. People have to be careful. I mean, we don’t have any choices now. We have an outrage machine out there. And yeah, you know, it’s always a concern that someone is going to say something online. They’re going to get traced back to you because they worked for you or work for you. And next thing you know, your business is getting doxed. And you need to turn off your Google reviews and you need to, you know, turn off your Facebook page and you had nothing to do with it. And I’ve seen plenty of examples of that. I’m talking whereby the person who has done the offensive thing, hasn’t worked with the business for like two years and still it gets traced back. They dox, they publicize, they say this person works for this business, let’s go make them miserable too. So, I mean, I think right now and the way things are running, you can post something politically and cause that kind of harm to a business. You know, folks got to be careful. So.Alright, let’s just take… I think I’ve kind of talked circles around this. We can just kind of jump in. Freedom of speech, legal off-duty activity, protected political speech. And folks, we’re going to talk about the National Labor Relations Act yet once again, because it comes into play here. Jeff, your superior in the military can just come in and go, ‘You know what, everybody shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up. I better not hear another word about this, about this here ever. In fact, I’m telling you, you don’t have an opinion.’ And they can do that in the interest of whatever they want to do. Am I correct?

Jeff: Yeah. To pair with that too, you serve the president ultimately. So whether you like him or not, your job is to follow the orders that are given.

Paul: Unfortunately, in the private sector, as good as that would be to be able to just apply one rule and say one thing, which is, ‘Y’all cut it out. This has nothing to do with work, has nothing to do with patients. And I don’t want to hear anything more about any of this. I better not hear anything more about this,’ which is, by the way, that’s your adverse action. You’re basically relaying to someone you’re going to fire them, or implying that you might fire them for breaking a rule. We cannot apply those rules. And several of those categories, they cause us some problems. Okay, so let’s start. I’m going to just start with freedom of speech, and I’m going to be just… I’m going to be a little bit of the outrage machine right now. What pisses me off is that we have a bunch of politicians out there who are lawyers, who have clerked for Supreme Court judges, who are people of authority who absolutely know what I’m about to say is true. And yet they are giving misleading information, which is they’re saying things like, ‘Facebook is violating our freedom of speech because they’re taking our posts down.’ That’s an example of it. I just want everybody out there to know that freedom of speech applies to the government. The government may not tamp down your freedom to say what it is that you want to say. Private enterprises, dental practices, all of us, all of us as private employers, we are not obligated by this. We can tamp down speech in general. Okay, so for everybody listening, if somebody tells you that your speech, your freedom of speech is being assaulted because somebody took something down in a private company, that is not true. That is false. And I would encourage you to look into it further. So we can’t use that overall kind of just shut everybody down, even though the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to us because of these other three issues. So there’s legal off-duty activity, there’s protected political speech, and again, there’s the National Labor Relations Act. Let’s talk about legal off-duty laws. By the way, everybody, this conversation should remind you of this thing that I say all the time. For every action that you take with an employee, whether it’s timekeeping or it’s resolving issues between employees or somebody is hurt or whatever is going on in your practice, there’s likely a law or regulation that says what you can and can’t do. And that even applies in this kind of very human interactive thing where two, two people or maybe more are in kind of an argument. So there are several states out there that protect legal off-duty activity. So imagining that someone posts something online that is inflammatory, that doesn’t violate the law. They didn’t threaten anybody, they just posted something that most or many people might disagree with—50% of people might disagree with it. I made Jeff smile. They can do that. They can. They have a legal right to do it. And there are more than two dozen states that actually have statutes that say that employers can’t mess with somebody when they’re… when they’re involved in legal off-duty activity. One of those could be, for example, these things are… these laws are kind of broad, but since we’re talking about political speech, one of these… a good example of that is you have an employee who’s working for a candidate that you don’t like. Or working for a referendum that you don’t agree with. You are not supposed to take any actions at work because of that legal off-duty activity, even though you don’t agree with it. They’re supposed to be kept separate. And I agree with that. I think that it should be.

Jeff: What if they’re posting during working hours?

Paul: If they’re posting during working hours? That’s a very good question. Good job, Jeff. If they’re posting… if they’re online posting, when they are on the clock and I mean literally on the clock and supposed to be at work, then you have something that you can say. You could fire them for that. However, the law states, the federal law states about hours working on the clock is that if an employee is on break, that they’re not under your control. And in those instances, they could be on their own social media at lunch or during one of their breaks—morning or afternoon if you give breaks—and they could be on their social media and they could be posting something. So just because they’re in the building and work is going on doesn’t mean that you have full control over them. But if someone were to notice that they got at work, clocked in at 9 a.m. and at 9:15 they’re on social media arguing with someone, then you have a leg to stand on. You have a very, very strong leg to stand on.

Jeff: I was going to ask in regards to legal off-duty activities, what about if someone decides to go to a protest, a political protest?

Paul: Legal off-duty activity. I hate to say it, but I’m going to say it. It’s… gosh, it could be the worst thing in the world that they’re participating in. You know, we’ve seen all of these protests and these not-so-great people out there protesting. I’m air quoting. You know, you cannot just… you could not agree with that. But here’s the thing. You cannot fire them for doing that as legal activity. Now, I know there’s so many people that are like, ‘What if they do something illegal while they’re there?’ We’re in a different conversation at that point. That’s why you’re a CEDR member if you’re a CEDR member, because we’re going to help you through that. Because those are the kinds of questions that we have to deal with.

Jeff: I will say one of my favorite off-duty activities when we talk about politics specifically, is it seems to bring people together for barbecues. Which I know that we both are a fan of barbecued foods.

Paul: I do. I do. I love a barbecue. But I can tell you that anybody who brings up political talk, even in my personal group, you’re going to have to be really close to me for me to talk about this. And, you know, just for me, I was raised… there’s two things that you didn’t really talk about. And I learned this from my grandparents who were farmers, churchgoers—the whole thing. We don’t talk about our religion and we don’t talk about our politics. And it wasn’t that we couldn’t talk about them or we shouldn’t have thoughts about them, or that we didn’t sit down at times and talk about them specifically. But it was that these things were closely held. And that’s just how we are, and that’s how I feel about these things. I don’t generally talk about these things unless you’re, again, you’re my best friend or one of my best friends, and we’re just sitting down and we’re kind of going at it and talking about something.

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Jeff: Well, that makes me think too, especially in the military I experienced this, as a melting pot of cultures. People from different cultures have those different ways of having conversations about those tough topics. And you know, it’s the same for me and my family. Even to this day my parents don’t like to talk about politics with me, as a grown man. And so that’s not something I typically share when I go to the workplace. And we have to be cognizant that there are people that have those various levels of norms that they grew up with and that we’re not doing anything that could be exclusive to them.

Paul: Exactly. So we just covered legal off-duty activity, I think well enough. Just got to be careful about that. Know your laws and understand this is another reason why you can’t just come out and tell everybody to shut up and not express any opinions. Then there are laws for the next one. And I don’t think we have to go very deep into this, political speech. There are literally, again, laws that say that people’s political speech is protected and there are a few states that have those laws in place. But in general, I don’t think we have to say too much more about political speech.

Jeff: Follows the same rules, right, that we talked about with off-duty activities.

Paul: The next thing that I want to touch on is the National Labor Relations Act. Let’s just say somebody posts online. They say something like they wish this law would go into effect and everybody should vote for this person because they’re the only ones that are going to deal with this problem. And part of that problem is, let’s just say that the candidate wants to raise or lower minimum wage. I don’t know, or the candidate has something to do tangentially with work. That speech is protected. So we have one more way here that we have to be very, very careful because that’s not a state-by-state thing. That speech is protected across the entire country. You can’t… this is why you can’t have no gossiping policies. This is why you can’t tell people that they can’t discuss their benefits and wages. Believe it or not, this thing tentacles out for miles and encompasses all kinds of speech because that’s how this stuff manifests, right? It manifests in words and those words often, again, manifest in a post on Facebook or wherever people… I don’t know how many times I’ve said that. I keep saying Facebook, I think I might be aging myself. You know, what I don’t see is people get on Instagram and argue, ‘Your dog pictures are stupid.’

Jeff: We like the pictures of dogs.

Paul: Really?

Jeff: Ultimately, right? That’s what they’re there for.

Paul: Yeah. Could you post another picture of food, Paul, please? Like I had one guy who just, I think he just got sick of it. He was just like, ‘That looks awful.’ And I was like, ‘You are no longer in my friends, sir.’

Jeff: You’re not invited to the next barbecue.

Paul: That’s right, you’re not coming to the next barbecue. Okay, so back to the National Labor Relations Act. You just have to be very, very careful about overbroad policies or statements or doing anything to try and create an effective solution to my original statement, which was you have one employee or two employees who posted something, and one or more other employees are not happy about it, and they come to you and they say, ‘You have to do something about this. I can’t believe she’s posting this or he did that or he said that or that’s offensive’ or whatever. Here’s the thing. I’m going to boil this down. You still need to protect your business. You still need to protect your employees. So if someone goes online and starts talking about things that are, back related to work, might create some kind of problem at work, especially for your employees. So when I talked about that doxing whereby someone said, ‘This person works for this practice, this is her name, this is their name, this is how you get in touch with them, let’s go ruin their Google reviews and let’s start calling.’ And they start calling and threatening, you need to do something about that. You have an obligation.

Jeff: Right.

Paul: But you can’t always do anything about it, nor should you. And I’m not talking about the sexual harassment. I’m talking about someone posting something inflammatory. So our first piece of advice here from CEDR is just ignore it. Tell people that are complaining about it if, you know… First, don’t take their word for it. Go look at what the person wrote and decide whether or not you can make a direct correlation or connection from what they’ve said or done to your practice. And this isn’t in speculation, right? This is not, ‘I think that that’s going to upset some people and some people might call and they might get mad.’ That’s a little more that. That’s not—you can’t really take action on that. The other thing that you could do is pull the employee in and speak with them. I think that that, you know, when we talk about an investigation, this is the light version of the investigation, which is just to pull them in and say, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on.’ Now, if someone endorses their favorite person for president and the other two employees get upset about it, you’re not calling anybody in. You’re going to tell the people who filed the complaint, ‘I read it. They’re just for a different candidate than the rest of us care for. We’re not talking about this anymore.’ You get to nip that in the bud. However, if they’ve said something that you think can really cause you some issues or might start losing your patients, or you have a patient call in and say, ‘I saw Mary Beth’—I always use Mary Beth—you might have to go to this person, sit down with them and say, ‘Hey, look, I just need you to be aware of these things. What you say and do impacts the practice. And what you’re posting right now, I think may have a negative impact. I’d like for you to scrub your page of your connection to this practice.’ That’s something that you might say that you want to do based off of this, but you better document it. You need a screenshot of what it is because believe it or not, even that little piece of guidance that I gave you might cause a problem with the National Labor Relations Act. Because employees have a right to post things on their own, on their private Facebook, on a public Facebook page, which are an extension of their feelings about work and when, you know, what’s going on. So, again, got to be very, very careful about putting that kind of thing into place. You start getting calls, we’re on a different playing field. You need to get in touch with an HR expert, somebody like us, and we can help you work through it and do some documenting and why you might reach out to the employee and pull them in and say, ‘You can’t do that anymore.’ There could be instances where you separate with someone because of what they’re putting on Facebook or what they’re saying publicly that’s impacting. But again, this is something that you would want to go through, some kind of an analysis. Document your reasons why, what was said and the reaction and everything is going on and all the phone calls coming in and the things that are causing your business an issue.

Jeff: So I have a question. When it comes to things like public controversies or other major political events, those tensions sometimes come into the office. What do you feel like the best advice you could give to a manager is to handle that?

Paul: You sit down with people and without forbidding them from doing it, you question what contribution it’s making to their work day. I mean, it really is a way to kind of get people down to earth. Which is, ‘What do you think this can possibly accomplish here? I understand the three of you are at war with each other and the patients know it and a patient’s just mentioned something to me and asked me what’s wrong here. If that continues, I’m going to have to take additional steps.’ Again. I made a threat. I didn’t tell you ‘Shut up.’ Didn’t say you couldn’t talk about things. I’m beginning to question what it is that, what it is that you’re saying and doing without really being… it getting specific. You definitely don’t want to get into the who’s right and who’s wrong. If you can avoid that by any measure, I hope this was helpful for everybody who’s listening out there, because I know we’re getting all these political things coming in and it’s only going to heat up. I believe we’ve all done a pretty good job. I think over time, we’ve all begun to understand that this is just not healthy for us as a society. I don’t know what we’re going to do, I don’t have any answers to the question. But I can tell you from personal experiences both in my yard barbecuing with 20 people two or three times a month. I can tell you that when I’m in the commercial kitchen at the shelter once a week and I’m cooking, me and my team are cooking for those 60 ladies—by the way I’m just a cog in the machine—we’re cooking for those 60. There’s no political conversation going on in there. There’s no time for it, there’s no place for it. Even though I know we’re all different volunteers from different backgrounds and stuff, I can tell you here at CEDR, Jeff has already described to you, he’s new. Jeff, this is how it always is.

Jeff: Yeah, and what I think you’re describing too, which I appreciate is, it’s humanity first. And that’s how we got to think about our workplace.

Paul: We really do. We have to think about the humanity and inclusiveness and the fact that people are going to say things that we don’t agree with. The thing is, stating the obvious, 20 years ago they said it in their head. They did. They said it, maybe it was a little more than 20 years ago, darn it. No it was 20 years ago.

Jeff: We’ll say it was 20 years.

Paul: Yeah 2004 people were not really on Facebook doing a lot. I don’t know if Facebook existed back then.

Jeff: It was Myspace maybe at that point, right?

Paul: Yeah but we weren’t out there arguing on Myspace. By the way I logged into my Myspace page.

Jeff: It still exists for you.

Paul: It still exists, I got in about a year ago. What an awesome opportunity they missed there as a business.

Jeff: Oh it’s a relic now.

Paul: Positive focus, take us out of here.

Jeff: Yeah I think for me, I’m looking forward to this weekend. I’m actually marinating chicken right now. I’m going to do some pulled chicken tacos this weekend.

Paul: Oh nice.

Jeff: That’s it for me, I’m excited.

Paul: Very, very nice. I am going to put this positive focus in here. Again, I don’t think anybody in my family is ever going to hear this, but I have a member of my family who is going through an incredibly difficult, rare surgery as we record right now. My positive focus is for her. Her daughter is donating part of an organ. You know, it’s just a really big deal. And I’m going to relay that it’s a little bit hard because I’ve had some problems with my family over the political stuff, and so I’m not as close to this family as I’d like to be. And there’s a cost to that. There really is a cost to that. So my positive focus is, I’ve set all of that aside and I’m in touch with her and I got a text last night in the middle of the night before. She was going into surgery and I’m hoping that everything turns out alright. In fact I’m positive everything is going to be good.

Jeff: We are too.

Paul: Yeah. Alright everybody. Thanks for listening and hopefully you got a little bit out of this whole political speech thing, and we’ll see you on the next show here shortly.

Jeff: Thanks Paul.

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