Because of the misguided belief that “content is king” — it is if you’re Reed Hastings, not so much if you produce meaningless widgets — virtually everything that happens anymore needs to have a corresponding “thought piece” or “hot take” associated with it. When the U.S. Capitol was breached by a mix of MAGA, Antifa, and lonely, depressed dog walkers, everyone wanted a piece of that action — here, for example, is Harvard Business Review weighing in on “how to talk to your employees” about it. My man Vadim even let a bunch of “talent professionals” respond as well.
Takes on takes on takes.
It does raise a semi-interesting question, though: should we be talking about stuff like this at work when it happens, or no?
Herein would lie my take
I would say no.
Look, if two individual employees want to discuss it, or a group wants to discuss it, or you want to create a Slack channel for it or whatever, then so be it. That seems fine and organic.
When you get HR and management tiers involved in a process around “having tough current events conversations,” it becomes extremely formula and very forced … and those conversations don’t tend to do much for new perspectives and awakenings. If anything, the only possible outcome in a HR-driven current events convo is two people yelling at each other over ideological differences and out of frustration for being part of a forced conversation.
In general, and obviously every situation and office is different, but we live in a very polarized, partisan time … and social media has actually been terrible for that in many ways, but perhaps good in the sense that now we know Jeff from recruiting is a MAGA bro and we wouldn’t have known that if we worked with him in 1993, per se. So the lines are a little bit clearer because you see what people post/share (if they post/share), and you tend to fall back into your like-minded work colleagues, or people from your silo.
When we try to force conversations across functional lines, it can get messy — and it’s very hard for that forcing to come from a place like HR (no respect) or upper management (doesn’t care, will show they don’t care, and now it feels like forced and lip-service, and everyone would rather be doing something else).
So my short answer would be “No.” Plus, even if you want to say it’s a security event or a prosecutorial event, the fact is that the riots were a political event at base.
Who has ever benefited from talking about politics at work? Very few people, I’d auger.
What say you — should these things be discussed in some kind of mandated “Zoom Town Hall” or left to more organic pockets of dialogue throughout the different relationships that constitute an organization?
