A new distraction at work: Politics

Kris Duggan, the CEO of BetterWorks, says that anecdotally he’s seen some changes at the workplace since the election. That’s why the company commissioned the survey in the first place. “People spend time on Facebook, they go and look at cat photos and have some down time, and that’s fine. With all the political posts, it seemed like people were getting worked up, argumentative, and distracted,” says Duggan.

According to a study from McKinsey, workplace incivility was already on the rise. Researchers suspect the increasing rudeness at the office could result from a variety of factors: from the rise of remote work, to tension over changing workplace hierarchies, or the lack of face-to-face interaction in the age of email and Slack. For businesses, there are costs associated with less collegial workplace including increased stress, employee turnover, and eroding the trust required for collaborative work. Duggan says that managers should help their employees focus on work, and that while support groups or other interventions sound good, it might be a further distraction. “The problem with that is you do a debrief about the election, then you have to do a debrief at the inauguration, then you have to do a debrief about the first week, the second week, and it doesn’t stop.”

While the survey BetterWorks conducted is small, it reveals a paradox in the productivity culture: The idea of not bringing politics to work is not just old school, it also clashes with another increasingly popular doctrine of modern work—the idea of bringing your “whole self” to the workplace. Even HR professionals admit that making the office a politics-free zone would be pretty hard at this point.