Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD is BetterUp’s Chief Innovation Officer and leader of BetterUp Labs.
All day, every day, geopolitical news updates filter in through our devices as a low buzzing in the background. Important political events like elections, terrorism and war, however, thrust this ambient noise to the forefront, even at work. These moments of turmoil create a myriad of challenges for a diverse workforce and for organizational leadership.
In anticipation of the upcoming U.S. election, our team at BetterUp Labs studied the impacts of these events on the workplace—and what organizations, managers and individual workers can do about it. In a series of articles here in Forbes, I’ll share key findings to help leaders prepare for the election and for geopolitical events to come.
The Effects Of Political Tension
We all know that the infiltration of politics at work can feel uncomfortable or even painful when conflict becomes overt. And it seems logical that this would impact performance. Until now, no one has quantified this impact, a data point that will prove useful in advocating for efforts to alleviate tension.
In search of this data, our lab analyzed performance data from 246,000 employees during the U.S. elections of 2020 and 2022 to see how they compared to the baseline. We looked at two key measures: 1) productivity, a self-rating of how productive people feel at work, and 2) well-being, a self-rating of their current well-being compared to how they usually feel.
As you can see in this data, both employee productivity and well-being decreased significantly in the week before the election compared to the baseline. Note that because this was the week prior to the election, this doesn’t reflect the outcome of the election; it reflects the anticipatory stress. Productivity decreased by 2% that week, while well-being decreased by 5% versus baseline. These decreases started and resolved gradually as tensions rose and then declined from late summer to winter over approximately a six-month period.
How This Trend Impacts The Bottom Line
This was not unique to previous elections. Over the past few months, we surveyed an additional 1,200 U.S.-based full-time workers across several time points to assess the current state of political discourse and divisiveness in the workplace and identify how organizations and managers can prepare for major global macroeconomic events. Negative impacts are on the rise this cycle, too. From June to July 2024, for example, we saw the share of people reporting negative effects of political talk on work outcomes—including focus, a sense of belonging, team cohesion and mental health—increased by 16% to 37%.
How does this translate to dollars? Using insights from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and well-known research by Brant Hamar and colleagues to answer this, we found that for a workforce of 10,000 employees, the decrease in productivity and well-being due that week before the 2020 election cost an organization approximately $900,000 per week. That equates to many millions of dollars when amortized across the gradual rise and fall of the six-month period analyzed in 2020.
Protecting Your Business From Political Disruption
Not all organizations absorbed this hit, however—and we think we know why. We compared dozens of cultural, leadership and organizational factors to figure out why some companies saw higher election-week drops in productivity compared to others. The three things that served to protect organizations most strongly against this dip were:
1. Investment In Employee Development: Organizations that spend time and energy helping colleagues grow felt fewer ripples of political turmoil in the last two election cycles. When employees feel a strong sense of belonging and receive well-being support from their organization, they experience approximately 30% less politics-related stress (among other issues) compared to employees who lack these resources. In addition, an organizational culture that supports personal development buffers employees’ well-being and productivity dips during elections.
2. Development Of Coaching Skills: Companies that provided resources to help employees develop a coaching mindset (think asking thoughtful questions, listening deeply, attending to individual motivations) were protected from the negative impacts of external political noise. Members at organizations with low scores in this area saw twice the well-being impact in the 2020 and 2022 elections.
3. Recognition And Reward For Collaboration: Finally, organizations that reinforced collaboration and knowledge sharing among colleagues saw dramatically better productivity outcomes around the last elections.
Conclusion
Navigating workplace political tension seems to grow more stressful every year—and at key moments, it costs companies nearly $1 million per week. The good news is that there is a lot that organizations can do to avoid this impact going into the remainder of the election season and beyond. Essential protective factors include investment in employee development, a coaching culture and a collaborative environment.
In my next column on this research, I’ll cover our findings on what managers, specifically, can do to help protect their teams from political tension at work. Of all the factors we looked at—organizational, individual, managerial—it turns out that managers matter most. Stay tuned.
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