It's very hard, probably impossible, to come up with a specific list. The list will either be incomplete (the trolls are cunning) or overly broad and spark anti-authoritarian feelings.
If you've ever been an online forum mod, or similar, you'll know that the larger the "board" gets, the more out of whack it gets. When a company, or forum, is small, and most people know each other, at least a bit, they tend to stay civil. Past some point, that goes out the window.
Not talking about politics is a good idea, but it's very hard to specify what is "politics" and what is not.
You can just say that there should be no personal attacks, people should be civil to each other, and nothing that a reasonable person would construe as racism or harassment. This is similar to the rules on wikipedia, and it works very well there.
The problem is that there is a small minority of people who don't/can't see things from other people's perspectives, so they either make blatantly offensive comments without realising it, or they get offended and their feelings hurt when no reasonable person would have taken a comment to be offensive.
Perhaps there could be a peer-based mediation panel within Google to make non-binding, non-public rulings on these cases without them going to HR (if both parties agree on the outcome). If these panels were make up of reasonable people (think wikipedia admins), then it might work quite well.
> It's very hard, probably impossible, to come up with a specific list. The list will either be incomplete (the trolls are cunning) or overly broad and spark anti-authoritarian feelings.
They should put up a big banner of the question the employees should be asking themselves about their work activities: "Is this good for the company?"
I think the simple line that could be drawn is the separate politics and policies. I think[0] it could be fine to discuses a heavy handed immigration policy while not discussing the politician behind it. One has a chance to yield a good discussion, while the other does not.
[0] If everyone involved has an implicit mutual respect for the other person, which seems unlikely.
That discussion is unlikely to go well if any of your co-workers are immigrants. You can't discuss "should you be in this country or should you and your family be deported" in front of someone dispassionately.
Edit: the last few times I've discussed "heavy handed immigration policy" at work it has been because co-workers have had to deal with the Home Office and I'm commiserating how difficult it is. One guy got tripped up by "the middle initial on your ID wasn't present in the name field of this form" (or vice versa).
This is more or less what David Gudeman, the other plaintiff in Damore's lawsuit, wandered into:
> Gudeman further stated that at the suggestion of another Googler, he searched Gilani’s story of being profiled, and found “zero evidence for the claim that [Gilani] was targeted just for being a Muslim.” Gudeman posed more questions about the FBI’s motives for looking into Gilani such as the fact that Gilani had recently visited Pakistan, and that the FBI could have possibly found something interesting about Gilani’s trip or the region that he visited.
If you're going to have a rule about not discussing politics in order to uphold a productive workplace culture, it seems like a very good place to start is that your coworkers should not be able to say something with the subtext "Maybe the FBI had a reason to investigate you for being a terrorist."
Speaking as an immigrant: this is bullshit. I've heard a lot of far-righters talk about restricting NEW immigration and deporting illegal immigrants, but have never once been party to a conversation when they implied that I or my family should be deported.
Aside from the feeds of a few dozen Twitter edgelords, the discussions you're imagining (or want us to imagine) do not exist and are a strawman argument.
I'm afraid demands for people to be deported are very common in UK immigration discussion, and very few people seem to be fussy over the legality of it.
Why? I'm a immigrant to the country I'm resident to, hoping to apply for citizenship. I don't resent any current citizen/local discussing tighter immigration laws that doesn't insult my nationality, which I'd excludes anything with a factual basis.
But then, I'm a European, living in another European country, so the same racial sensitivity might not exist?
From what I understand, The US has a special view on immigration due to historically lax enforcement, varying history of enforcement, and general diversity of our population. It's hard to compare to other countries.
I could have used better description for the example. But as a tech company, I do think there are merits to discussing how a modified H1B Visa policy affects us.
I think this is even too far. If this immigration policy affects you, you should talk to your manager about it, but general workplace discussion about anything that isn't "creative" (as in, your hobbies or pets) is a trap.
EDIT: and what I mean by that is, you can discuss with a close coworker whatever you want, but people seem to want "open texted based communication" in a way that invites argument.
Google is the sort of company that invites the entire company to post (and vote on) questions for senior leadership to answer, though. And they believe this is good for the company. "What are you doing to influence immigration policy" impacts the company just as much as "What are you doing to provide thought-leadership in containers" or whatever.
> We share everything we can. We have a weekly all-hands meeting called TGIF, hosted by our founders, Larry and Sergey. In the first 30 minutes, we review news and product launches from the past week, demo upcoming products, and celebrate wins. But the second 30 minutes is the part that matters most: Q&A.
> Everything is up for question and debate, from the trivial (“Larry, now that you’re CEO will you start wearing a suit?” The answer was a definite ‘no’), to the ethical (“Is Google going in the right direction?”).
Annnddddd This is how we get to where we are. Thanks for sharing, I think this is helpful info to give perspective as to why they have these "HR problems" when in fact it's a cultural choice to be exposed to these challenges!
I assume it's been a net positive for them in the past, I wonder if this TGIF policy will get changed.
This kind of thing seems insane to me. If you want to build a cohesive team, you figure out what is common to everyone and rally around that. Bringing in divisive topics unrelated to work seems like you're playing with fire.
If you've ever been an online forum mod, or similar, you'll know that the larger the "board" gets, the more out of whack it gets. When a company, or forum, is small, and most people know each other, at least a bit, they tend to stay civil. Past some point, that goes out the window.
Not talking about politics is a good idea, but it's very hard to specify what is "politics" and what is not.