Watch For A Spike Of Bad Behavior In The Workplace
Long before I became a divisional president of a big multinational corporation, I was a new VP— one of many— trying to adjust to an environment that couldn’t have more different from the entrepreneurial punk rock background I had thrived in. Every Thursday we had this one meeting for senior executives, beyond VPs, and eventually those meetings became mandatory for me. I hated them and tried figuring out why. And I did— and I went to speak to the chairman of the company about my feelings. The meetings were so wretched and claustrophobic because there was so little diversity, first and foremost no women. How does a the senior policy-making weekly meeting have no women; also no young people? This was 4 decades ago and the changes that the chairman made did wonders for the company in every way, including, eventually, profitability.
The new Gallup survey shows that Americans hate their jobs or, at least, don’t feel engaged. Less than a third do feel engaged. “Just 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down 10 points from a high of 56% in March 2020. Currently, 39% of employees feel strongly that someone cares about them, a drop from 47% in March 2020. Only 30% strongly agree that someone at work encourages their development, down from 36% in March 2020.”
But according to yesterday’s Financial Times, there’s one set of “workers” whose job satisfaction is about to skyrocket: MAGAfied corporate assholes. Their team of writers reported that “In a mirror image of the 2020 corporate rush to support social justice causes after the murder of George Floyd by a policeman, companies today are reshaping the way they interact with their customers, employees and society at large. Some of the moves, such as the parade of CEOs visiting Trump in Florida, the donations, and the effort to do business with people in his inner circle, appear designed to curry favor with a man famous for attacking companies and executives he dislikes. But the election has also accelerated a wider shift back to more conservative social and political stances and an embrace of unfettered capitalism. Companies are scrapping diversity, equity and inclusion departments, cutting their support for racial diversity charities, and dropping out of climate change groups. They are also scrubbing anything that could be perceived as ‘woke’ from public statements, corporate documents and advertising. The election has empowered some top executives to start speaking out in favour of conservative policies, from tax cuts to traditional gender roles.”
Liberal politicians and investor activists are appalled. “Corporate caving to Trump is deeply distressing,” said Brad Lander, New York City comptroller and an advocate for sustainable investing. “We have seen too many examples through history. That, over time, is how democracy and fundamental rights are weakened.”
But companies, executives and analysts contend that the motives driving the changes are complex and reflect far more than a desire to pander to the incoming president.
The mood among their customers has changed, executives argue, and court rulings and state and federal regulatory probes, notably last year’s US Supreme Court ruling outlawing affirmative action in colleges, have undercut the footing of diversity and climate programs.
For many, the new administration offers a welcome opportunity to roll back some of the tighter rules enacted during President Joe Biden’s administration and bend tax and regulatory policy in their favor.
…“It is a statement of the lack of confidence and backbone of tech executives,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management. He described their contributions to Trump’s inauguration serve as a “tithing scheme” to the president-elect.
In the financial sector, the most visible shift since Trump’s election has been around climate change. All the major Wall Street banks and several big money managers have quit industry groups that seek to use their financial clout to cut carbon emissions.
BlackRock, the target of conservative state probes and lawsuits over its prior support for sustainable investing, explicitly cited legal and regulatory issues for its departure from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative last week.
Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say that Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.
“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals. “Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,” one said.
Consumer-facing groups, meanwhile, have become increasingly careful to avoid seeming “woke,” less they trigger the kind of boycotts faced by Target and Bud Light over marketing that celebrated gay and transgender people. That backlash was under way well before the election.
But the shift to the right has been so rapid that some groups have been caught out. After the recent New Orleans terrorist attack, the chief executive of insurance group Allstate, Tom Wilson, drew a firestorm of criticism for saying “we need to be stronger together by overcoming an addiction to divisiveness and negativity.”
Conservative activists accused Wilson, whose company was sponsoring a high-profile American football game in the city, of minimising murder while pushing progressive causes. Allstate tried to explain that the statement “reflects a broader commitment to fostering trust and positivity in communities across the nation”.
The other big corporate shift has been on DEI efforts, particularly since the Supreme Court’s ruling against the use of race-based college admissions in June 2023. Companies including Harley-Davidson, Ford and Molson Coors began rolling back their corporate diversity in the months after the decision, and the trickle became a flood after Trump’s election victory.
Walmart stopped considering race and gender in granting supplier contracts, ended racial equity training for staff, and pulled funding for the Center for Racial Equity, which it set up with a $100 million pledge after the George Floyd protests. McDonald’s last week dropped percentage goals for women and non-white managers, ceased asking suppliers to sign a DEI pledge and said it would now refer to its diversity team as a Global Inclusion Team.
A Wall Street Journal piece yesterday started with this sentence: “Mark Zuckerberg wants Donald Trump to get to know the ‘real Mark.’” Normal people are going to throw up when they see that Mark though, described in the piece as a “shape-shifting chief executive [making] frenzied effort to recast himself as a friend of the president-elect. On Friday, Zuckerberg met with Trump in Florida for the second time in seven weeks and torched Meta’s longstanding diversity policies… Also on Friday, Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to trash the Biden administration and extol the benefits of masculinity in corporate leadership. ‘I do think a lot of our society has become… kind of like, neutered, or like, emasculated,’ Zuckerberg said in an interview with the comedian and podcaster, who endorsed Trump just before the election. ‘When you’re running a company, people typically don’t want to see you being like this ruthless person,’ he said. He added that people who have seen him competing in jujitsu have remarked, ‘That’s the real Mark.’”