06/26/2024
By Ed Brennen

With a highly contentious presidential election looming and controversial issues such as abortion and transgender rights being decided on a state-by-state basis, the political climate in America is sharply divided.

“For years, your identity was tied to your job or the company you worked for,” Merriman says. “But the reality of the workplace now is there’s more contingent workers than ever, more on-demand workers than ever, so it’s silly to think that workers are identifying with their workplace. For many workers, their identity is tied to their place — their community or their city.”

One strategy, she says, is to separate organizational identity from politics.

In 2021, Basecamp, a project management software company based in Chicago, announced a controversial policy prohibiting employees from discussing political or social issues in online company forums. While some employees left because of the policy, Merriman notes that it remains in the code of conduct and that the company “has done well in the long run.”

When Pella Corp., a window and door manufacturer based in the politically conservative city of Pella, Iowa, opened a satellite office in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2019, Merriman found that nearly 100 of its 600 employees relocated to the more diverse metro area.

“Their focus is, ‘If we want to hire talent, we need to keep the political climate more neutral and inclusive.’ And it’s working for them,” says Merriman, who points out that Newsweek included Pella among “America’s Greatest Workplaces for Diversity” in 2023.

Another strategy is to influence local politics.

Merriman cites the example of cloud-based software company Salesforce, whose CEO, Marc Benioff, publicly opposed Indiana’s 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Not only did Benioff call attention to the act’s potential for discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals, but Salesforce offered to relocate Indiana-based employees who felt at odds with the legislation. 

A third strategy is for companies to relocate their headquarters from red or blue enclaves to “purple” places such as Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Miami. While this can neutralize political tension, Merriman says it’s not without risk.

Global asset management company AllianceBernstein relocated its 1,000 employees from Manhattan to Nashville in 2022, saving the company $80 million annually, but also removing it from the deep financial talent pool on Wall Street.

“Cost-cutting is not a bad reason to move, but it indicates you're not leading with a talent-management strategy,” says Merriman, who found that AllianceBernstein employees “were worried about their long-term career prospects because they were isolated from the cluster of financial businesses.”

On the other hand, Merriman says financial services company Citadel “did it really well” by giving employees the option of remaining in Chicago when it relocated its headquarters to Miami in 2022.

While people may feel like they can be their “authentic self” when they identify with their place, Merriman says they also run the risk of becoming trapped in a political bubble.

“When you're with people who are like you, your views tend to escalate and you have groupthink, which is not a good thing,” she says. “That’s why universities play such an important role. We expose students to different views and people from different places. They gain an understanding of each other, which is an eye-opening experience.”

“I’ve been doing these pockets of research over the past several years, and it was hard to link them together,” Merriman says. “But the more I do, the more I see this common theme about how we feel about the places where we’re spending time.”