Eight steps business leaders can take to prevent ideological pressure and political conformity in the workplace.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff:

After our book The Coddling of the American Mindcame out in 2018, business leaders from the corporate and non-profit sectors began contacting us about internal issues they are having with recent hires. They told us that their youngest employees show increased levels of anxiety, depression, and fragility; a tendency to turn ordinary conflicts between co-workers into major issues requiring the attention of the Human Resources Department; and greater insistence that the organization must share and express their personal political values related to social justice. 

In short: Beginning around 2018, parts of the corporate world began to experience the same changes we saw in universities from around 2014. This makes sense once you realize that members of Gen Z began to arrive on campuses in 2013 and 2014—they spent four years within institutions that largely catered to their new needs and demands, and began to graduate from four-year colleges around 2017 or 2018. 

2021 survey found that 48% of Gen Z respondents reported feeling stress all or most of the time, and the top source of worry among them was career prospects. As for the increased internal conflicts and tensions among employees, the title of a 2021 articleon the front page of the business section of The New York Times sums it up well: “The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them.” Friction and punishment campaigns in the corporate world seem to be hypercharged by Slack and other internal company messaging platforms. 

The turmoil at The New York Times in 2020 offers multiple case studies of personal and political conflicts intermixing, as individual journalists ran afoul of the new sensibilities. Bari Weiss, a staff editor and Op-Ed writer, resigned in July 2020. In her resignation letter, Weiss mentioned “constant bullying” and how she was subjected to what one outlet described as “‘Mean Girls’-styled sniping at her in company Slack channels.” Science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. resigned in 2021 over criticism of his behavior on a company-sponsored trip to Peru in 2019 (primarily his repeating a racial slur to clarify how it was being used in a story told by a student on the trip). McNeil had already been disciplined for his behavior on the trip, but co-workers, accusing McNeil of racism, complained that he hadn’t been fired. A month after his resignation McNeil wrote, “I’m surprised by how quick some colleagues who barely know me were prepared to accept those accusations and even add more on a Times alumni Facebook page.”