When millennials spend four years living on college campuses that cater to every whim, they graduate and find themselves wondering, “Why doesn’t our office have beanbag chairs, cafeterias, and gyms?”
Some companies, like Power Design, an electrical contracting company in Florida, have answered the call to be a more “woke” office. Gone are the days of musty cube walls and burnt coffee. They’ve installed a full-fledged fitness center, stocked cafeteria, and a car wash amongst other amenities. Power Design even hosts fun promotions and events for its employees, like a BBQ contest and an end of the year event with nearly $100,000 worth of prizes and giveaways.
All this seems to have paid off for the nearly 30-year-old organization, where millennials make up 34 percent of its workforce. In fact, they were ranked 45th on Fortune’s “100 Best Workplaces for Millennials” list.
Of course, they’re not the only company to turn the office into a campus. Remember the movie The Internship? While a comedy, Google’s real campus is what many would call millennial-focused.
Besides all the cute perks, like lattes and bike paths, there’s something else millennials really want from their employers: activism.
The standard for many years was that politics and religion weren’t discussed at the dinner table or around the office. Sure, companies have made donations for years, but the discussion never trickled down to floor employees. Today, the dialogue has reached a boiling point where one side finds the other intolerable.
According to a new survey from Weber and Shandwick and KRC Research, the numbers are favoring a direct global workforce where everyone gets involved in the political discussion. An astounding 56 percent of millennials feel that their CEOs have an obligation to enter into social issues and discussions. A shocking 47 percent say that silent CEOs risk criticism, and another 21 percent say that they expect sales from a non-political company to decline.
These statistics are consistent with the art form of the vocal minority: outrage, outrage, outrage. CNBC noted that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz attempted to fuse racial identity politics with grande lattes by mandating baristas write slogans like “Race Together” on cups. Some older critics, like the late Gwen Ifill of PBS, tweeted “Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well.” However, as the market shows, Starbucks has only grown stronger since the New York Times profiled the company’s politics in 2015. Shares traded up another 20 points that year.
Liberal employees and customers have given companies an extra drive to enter politics, but there is even greater potential in which employees and customers on the other side of the aisle are alienated. One recent example is the high-profile firing of Google engineer James Damore after his internal memo regarding the equal treatment of employees by gender went viral.
While there’s no exact number of students in the hard sciences who vote Republican, this ostracizing act will undoubtedly dissuade a conservative prospect from wanting to even enter into the tech field. As more Americans become unapologetically open and forceful about their identities and politics, whether it be Antifa rioting on college campuses, executives shutting out right leaning thoughts in the workplace, or blue check mark SJWs demanding websites be kicked off their domains for speech they disagree with, conservatives are finding out that a world where leftists hold a megaphone can be quite uncomfortable to live in.
Millennials thrive on diversity, so they say. Let’s encourage workplaces to truly be diverse, incorporating policies that allow free-flow of thought, or go the other route completely and prohibit political thoughts within the 9-to-5 walls. Anything in between gives way to divisiveness and scenarios where execs pick the winners and losers of employee political debates.
