Google Puts Curbs on Political Debate by Employees

Google issued new guidelines limiting employee discussion of politics and other topics not related to work, in a major shift for a company that has long prided itself on open debate and a freewheeling internal culture.

The Alphabet Inc. unit said in a public memo on Friday that staffers should avoid spending time hotly debating matters unrelated to their jobs and refrain from name-calling, among other discouraged behavior. Google also said it would appoint employees to moderate the company’s famously raucous internal message boards, rather than allowing volunteers to do so — in effect acknowledging that the discussions have spiraled out of control.

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The company’s internal message boards host thousands of discussion groups, on topics ranging from social issues to sports, and employees can spend hours a day sparring in them. In recent years, though, the level of debate at times has driven a wedge between staffers with opposing views as well as between management and an increasingly activist workforce.

Thousands of Google employees walked out last year to protest payouts to executives accused of sexual harassment, and some have objected to the company’s pursuit of government contracts.

Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker has threatened to fire workers poking around inside the company for information on contentious topics like Google’s cloud-computing relationship with the U.S. Defense Department, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.

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Two former Google employees, with opposing political views, said the changes overall will be jarring. One of those, a software engineer, said many employees were drawn to the company in part by its policies, including commitments to “do no evil” and “bring your whole self to work.”

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The new guidelines don’t forbid discussing politics at work but require managers to address conversations that become disruptive.

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Google said it will launch a tool later this year for employees to flag content within internal discussions that doesn’t align with the new guidelines. Those reports would then be reviewed privately by members of the new moderation team.

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In 2017, it fired an employee who wrote an internal memo suggesting men are better suited than women for tech jobs. Last year, former female employees sued Google for allegedly discriminating against women, while former male employees sued it for allegedly discriminating against conservative white men.

Former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee told the Journal earlier this month that he believes he was fired in large part because he expressed conservative views on the company’s internal message boards.

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Google’s latest changes, while seemingly made with good intentions, could inhibit dialogue among company employees, said David C. Logan, a senior lecturer on workplace management at the University of Southern California.

“Cultures of political correctness ironically can become unsafe places to work,” he said{snip}

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