Toxic Gen Z politics are infecting the workplace, survey finds

A shocking level of political and intellectual intolerance is spreading through the workplace, particularly among Generation Z and millennial employees, a poll from Indeed released this month reveals. Nearly 40% of workers aged 18 to 34 said they would consider quitting their job over political differences at work or if their CEO said something they disagreed with.

“The fact that almost half of us would rather quit our jobs over politically charged fractions than be open to respectfully coexisting is a telling sign of just how divisive we’ve become,” Indeed’s analysts concluded .

But there’s more to this story than just political division. This disturbing degree of intolerance is a direct product of the echo chambers and “safe space” culture in which young workers were raised.

Success in the real world requires the ability to get along and work with people with a wide variety of backgrounds and beliefs. But success in college, which is supposed to prepare young people for the workplace, typically does not require this at all.

Conservative professors are a tiny (and shrinking) minority on most college campuses. And liberal college administrators outnumber conservative peers by an astonishing 12:1 ratio . Meanwhile, students increasingly feel unable to speak their minds and self-censor accordingly.

So, many young people are coming of age in echo chambers where they’re rarely, if ever, forced to confront or engage with ideas with which they strongly disagree. It’s no surprise, then, that they would emerge and enter the workforce without this basic degree of resilience that past generations took for granted.

If we want to change this frankly pathetic survey result, we’ve got to go to the source, and that means addressing the political imbalance and close-mindedness that is so rampant in our education system. Otherwise, we are setting up young people for failure — and potentially hurting business, as well.

Conservatives, liberals, moderates, and independents alike all have different values and perspectives that are useful in different ways for a large organization. Any company overwhelmingly dominated by members of one group will likely have blind spots and miss out on opportunities or solutions. The same will happen if there is diversity of thought, but people with minority perspectives are too scared to speak up, which the Indeed survey suggests is also happening at a high rate. A whopping 39% of employees said there’s pressure to conform to a certain ideology, and 39% similarly said they’ve observed discrimination or harassment over differing views.

This isn’t good.

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Companies place tremendous value on diversity these days, but diversity of thought is the most important form of diversity. After all, diversity is of limited value if everyone looks different but thinks the same.

The repressive state of affairs is making building a truly diverse business impossible. So, there’s simply no getting around it: We have to address the crisis of intolerance among the younger generation, or it will cause systemic economic and social problems in this country for decades to come.

Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is an independent journalist, co-founder of BASEDPolitics , YouTuber , and Tony Blankley fellow at the Steamboat Institute.