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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

But what is the alternative? The problem is diametric opinions end with two people (no company involved). What is the company to do to get people with opposing views to “get along”?

Let’s put up Tibet. Some people will have strong opinions on one side and another set will have strong opinions on the other side. (Most people will be indifferent).

How can the company manage that tension among people who work for them when those people believe the company has given them the freedom to pick a side and express that side and perhaps vocalize and ultimately mobilize?

I don’t see an obvious solution to this beside the traditional course. The present alternatives are even more “authoritarian” (i.e. firing the adherents of the wrong opinion, etc.)

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Good example :-)

The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground.

For a long time Google generated hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee in revenue which they have been banking for the most part, and occasionally spending on acquisitions. An alternative would be an employee communications support network that promoted good communication skills and facilitated improvements in employee discourse on all topics. Google could have funded an entire research institute and a few thousand employee 'coaches' without meaningfully digging into their cash pile. That would have been "non-traditional."

I love that suggestion and I've borderline fantasized about initiatives like that. I always wonder why debate-focused activities aren't more popular. A few obstacles usually come to mind:

1) Top-down, it's hard to convince people of the value of this who don't already see the value. It's hard to attach a KPI to it, hard to attribute changes. Or at least, from some POVs.

2) It's hard to be sure there will be participation. It's easy to pop off via text when you're procrastinating or got (self-)baited into a conversation. Scheduling discussion time / debate club or whatever feels like a chore.

3) It takes work. Like, to actually have a good debate about something takes time to think, engage, research, reflect and iterate the conversation. Not to mention the willingness. As above, it's easier to engage in junk food discourse than it is to challenge yourself, patiently tune your message over time or advance a dialectic.

But that said, those all feel like workable problems. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if this is one of those cases where nobody has mustered enough will and attention to give it a real shot.

Mediation and coaching are certainly great ideas for non-traditional approaches, although I feel that’s beyond the scope of a company given how resource intensive this is.

Beside, you won’t get the Dalai Lama with all the tools at his avail to accept the mainstream Chinese point of view.

That said I wouldn’t mind if a company tried this approach out of curiosity to see how it works out.

> although I feel that’s beyond the scope of a company given how resource intensive this is.

That's the thing, Google banks multiple BILLION dollars in free cash every quarter. Lets say you build a 'company within the company' and give it a budget of $100M a YEAR. That is a pretty sizable enterprise for what is funded out of about 1% of the cash that would otherwise just sit around in 'cash and cash equivalents'.

One might think that an executive management team might say, "Hmm, if we spend 1% of our free cash flow on improving the communications of all of our employees, what effect will that have on their productivity?" Will they be "more productive" or "less productive" ? They already have the null hypothesis results to compare to.

To make a comparison, a more "traditional" company might consider starting up a private bus service to move their employees from their homes to work and back again was too resource intensive. And yet that is exactly what Google did.

> The 'hard' solution is to teach people to communicate about topics on which they disagree. An easier solution would be to have employee moderators. A combination of providing communication classes and moderators with a dose of involuntary enrollment might be a middle ground.

The easy solution is to just do what has always been common sense: don’t talk politics at work. Because even the if there is healthy debate, at the end of the day people are petty about people on “the other team.” For example, I’ve gotta imagine being outed as a Trump voter at Google has to put a huge target on your back.

Problem solved: There should be no "opinion" at the workplace outside professional topics. Unless you're the person in charge of the Tibet strategy, your opinion should stay at home.

It's a workplace, not your buddy's couch.

The workplace is part of society, of course opinions belong there.

I agree but what if the employer takes a position on Tibet? Or more likely on any hot potato topic (gender equality, Trump, pushing the political debate either side if the company has the ability to do so, etc).

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