Cheryl Morlote remembers how she had to tone down her boss.

Morlote had moved from New Jersey and was settling into a human resources position at a manufacturing facility in Havelock when she began hearing whispers from employees about the chief executive officer’s political outspokenness.

The CEO occasionally shared his political views in one-on-one conversations and at managers’ meetings, Morlote recalled. While some employees felt uneasy about their boss’s forceful opinions, they kept quiet in public because they enjoyed solid benefits, she said.

Morlote felt compelled to approach her boss. “They want to work for you. This is about respect,” she told him. Ultimately, “he got it,” Morlote said. 

“I think it’s always a top-down thing,” says Morlote, who has since moved companies and is now the human resources director at Wells Insurance. At Wells, Morlote has folded a set of “do’s and don’ts” about political talk into broader organizational training for the firm’s 70 employees in downtown Wilmington, Southport and Wrightsville Beach.

“If your organization at the top is disrespectful, things are said on the floor by your ‘seconds’, that’s going to translate all the way down,” she warned, creating flagging morale, friction between employees and possible legal complications.

Tone at The Top

With the May 6 primaries nearing and pitched battles underway for the U.S. House and Senate and a variety of local offices, both employers and employees in the Cape Fear region may want to take a fresh look at how they handle political discourse, two attorneys say.

“There’s a common misconception out there with employees that the First Amendment protects their right to say whatever they want to say, wherever they want to say it,” said Dalton Green, a partner at Hedrick Gardner Kincheloe & Garofalo, who recommends that employers ban political discussion that interferes with work, or is disruptive, and permit it only during breaks and non-working hours.

“People can get pretty pushy when it comes to politics,” she acknowledged.

“The employer has nearly unfettered discretion in controlling the political dialogue in the workplace,” said Andrew McVey, a partner with Murchison, Taylor & Gibson, who believes that muzzling election-year chatter is motivated primarily by a desire for productivity.

“Employers need to be very careful first in not conveying to their employees that they have any particular political agenda that they want their employees to step in line with,” McVey added, echoing Morlote.

Ear to the Ground

While employers may discourage water-cooler politics, keeping it from happening is another thing.

A national survey of nearly 8,000 full-time workers conducted by Harris Interactive for the human resources firm CareerBuilder in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election found that 36 percent of those polled had discussed politics at work – and that 23 percent of the workers doing so had a heated exchange with a co-worker or higher-up. Further, 10 percent of respondents admitted that their opinion of a co-worker had changed after learning a colleague’s political affiliation, mostly for the negative.

Workers under age 25 tended to shy away from talking about politics while those 55 and older were the most vocal, the survey found.

In an election year, especially incendiary topics may require extra vigilance on the part of managers and supervisors.

Employees may believe they’ve been bullied or harassed during discussions of hot-button issues such as abortion, gay marriage or the race or gender of a candidate, a perception that can develop when workers view such issues through the prism of their own religion, race or gender, Green and McVey said. 

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforces a variety of laws related to discrimination, and failure to control heated political exchanges touching on religion, race, national origin or other factors could lead to a legal finding of a hostile workplace environment.

“If there truly is harassment that is keyed to someone’s religion as opposed to solely their political views, the employer would have a duty to investigate and take appropriate remedial action,” McVey said.

Employers must also be mindful of the rights of employees under the National Labor Relations Act if they start talking about issues such as an increase in the minimum wage, another hot topic this election year.

“If you’re having a discussion specifically about bringing in a union or … how the wages need to be increased in the workplace, those are areas that in my opinion are pretty well covered by the National Labor Relations Act,” McVey said.

“The employer needs to be careful about limiting that sort of speech,” Green added. “The conversation doesn’t even have to be company- or industry-specific in nature.”

Nurturing Civility

Employers can foster a more civil workplace by banning the use of social media unless it is specifically work-related, prohibiting on-site political solicitation and barring the display of buttons, stickers and T-shirts that endorse a candidate.

Written policies, including procedures for handling complaints, should be enforced in a consistent manner.

Shane Johnson, director of governmental affairs at the Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors and a former advance man for the Reagan White House, endorses the view that employers should take the lead in setting an organizational culture and establish guidelines for political discussion that reflect it.

Conversation in the office or factory that’s respectful of others can actually be beneficial, Johnson believes.

“We spend a lot of time at work,” Johnson observed, “so this is still a very important place for us to discuss those things so we can mature, so we can listen to other people and [in turn] learn from other people.”

The votes from local experts are in: If it’s going to happen at work, the best kind of political talk is civil.