Alison Taylor, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is a leading authority on sustainable business, guiding some of the world’s biggest companies towards ethical governance. A member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Good Governance and the Financial Times’ Moral Money Advisory Board, she’s at the forefront of responsible business. In this excerpt from her new book Higher Ground, Taylor explores the surge of employee activism and its transformative impact on today’s work culture.

This article first appeared in Issue 05 of The Beautiful Truth magazine. Get your copy here.

On 17 March 2022, Sofia Vashchenko, a web content manager at Nestlé, based in Lviv, Ukraine, posted on LinkedIn that her eight years of dedicated loyalty to the company had come to an end after “speeches by top management” emphasised “that people of Russia also matter and Nestlé cares about them.” Her post continued: “Nestlé obviously chooses profits and funding war criminals above the people of Ukraine.” Vashchenko added that she had just spent three weeks “trying to support my team of 20 people mentally as well as ensuring the continuity of operations.” She declared that her team was “mentally broken” after the Nestlé webcast, and she was leaving the company because “I want to show my integrity with my own values as a person and as a professional of my future employer.”

Junior and mid-level employees have become ever likelier to blame senior leaders for what they see as ethical failings of their organisation and to seek to hold them to account in the court of public opinion. Even leaders make use of the new transparency weapons. In April 2022, a senior brand manager at Levi’s published an article on a prominent blog and gave numerous media interviews describing how she turned down a large severance package so she could speak up over what she described as the company’s aggressive efforts to stop her from commenting on Twitter against Covid-19 school closings.

Deciding when the company should take a stand

Leaders understandably have mixed feelings about the rise in employee activism. Megan Reitz and John Higgins [authors of Speak Up: Say what needs to be said and hear what needs to be heard] described a spectrum of responses, from straight-up denial (“What activism?”) through suppression and “façadism” (a kind of feigned empathy) to meaningful dialogue – and even efforts by some corporations to stimulate activism. Despite all the caveats I’ve already laid out, there may be good reason to take an organisational position on an important social or environmental issue. This must be carefully considered from a range of angles. Leaders who encourage activism should not delude themselves into thinking they can retain top-down control over how it unfolds.

Re_Generation (formerly the Canadian Business Youth Council for Sustainable Development) produced a detailed toolkit to enable young workers to “help employees understand the difference between greenwashing and genuinely impactful sustainability efforts, and to hold employers accountable to their promises.” The report suggested: “All employee activists should… acquire a high degree of sustainability literacy in order to adequately assess their company’s performance. The second stage of employee activism involves finding allies, organising for change, and helping to spread the word through meetings, workshops, conferences and informal channels such as internal message boards.”

Organisations are emerging to facilitate and coordinate these efforts. After being Facebook’s director of sustainability for six years, Bill Weihl left in 2017 to start ClimateVoice, a platform for coordinated employee activism on climate change in the tech sector. “I realised that the most important thing Facebook could do was to use its voice in the public policy battle on climate,” he tells me. The problem Weihl perceived is that “many tech companies do the right thing in their own operations – and even keep expanding their sustainability goals – but are largely silent on public policy questions. Meanwhile, Big Oil uses every ounce of influence it has.”

In light of these employee efforts, it’s extremely risky to treat taking stands as a communications strategy that’s divorced from internal priorities and spending. Today’s employee activists aren’t content to read management’s supportive posts on Instagram. They’re looking under the hood to ensure that corporate rhetoric and action on public policy are aligned. They expect the company to take political risks by standing up for its expressed organisational values. You can see where all this might leave a business that proclaims support for certain public policy positions while opposing them via its lobbying and contributions.

Leaders who encourage activism should not delude themselves into thinking they can retain top-down control over how it unfolds.

So how can organisations be more effective and less hypocritical regarding when and how they speak up? Organisational leaders can work actively to reduce divisiveness and promote pluralism and mutual respect, or they can choose to lean into increasing polarisation and employee demands by taking more activist positions. Both routes feature pros and cons. Avowing neutrality won’t solve all challenges because silence is frequently interpreted as complicity. A more activist stance will alienate some potential employees and attract others, inviting difficult questions about overreach and representation. Any embrace of corporate activism must be based on rigorous, consistent criteria, not least because when you speak up on one question, you raise expectations that you will do so on the next, yet-unknown topic of keen interest.

Whatever your company’s ultimate disposition, speaking up should never be divorced from questions of values, culture or environmental and social priorities. (This is yet another reason why sharply focusing your priorities is such a good idea.) While leaders need to invite employee voice and participation, it’s a bad idea to ask the workforce for a majority decision on every hot-button question. Not only is it likely to mire you in distracting conflict, you’re running a business, not an electoral realm.

It’s sensible to agree that the company won’t speak up unless it has ensured that a proposed action will not undermine the broad social, political and environmental systems we all rely on. The following questions might help:

• Is the issue central to your values, code of conduct and/or other existing public commitments?
• Is the issue an environmental or social priority, according to a rigorous materiality assessment?
• Does the issue pertain to commitments you have made to your workforce, such as any on diversity and inclusion or human rights principles?
• Has your company already done all it can to ensure it isn’t making the problem worse through its actions or business model?
• Does your company have relevant capacity and expertise to contribute to solutions for the issue?
• Is this a new issue that has a proximate relationship to the company’s goals or operations?
• Is there a clear way your business can make a positive contribution in collaboration with others?
• Will acting on the issue support a positive operating environment for business in general? Would it support democratic participation, fair competition, equality of opportunity and basic human rights?
• Can the company make a statement that’s consistent with its values, prior actions, political spending and environmental and social priorities?

A negative answer to any of these questions signifies that it would be unwise to proceed.

While some employees may demand speaking up, the second-order consequences of business engagement are unpredictable. Before you mount any public campaign, ensure that actions and spending are aligned and that you’ve taken concrete steps to protect stakeholders from human rights violations. (Most companies will find that further internal work awaits.) The worst possible approach is to view a public campaign as a way to compensate for – or distract from – a lack of meaningful action by your core business. In other words, don’t speak up on the death penalty if your workers lack healthcare support or a living wage.