Companies spend considerable energy and resource on maintaining their corporate reputation aiming to protect and enhance their brands. The idea they should allow the mixed and multiple voices of employee activists to contaminate the corporate message can be anathema to the CEO’s and CIO’s nightmare. But, as our research suggests, employee activism is on the increase and is here to stay. So, organizations need to address it, lose this perception of a ‘nightmare’, and help engage with activist employees to achieve positive outcomes for the organization and its stakeholders.

Today’s well-educated, informed, and social media-savvy employees are often deeply concerned about the enormous societal and environmental challenges of our times and are increasingly unlikely to tow the corporate line if it goes against their better judgment. With employee activism becoming a defining feature of the mid-21st century workplace, business leaders can no longer avoid or merely superficially engage with the contentious social and planetary issues that their employees, customers, and other stakeholders will be only too aware of.

Far from simply being a nightmare, activism speaks to a rich vein of energy and creativity. Embraced intelligently, employee activism can become a positive dynamic in shaping corporate culture, stimulating employee engagement, and supporting a progressive company’s sustainability goals (and the goals of the growing ESG investment community).

The challenge comes in genuinely engaging with activist sentiment, which may require leaders to accept fundamental changes to organizational hierarchy and power structures. It also requires leaders and employees at all levels to engage in a form of unscripted dialogue they may not be used to, that may reveal difficult truths, and require them to expect to have their minds changed.

Being under-challenged, or ‘rust out as shown in the performance curve, comes from not being under enough pressure

In our recent research (see below), undertaken with our colleague Emma Day-Duro, we, explored the reason why and how employee activism occurs, looking both at ‘productive’ activism i.e. strategies that can be effective and work for the individual and the organization and at activist ‘traps’, where individuals can suffer, and actions fail. We also delved into organizational leadership responses to employee activism and how these could be classed as ‘productive’ or as ‘traps’ too including ‘advantage blindness’ due to living in a privileged ‘optimism bubble’, believing inaction is apolitical, superficial ‘facadism’, or falling victim to ‘cancel culture’.

Activism is a term that exists in the eye of the beholder and evokes a broad range of positive and negative meanings as Ruchika Tulshyan put it in our conversation together: “What looks like rebellion to you, might be another’s fundamental human right.” Even as it applies to employees it can range from the tempered action of BBC journalists seeking gender pay parity to the more radical action of RSC actors resigning and threatening strike action to force the Royal Shakespeare Company to cut its sponsorship ties with the oil giant BP.

For this research, we understood employee activism to be “voices of difference that challenge the established status quo as to who gets heard and/or what should be included in the formal organizational agenda.” We examined activist influence and how voices of difference can be heard, how power imbalances can silence employees, and how confident managers, prepared to support agendas that play out over the long term, can engage with activism for the organization’s benefit.

Responding constructively to employee activism is important. Organizations that enable their employees to help guide them will be best able to adapt to the changing external environment. As the world changes and we are in the midst of enormous social and technological change organizations need to change as well. Those that fail to reflect the social values and priorities of their workforce and their customers are unlikely to thrive. This fits well with the increasing business focus on stakeholder value, ‘purpose statements’, and ‘integrated reporting’ the move towards measuring company performance against sustainability and societal goals rather than purely on financial profitability.

Not all activist causes need to be embraced. The important thing, as we have discovered in our previous research, is that organizational health and sustainability are greatly enhanced in an environment where employees at all levels are encouraged to ‘speak up’, and managers to ‘listen up’ and take heed. An environment where ‘speaking truth to power’ is expected and leaders know how to listen, is one where a productive dialogue can take place around activist issues and enable a genuinely shared organizational agenda to emerge.

As we say in our research report, “There is no one definition of employee activism and no single organizational response. How activists influence and organizations engage with them is a function of personalities, individual and collective experiences, perceived pressures, and an organization’s political and speak-up culture. It is also a matter of how in-touch leaders are with experiences outside of their own, often privileged perspective.

Organizations that enable their employees to help guide them will be best able to adapt to the changing external environment

“Leadership is becoming a more explicitly political/ideological act. We would argue that it has always been so, but whilst in the past its politics/ideology have often disappeared, in the future it may be forced into the light.

We urge leaders of organizations of all types to resist the instinctive reaction to see employee activism as a nightmare, and to understand how empathetic but realistic engagement with it can bring benefits to all.

Our full research report can be downloaded here: ‘The Do’s and Don’ts of Employee Activism: How Organizations Respond to Voices of Difference’ (Megan Reitz, John Higgins, Emma Day-Duro; Hult International Business School; 202). The research was based on:

1. Sixty-two semi-structured interviews with activists and organizational leaders. Interviewees were drawn from a wide range of industries including healthcare, retail, manufacturing, academia, charity, and public sector, across the globe including Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America.
2. Data drawn from cooperative inquiry groups including a longstanding inquiry group focused on speaking truth to power, a global bank study conducted over four months in 2020, and several group inquiries with activists, leaders, and academics.
3. Online inquiry with Twitter and LinkedIn connections.
4. Conference and workshop participation, including discussions and polling data (gathered from a total of 398 participants) collected at The Drucker Forum, in October 2020 and the Chartered Institute of Professional Development (CIPD) Annual Conference, in November 2020, 303 participants in 6 workshop groups (global, cross-sector, cross-hierarchy), in November and December 2020 and 392 senior leaders at a global services organization surveyed in November 2020.
5. Literature review of academic and practitioner publications.