Why You Should’ve Given Your Team Election Day Off

It’s Never Too Late to Demonstrate Your Commitment to Employee Experience

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Philip Mandelbaum
11/10/2022

from Unseen Histories: Caption reads, "Negro voting in Cardoza [i.e., Cardozo] High School in [Washington,] D.C. / [MST]." Original black and white negative by Marion S. Trikosko. Taken November 3rd, 1964, Washington D.C, United States (@libraryofcongress). Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003688167/

If you missed the Day Without Us, I’m sure your staff understood: it was a one-time event announced only months before. But what about Election Day? You’ve known since you finalized your annual HR strategy that midterm elections would be held November 8. For many, voting has never been more important. Asking your team to join you in taking the day off to vote (and consider your core values) would have helped you demonstrate your leadership and — more importantly — your empathy and commitment to the employee experience.

Indeed, even if our supposed innovation influencers (e.g., Twitter or Google) are sprinting in the opposite direction, we all now know that employee experience is the new customer experience, And since brands that provide superior customer experience produce 570% more revenue than their competitors, I spent most of our first-ever Chief Marketing Officer event, CMO Exchange, pontificating on CX, EX and UX. Your social media posts and digital ads are meaningless if the on-site user experience you provide doesn’t generate leads, and the CX you deliver throughout the customer lifecycle doesn’t convert those leads into customers and loyalists.

Are Your Employees Happy?

Are your employees happy? How do you know? When was the last time you checked in with your managers? And how often do they talk to their staff — about job satisfaction, or wellbeing? Let me be clear: If you and your management team don’t ensure the people you hire feel respected, included and valued, they’ll quickly become disengaged, accelerating turnover, compromising recruitment, eviscerating brand image, and shrinking ROI.

So why not block out an afternoon to think about what your employees actually need? For instance, the flexibility to vote in their local elections, which impact their daily lives.

Here’s an example:

Many of your most business-critical employees work on site. You don’t allow your staff the time to vote on Election Day. Without their votes, a proposition to improve citywide infrastructure and transportation fails. As a result, your understandably discouraged staff suffers daily through increasing congestion, causing work tardiness, decreased productivity and efficiency and, most importantly, waning job satisfaction.

That’s not the kind of work or life experience any business leader would argue they’ve ever wanted for their employees. Yet, we continue to make people-management moves that suggest otherwise, even as our employees — like our target audiences — become increasingly sophisticated in their expectations and requirements.

A crowd of young protesters at a climate crisis march, with focus on a protest sign reading 'THERE IS NO PLANET B'

The Importance of Authenticity in Corporate Advocacy

There’s no denying it. The 2020s kicked off with a supply chain-halting global pandemic and the longest period of sustained protest in US history. Then came the Great Resignation. And inflation (and all the CEO quotes celebrating it). And with abortion rights, workers rights and voting rights headlining the news cycle and the ballots, many of the choices you may have previously relegated to HR now require your intervention.

If, for instance, your brand promotes its commitment to workers’ rights, company culture and/or DEI, but your salary is skyrocketing as prices rise and employee pay stagnates, it won’t be long before one of your most tenured employees calls you out on social media; from there, it’ll feel like seconds before the generations align to come for your organization — and you start hemorrhaging customers. (All you need is one influencer to join in on the backlash, and you could be doomed.) Which, of course, leaves you with two options:

Be authentic, and don’t speak of values you don’t truly hold (Dan Price built and ruined his career this way; edit or redo your About Us page, your LinkedIn and Glassdoor profiles, and your content marketing, if you have to)
Be authentic, and demonstrate your commitment to the values you espouse (e.g., by offering your team the day off on Election Day)

By providing your workers with a civic engagement opportunity (i.e., voting), you could have begun to instill a sense of community, changing the employee narrative and possibly your employees’ actual wellbeing. (By offering remote work, for instance, you can save your full-time workers the equivalent of 33 workdays commuting — while decreasing absenteeism and ‘executed’ vacation time and improving your organization’s work quality and profitability.)

On September 30, 2022, you could have offered your employees a #DayWithoutUs; had you done so, though, the event’s mission to “abandon borders, boundaries, and binaries to build solidarity across the country” might’ve caught you some flack from certain corners. On the other hand, on November 8 you could’ve given your entire team the day off to vote in our nation’s elections and caught no flack — because voting is non-partisan, encouraged nationwide, and unifying.

An American flag pinned to the outside wall of an old barn

Knowing When to Activate, When to Keep Quiet, and How to Benefit from Your Choices

You don’t have to be an activist. You don’t have to work pro bono. Your product or service doesn’t have to target the entire population. And your organization doesn’t have to pad its mission statement with inauthentic non-business goals. You are who and what you are, and that is what consumers appreciate. In fact, once again, our latest research shows that while at least half of companies are now prioritizing inclusiveness, equity and cultural sensitivity, fewer than 5% are focused on politics.

In other words, most organizations probably shouldn’t take a stance on every hot-button issue. But, how hard would it be to offer your staff the time they need to participate in their community outside of the office (or refer to Columbus Day as “Indigenous People’s Day”)?

Not hard. That is the answer. Not hard. And almost certainly smart.

Every choice we make has the potential to strengthen or weaken our brand reputation and market position, so we weigh the pros and cons of taking a stance. For some of us, it simply isn’t worth the risk. But there isn’t a single Democrat, Republican or independent in the United States who would argue against your employees’ right (if not duty) to vote.

So, dip your toes in the pool, because your customers may just like the feeling. Make Election Day a day off. Then, decide between these two choices:

Taking the initiative now, adding Election Day (and Juneteenth) to your list of holidays off — but not promoting the reactive decision outside of the organization
Waiting until the next election year to announce your company’s additions to its holidays-off list — and leveraging the decision to internally and externally demonstrate your employee centricity, agility and adaptability, and commitment to doing what’s right for our greater society

Election Day is Only the Start

Needless to say, sitting on your hands from now until the next election cycle wouldn’t be prudent; there’s a lot more you can do to improve your employee experience, company culture, brand reputation and competitive positioning.

As Brindha Sridhar, senior director of customer experience at MetroPlusHealth and CEI online event speaker, told me recently:

Your transformation starts with you and your mission; whether it works depends on how it’s evangelized across your organization, and how well your employee experience translates into customer experience.

Undeniably, times have changed, and a competitive bonus structure and 401(k) will no longer cut it. Nor will additional holidays off, or even committing to DEI. In addition to implementing pay increases, work flexibility and a smart diversity, equity and inclusion policy, start by surveying your employees to better understand their needs, goals, opportunities and gaps.

The Employee Survey: Employee Experience and the Importance of Listening

To run a successful organization, you need to know how your employees — and prospects — feel, during recruitment, hiring and onboarding, and throughout their career. What’s most important isn’t which holiday days off you offer or even which benefits or perks you provide, but that you respect and value your employees and reward hard work.

How’s this done? By listening, first, repeatedly, and methodically. So, instruct your HR director to lead their team in:

Conducting research on industry standards and competitors’ benefits offerings
Developing an employee survey using AskNicely, GetFeedback, LimeSurvey, Qualtrics or Zoho Survey
Gamifying the exercise and offering incentives for completion
Promoting through your HR or internal comms team the importance of the survey to ‘their’ employee experience and future benefits
Disseminating and tracking the survey through your HR portal (see below)
Leveraging the survey data to ascertain what your employees most appreciate — and would most appreciate
Identifying creative incentives and other workplace solutions you could offer beyond the traditional benefits
Proposing your updated benefits package to senior management, including legal and finance
Researching and partnering with the best providers
Continually monitoring employee wellness, morale, engagement, efficiency and productivity, iterating and optimizing benefits and perks as necessary