Is the workplace becoming a non-free speech zone?

Sante

You pose a great question Mr. Scrumian. There is a fine line between being Politically correct and Freedom of Speech.

I face this a lot in my day to day operations. I personally think that freedom of speech still exists but people became more sensitive so one can still be transparent but probably need to think more about the choice of words in order not to be misunderstood especially if you are working in a different culture than yours.

The whole world is changing. People do not trust each other as they used to do before. People do start by assuming the worst in what you said before they think about it in a positive way so this is why being politically correct these days is of utmost importance.

RK

Generally speaking, there is no "free speech" in the workplace. I represent my organization and so I have to choose the words that best represent it's goals and opinions, not my own.

The issue of political correctness is an interesting one. If I say things that make people uncomfortable, I want to know so I can stop. I don't want to inhibit a healthy work climate because of mere words or phrases that I use. The problem is that there are a few workplace bullies who use this like a weapon; they inject fear into the organizational climate to empower only themselves. In the case of your university, it's probably more than "a few."

Thanks Andrew. I was in a meeting earlier this year, reporting to a project committee. When a question was asked about one of the business customers (whom I had never met, only communicating via email and phone, but I knew her name to be Nikki), my reply was "She received the Statement of Work and seemed very happy with it". To which someone at the meeting replied: "Are you certain that is the correct pronoun?" I replied: "Are you referring to She or Statement of Work"? It was a university after all, so I should have been prepared for the Twilight Zone. I agree, transparency can cause friction, but that transparancy now has so many lenses to it. If one is constantly watching their words for fear of tripping up on the latest trend in obectionism, free speech is the loser.

In these days of gender multiplicity, I have found that referring to persons by their name avoids the issues of pronoun correctness.

Stéphane
he/him/il/ello

We live in a world where we have to view the “spoken word” as generated content that we are publishing. As painful as that sounds, that is the reality in many environments, so it serves us well to adopt metaphors such as this to mitigate our appearance before varying forms of inquisitions.

I do my best to avoid third-rail subjects in the workplace, but the issue for me is the list of subjects has grown beyond the few that I could write on the palm of my hand. So, now I rarely send an e-mail immediately, I leave it in draft mode and come back to it a few times, scrubbing it and running it through grammar filters and doing my best to dot every “i” and cross every “t.” On the spoken word, I do my best to practice Mindfulness, to give myself additional milliseconds to consider what I’m about to say.

For me, free speech is alive, but it costs time to make sure that what I have to say in verbal or written form is properly received, meaning, removing that which might distract from my message.