Should Certain Subjects Be Verboten?

Chicago entrepreneur Jason Fried founded the tech firm 37Signals in 1999. A few years later he hired Danish programmer David Heinemeier Hansson, who devised the web framework Ruby on Rails. From that they developed Basecamp, an online management and messaging platform — and 37Signals started to take off. By 2006, investors included Jeff Bezos, and MIT named Fried a top young innovator. In 2010, Fried and Hansson wrote Rework, laying out their business wisdom. The book emerged as an internet-era manifesto and pushed them further into the spotlight. They soon changed the company’s name to Basecamp and their next book, Remote: Office Not Required, seemed to foresee our telecommuting future.

By the time the pandemic arrived they were poised to be gurus of 21st-century work. But in April 2021 Fried announced in a public blog post that Basecamp was banning discussions about society and politics in its internal messaging platforms. “Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion…quickly spins away from pleasant,” Fried explained. Basecamp staffers expressed outrage, and the news sparked heated discussions on tech platforms. Basecamp was not the first firm to enact such a ban; the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase had enacted a similar policy some months prior. But Coinbase had not garnered great praise for its progressive culture or understanding how to keep remote teams connected.

Basecamp had, and the internal anger and pointed public questions had the potential to erode its productivity and its brand. So, three days after the ban, Fried hosted an all-hands Zoom to allow staffers to air their grievances. The discussion turned intense. At one point Fried and Hansson, as well as head of strategy Ryan Singer, appeared to refuse to denounce white supremacism — and several employees ended up in tears. By the next day, more than a third of the firm, 20 of 57 staffers, had accepted a buyout, including the heads of marketing, design, and customer support.

Basecamp had become a cautionary tale. How did Fried and Hansson lose sight of what had brought them success? Crucially, the ban was not even an effort to avoid heated political discussions, such as Trump vs. Biden or whether to get vaccinated; it was about squelching an internal advocacy groups’s criticism of Basecamp’s efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion. In a flash, Basecamp went from a culture where all voices were embraced, where bold thinking and strong opinions were encouraged and prized, to a culture in which stepping out of line appeared to be verboten.

It’s hard to imagine a better example of the power and potential pitfalls of strong culture. Basecamp had staked its reputation and built a strong brand on the idea that its leaders embraced progressive management practices fit for the 21st-century workplace. Yet when an internal discussion dragged skeletons out of the closet, they moved away from all this, and the house of cards came crashing down.

The lesson from this saga is that leaders would be wise to establish a culture that is consistent with norms that will be sustainable for the organization. In terms of the free exchange of ideas, is your culture going to encourage employees to act in moderation – or to engage in extreme positions on corporate networks? For some cultures the latter might work, while other culture norms would see these discussions moved to employee personal social media accounts away from work.

There’s a fine line here. Innovation, growth, and development tend to come from a culture that encourages outspokenness, from staffers and managers being comfortable enough to take risks, in what they say and what they set out to do. Foster a culture of continuous improvement by establishing “learning” as your most important currency. Schedule retrospectives to review new initiatives, key processes, and incidents. Share customer feedback broadly and summarize it for strategic planning. When staffers bring forward ideas that challenge leadership, be open to feedback and thank them for their contribution. These should be seen as opportunities to evolve and build employee trust by embracing company values. In the end, whatever expectations your firm chooses to set, be sure it aligns with your culture and that your leaders are truly able to stick to it, rather than waffle.

We saw a similar disruption at Twitter, where staffers had long been able to choose where they work. Suddenly new ownership dictated they had to be at the office working “at high intensity”. This was completely inconsistent with established norms and as a result more than four out of ten employees choose to leave.

Company culture means nothing if it’s not backed up with integrity. The real test is not achieving perfection — nobody’s capable of that. The real test is acknowledging errors and making amends, then figuring out how the mistakes occurred and taking steps to reduce them going forward. The truly valuable employees, the ones with more interest in company success than internal politics, are those with the courage to tell their boss when they’re wrong. Those are the employees that might one day lead the company to bigger and better things. Rather than silenced, they should be applauded, and given a platform to express their views.

Over time, your workforce will inevitably come to reflect what leadership communicates as acceptable. At successful companies, the reflection is an appealing one.