Why We’re Closing Election Day and Encouraging Our Team to Be Poll Workers

You may wonder why we’re giving our team yet another day off, so soon after the Jewish holidays gobbled up most of October. The answer is, democracy. 

In addition to giving our team the day off, we’ve encouraged them to volunteer to be a poll worker at their local precinct. We’re hoping that at least 25% of our team will choose to volunteer in this way.

In doing this, we are joining a larger movement along with many other Jewish organizations. The Jewish Partnership for Democracy is a transpartisan Jewish network supporting free, fair, safe, and accessible elections.

Leading Edge is not a political organization. We work with Jewish organizations across a wide range of ideologies, representing different missions, sizes, denominations, and other forms of difference, to help them improve whatever they do, by focusing on culture, people, and leadership. We are a resource for the entire Jewish communal field, not an institution advancing any one of the many political visions or coalitions that belong to it. 

So why are we choosing this form of civic involvement—specifically regarding elections? Here are three reasons we’re doing so.

1. No employee is an island. 

We recognize that our employees are full human beings embedded in larger social networks, and we strive to make that recognition real in the ways our team experiences their employment with us. In our time off policies, our benefits package, our scheduling choices, and so much more, we work hard to provide support for our employees as family members and caregivers. In our donation match policy, we support employees as philanthropists. 

In much the same way, in this new choice to close on Election Day and encourage electoral volunteering, we support them as citizens participating in a democracy. We remove any sense of tension they might have felt between being a good employee and being an engaged citizen on that day. This is a benefit to the employees, who are not required to participate in the election, but are given extra convenience and encouragement.

2. No organization exists in a vacuum.

One of the beautiful things about organizations in the Jewish nonprofit sector is that they serve and benefit people beyond the Jewish community. They rely on their broader communities for safety, support, partnership, and engagement. They benefit from nonprofit tax status, as well as the kinds of stability, prosperity, and rule of law that (at least ideally) benefits everyone. For Jewish nonprofits who live in democratic societies, the democracy around us is part of the overall environment that keeps us running. Paying the electric bill isn’t in our mission statement either—but we’d better do it if we want to keep the lights on. Similarly, Jewish organizations must be good organizational citizens. 

Organizational good citizenship doesn’t need to mean taking a partisan position about who wins an election, but it can mean taking a civic position in favor of a flourishing democracy in which every citizen has access to participation in elections that are free, fair, and trusted.

3. No system maintains itself.

At Leading Edge, we are by no means democracy experts, but we do know a lot about how cultures in an institution change over time. And here’s one of the things we know about culture: You can’t run a thriving culture in maintenance mode. Healthy cultures balance competing interests and tendencies; they strive to transcend biases and focus on collective goals; they constantly practice fairness. They do all of these things actively, not passively; they maintain and build these “muscles” by using them. Organizations and leaders who put time, effort, and resources into generating supportive and excellent cultures will see those cultures grow and develop; those who neglect them will see those cultures decay. Standing still with no change is simply a fiction; it doesn’t happen—or not for long. Stagnation will lead to decline.

Those culture dynamics exist within organizations—and they can just as easily exist in a nation. They can apply to a culture of useful feedback, or a culture of diversity and inclusion—or to a culture of democracy. 

So whether you’re thinking as an organizational leader or as an individual, remember that a culture of democracy doesn’t maintain itself. It needs our participation in order to work. 

And if you’re managing people this November 8th in the United States, consider giving them the day off.