Improving voter turnout has long proven stubbornly difficult. Campaign and PAC leaders spend hundreds of millions of dollars each election cycle trying to get people to the polls — blanketing television and social media platforms with paid advertising while investing in canvassing, phone banks, and mailers. Yet all of that money barely moves the needle. Randomized trials suggest that even a well-executed canvass can lift turnout by only a point or two at most.

Now, new research has uncovered a far more powerful lever for driving turnout: America's employers. Researchers linked LinkedIn employment records to voter files, studying 30 million workers at 377,000 employers, and found that a person's workplace is decisive in whether or not they choose to vote.

To account for employee selection bias, researchers at Michigan, Harvard, Columbia, and Maryland also tracked 8 million people who changed jobs. Their findings: workers who moved to a higher-scoring employer became 3.5 percentage points more likely to vote, while those who moved from an employer at the 25th percentile to one at the 75th became 5.8 percentage points more likely to vote. The effects held across political affiliations.

The results point to a striking conclusion: employers have enormous influence over whether or not their employees vote. People are powerfully shaped by the environments where they spend most of their time — and workplaces top that list. Employers set the tone for civic engagement, reminding employees that elections are happening and that democratic participation matters. They also control formal levers that can prevent people from voting, such as scheduling and leave policy on Election Day.

A call for employers to act

Most corporate leaders, the authors argue, do not think very much about employee voting — and likely have no idea where their companies fall on this distribution. In their view, executives have an obligation to find out and to make an effort to climb the rankings.

At the companies the authors run, driving voter turnout has turned out to be a management problem with an easy solution.

At Weyco, the company maintains a simple communications calendar. Several weeks before an election, employees are encouraged to make a plan to vote. When early voting opens, they hear about it. They then receive a friendly reminder the week before Election Day, and again on the day itself. Employees who want to vote or serve as poll workers are encouraged to take paid leave to do so, and the company arranges a ride for anyone who needs one. Weyco also brings voter registration assistance into the building.

At Goodmans, the firm has partnered with Power the Polls to recruit employees to serve as poll workers. Employees who participate receive a small stipend and a paid day off.

In both cases, the programs are simple to administer and cost little. Neither requires an outside consultant or a new department. Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy publishes a toolkit with a communications timeline and templates that any company can adapt, and both executives have also worked alongside fellow business leaders to develop plans through the Leadership Now Project.

A simple playbook

For most employers, the cost amounts to a few emails and some scheduling flexibility. The overall playbook is straightforward: give people time to vote, remind them when to do so, and help connect them to their local election officials to find out how. Another important step is encouraging anyone interested to work the polls.

Poll worker recruitment is a pressing challenge. Nearly half of local election jurisdictions had difficulty recruiting enough workers for the 2024 general election, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. This fall, Milwaukee, Kenosha, and Maricopa County are short of poll workers, along with jurisdictions in Ohio, North Carolina, Nevada, and many more. Poll worker shortages lead to longer lines and more friction for voters.

No need to wade into politics

There is a long-running argument in corporate America about whether and when a CEO should speak on matters of politics, and for many leaders it remains a difficult question. The good news, according to the authors, is that helping employees participate in democracy requires none of it. At no point does an employer need to ask any employee about their political preferences or about specific candidates. Nor does it require leaders to take a political position or risk landing in a news cycle.

Better still, the effects will not expire in November. The research suggests that voting is a habit-forming activity: employees continue to vote even after they leave the companies, and those employees influence their households — family members of workers at higher-scoring employers vote more as well. The impact of employers is also largest in primaries, which are the contests where additional turnout makes the biggest difference.

Helping employees vote is the right thing to do, the authors conclude, but it is also good business. Higher levels of participation lead to greater trust in democracy, which in turn reinforces the stability that allows businesses to plan for the future, invest, and hire. Employers are already shaping whether or not people vote — and, in their experience, even minimal effort can put that power to good use.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.