Incivility is bad for business.
Incivility in the workplace:
- Lowers productivity
- Destroys morale
- Increases employee attrition
- Causes health and wellness issues
- Increases the potential for costly lawsuits
- Alienates customers
- Damages relationships and ruins companies’ brands
- Costs $’s and reduces profitability
Among the many excellent books dealing with the topic of “workplace incivility,” two stand out as being uniquely important:
- The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, Robert Sutton, Warner Business Books, NYC, 2007.
- The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility is Damaging Your Business and What To Do About It, Christine Pearson and Christine Porath, Portfolio, NYC, 2009.
Leaders who aspire to act in a civil and respectful manner should read these books.
If you want to understand the real and tragic costs of workplace incivility, pay close attention to The Cost of Bad Behavior.
In this book, Christine Pearson and Christine Porath suggest, “that workplace incivility is one of today’s most substantial economic drains on American business.”
They go on to state “that job stress, much of which has been shown to stem from workplace incivility, costs US businesses $300 billion a year.”
That’s 300 billion dollars lost every year because of rude, insensitive, and demeaning behavior!
Citing numerous surveys and studies, including their own extensive research, Pearson and Porath assert that:
- Nearly 50% of American workers report being treated rudely once or more per week [Italics are mine]
- 60% of workplace incivility occurs top down
- Men are twice as likely to be uncivil; men and women are equally likely to be treated uncivilly
- People committing uncivil acts tend to be older (average age 41) and more experienced than their “targets” (average age 34)
In calculating the actual costs associated with workplace incivility, Pearson and Porath suggest that:
- 53% of employees lost work time worrying about an incident of incivility
- 28% lost time trying to avoid the offending ‘jerk’
- 37% reported a weakened sense of engagement with their employer
- 22% actually reduced their work output
- 46% contemplated changing their jobs
- 12% actually quit their jobs
Staggering!
Organizations and leaders that tolerate or even tacitly promote workplace incivility are literally throwing money down the drain.
Workplace incivility is toxic to an organization’s survival. It poisons the environment. It craters productivity. It obliterates employee morale and engagement. It pisses off customers.
Workplace incivility is, quite simply, bad for business!
One Response
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Dr. Robert Fettgather Says:
Ed Gardner hits on the paradox of business of our time and maybe of our time. Much like other revelations in the past:
like the routine beating of children with a rod does not improve their character. That introduced civility into childrearing at home to our collective benefit.The workplace may be one of the last places where the pretense of civility overlays a more barbaric incivility overseen with a lot of cleverness. There is a wink to civility followed by a regression to profit by plunder with the illusion of success. Like the proud parent of the meek, compliant and beaten child of old.
Data has long proved the efficacy of civility in in families, and the family wars have thankfully muted but not gone away (as I discussed in “Love, War and the American Family”).
Now Ed and others lead us to another “staggering” truth, that swaggering and worse does not make money but is instead quite costly.
Robert Fettgather, Ph.D.
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