Did you know that a moment of rudeness was reported to decrease a doctor’s  performance by more than 50 percent in an exercise involving a hypothetical life-or-death situation?  

Did you know that rudeness effectively damages our ability to think, manage information, and make decisions by 40 percent if experienced and 20-30 percent if only witnessed around us? 

Did you know that according to recent surveys, 7 out of 10 employees reported rudeness in the work place as the number one reason for their unhappiness and resignations? And that 25% of those people report management as the reason behind uncivil behavior? 

Did you know that customers that witnessed incivility from the employees or between employees were four times more likely to walk away from the company? 

 According to Johnson and Indvik (1994), workplace rudeness does not get the same amount of attention as workplace harassment, as violence or any other HR priorities within an organization. In today’s increasingly more competitive global business arena, researchers from Michigan State University found that:  “...Stress on the job, largely attributable to co-worker incivility, costs companies $300 billion in lost productivity annually, according to the American Institute of Stress...” (Pearson & Porath, 2010, p. 15). 

A lack of empathy, cultural awareness, good manners was not only overlooked but hidden behind a culture of reporting that started from the top and completely took the HUMAN factor out of the Human Resources department. 

Many people take lightly or for granted the idea that manners, etiquette training  and anything that we branded as “soft” skills could bring any profit into the company. 

Workplace incivility is bad for business because it directly impacts employees’ productivity, morale, undermines creativity, organizational commitment, leads to higher turnover, and ultimately reflects upon the bottom line of the company’s balance sheet (Pearson & Porath, 2009; Fritscher- Porter, 2003 ). 

There is a tendency for individuals to treat others as they feel they are treated. The unhappy employee is less likely to provide professional, polite customer service. The bottom line is that it is in management’s self-interest to not only manage and control rudeness in the workplace but develop a perfect awareness of cultures, empathy and civility. To build up an awareness of cultural differences and be sensitive to people’s problems. Management needs to step far away from the comfort sentence “My door is always open”. It never works!

Research suggests that the supervisor’s role in resolving organizational problems, such as incivility and rudeness, is pivotal. The supervisor is not just the individual who is in charge. They represent the brand of your organization, the role model that the employees need to follow. We need to stop designing our management job requirement based on authoritarian skills and more on life and people skills. We need to understand that technical skills can take you so far into the hierarchy of an organization but ultimately, your behavior will speak louder in the absence of a paper resume. Furthermore, employees tend to use the behavior of their bosses as a model for their own behavior.

So make sure you lead by the heart and not just by dusted policies because end of the day...business is not only personal but in a market where over night there are 10 more competitors showing up, your business' survival will essentially be built strictly on the capability of developing better personal relationships and human connections not just outside the organization but even more importantly within.

"Always be kind,"

Andreea Stefanescu

References:

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