If you want to prevent or address workplace incivility, you’ll find no shortage of obstacles.
The vast majority of the comments found in our HR Reporter survey on workplace incivility’s open-ended sections, point to two major obstacles.
Not surprisingly, the first obstacle respondents describe is this: senior managers are often the biggest offenders. And if the leaders model these bad behaviours, there’s no chance of taking meaningful action to curtail it elsewhere.
The second obstacle relates to the murky nature of the problem, and its multi-dimensionality. For example, “more often than not, things are said in a joking way”; “sometimes what was ok yesterday, is not okay today!!!”; “some people are perceived to have ‘untouchable’ status”; “most incidents of incivility are not brought to the appropriate personnel”; and; “there are no laws about incivility, so companies have no specific policies on this”.
Still, these complexities are no excuse for letting incivility damage both the business and its people.
The time is now for organizations to begin connecting the dots: incivility is a risk that needs to be managed just like any other risk. It needs to be diagnosed correctly and addressed in a thoughtful way.
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