New Study on Rudeness at Work: What Incivility Communicates to Bystanders
Another reason Gertrude’s gotta go…Rude people sap your energy and attention. They break your focus.
We used to have an employee (I’ll call her Gertrude to protect the problem employee), who wouldn’t speak before nine. When she walked in every morning, it was GRRRHHH—if she were in a reasonable mood. If we closed the office for a holiday, it was the “wrong holiday,” according to her—one that she would have rather worked so she could have taken a different holiday. If we decided to order in Chinese food for somebody’s birthday, she wanted barbecue. I’d tell Polly and Gertrude“thanks” for doing a great job on a project, and she’d reply that her coworker “didn’t help all that much”—that she just wanted to “set the record straight.”
Some days when I’d call in from the road to check status with her on various projects, Gertrude wasn’t speaking at all. Not a good idea, since she was my administrative assistant.
Why did I keep her? I travel most of the time—I didn’t have to put up with her sour disposition first-hand too often. And she was a tremendously productive employee, who could turn out the work of three typical employees.
But enough of the rudeness. I’ll spare you the details, but finally I fired her.
A month after her departure, a colleague of hers commented in a staff meeting: “I hate to say this because I was Gertrude’s best friend here, … but it’s amazing how the atmosphere around here as changed since she left. Everybody’s, well, upbeat again.”
Unless you’ve been living on a barge in the backwaters of the Ganges River, you’ve no doubt heard of the dangers of second-hand smoke. Ditto for the effects of second-hand rudeness.
A recent University of Florida study suggests that employees who witness abusive workplace remarks or behavior—even though they themselves are not the target—still suffer from their effects.
So what’s the challenge here for all of us? Persuading managers in the organization to get the backbone to do something about such rudeness! (Yes, I’m blushing here.)
Several times a year as a faculty member for Society of Human Resource Management seminars, I hear these complaints from HR executives: “Managers refuse to do the dirty work—they call us for those things.” Reasons they cite are varied: The typical manager
- hates to deal with conflict and has little or no training in that area.
- says he/she doesn’t have time to deal with difficult behavior.
- thinks, “As long as the employee does his job and stays out of my way, we can handle the fall-out by ignoring it.”
According to the University of Florida study, big mistake. Costly problem.
Witnessing a scene in which a peer is threatened, ridiculed or otherwise treated in a demeaning way has consequences for the group or organization as a whole. It
- lowers productivity
- interferes with the reasoning processes (resulting in forgetfulness, poor decision-making, setting inappropriate priorities)
- causes people to be less likely to help coworkers (a big concern in organizations that value teamwork)
- creates hostile tendencies toward others in those who witness such scenes
For full details of how the studies were completed, see the complete article.
The long-term challenge?
Deal with difficult people and rudeness promptly and decisively before their behavior adversely infects all concerned and affects the bottom-line.
