WORKING Jamaicans are very civil for the most part: exchanging, the courteous ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’ and generally being on polite terms with each other as we labour cheek by jowl in the office ‘salt mines’.

Unfortunately, there are those rare instances when the dragon of workplace incivility, rudeness or bad manners, rears its hideous head, threatening to devour all in its path. Although we are certainly not alone on this planet of ‘bad behaviour’, the comfort of huge numbers is not enough to create a remedy.

If you have ever civilly greeted a colleague only to be given the blank stare or have ‘deaf ears’ turned in your direction, you have been a victim of workplace incivility. If you have sent correspondence or made phone calls to your colleagues and they have conveniently forgotten to respond, or do so months later, some even boldly claiming early onset Alzheimer’s, you too have been a victim of this pernicious discourtesy. If you have been verbally abused at work and have found yourself to be a casualty of gaggling office gossipers, in case you did not know, you are also a target of workplace rudeness. Although I have noticed an improvement in the communication skills of some security guards, if you, my friend, have ever been instructed loudly and imperiously to, ‘nuh park ova deh so’ you are a marked victim of rudeness.

In some organisational cultures, sadly, there is no cure for this illness. Disrespect, rudeness and frequent, generous daily doses of ‘forty shilling words’ have become engrained in those workplaces and any new employee is quickly identified as an interloper and runs the risk of being roundly ‘out-ed’ as being ‘stoosh’ or elitist if they do not conform to the office milieu. It is indeed unfortunate that employees in workplaces have got so use to being yelled at and treated with indignity that they have become conditioned to persistent rudeness.

I am reading excerpts from a book entitled: The Cost of bad behaviour: How incivility is damaging your business and what to do about it”, written by Christine Pearson, a professor of management at the Thunderbird School of Global Management and Christine Porath, an assistant professor of management at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. It is as we expected; the problem of workplace incivility is widespread. According to the article, “American business has an incivility problem, and it’s getting worse. Tune into interactions in many workplaces today and you’ll spot employees speaking to subordinates in condescending tones, ignoring e-mail or phone messages, claiming excessive credit for their team’s accomplishments, browsing on their iPhones or texting during meetings, and leaving malfunctioning office equipment for the next user to fix. About one-fourth of workers we polled in 1998 said they were treated rudely once or more per week; by 2005 that number had risen to nearly half.

“An astonishing 95 per cent of workers in 2005 reported experiencing incivility from their co-workers. A recent Gallup study entitled “Feeling Good Matters in the Workplace” found that 73 per cent of workers don’t ‘feel good action.’ Of the respondents to the Gallup poll, 14 per cent say that they are actively disengaged as a result, and they admitted to doing what they can to undermine their organisations and their co-workers. The problem of incivility in the workplace has been compounded by our increasing tolerance of nasty behaviour as a culture.”

There are, of course, repercussions for incivility at the workplace because this is where employees spend most of their time. If employees are demotivated by rude colleagues and have to work in an environment that it abusive it will affect the staff turnover, employee performance and ultimately company bottom line. Porath and Pearson surveyed several thousand managers and employees from a broad mix of US businesses to try to quantify the cost of workplace rudeness. They found that employees who were targets of rude and discourteous acts reported that “these actions led to a reduction in work effort, work quality and overall employee performance”. Four-fifths of respondents stated that they were preoccupied at work because of the incident, and an almost equal percentage said they were less committed to their employer because of it.

Jennifer Swanberg, work-life columnist, reviewed Porath’s and Pearson’s book in an article in 2009. She noted that in their study of 775 US employees who had been targets of coworkers’ or supervisors’ lack of respect, nearly one-half of participants considered changing jobs to avoid the instigator, and one in eight actually did leave their job to escape the untenable situation. Considering that employer turnover costs are typically estimated to be 1.5 to 2.5 times the salary paid for the job (or US$50,000 on average per departing employee across US industries and occupational classifications), the financial impacts of incivility mount up fast.

Porath’s and Pearson’s book also examined who were the likely perpetrators of workplace rudeness. According to their studies, instigators of uncivil acts were twice as likely to be men and three times as likely to be of higher status than the target. In addition, men were seven times as likely to behave poorly toward someone of lower status as toward someone of higher status. Women, on the other hand, were equally likely to act uncivilly toward their supervisors as toward their subordinates, but less likely to act poorly toward their peers.

As the year moves swiftly towards the finish line, perhaps one of our New Year’s resolve should be to wage peace towards our colleagues no matter where along the food chain they fall.

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with RO Communications Jamaica, specialising in businesscommunications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com  . Visit her website at https://www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.