You may be asking, "why the focus on civility and why does it matter?"
Research has shown that incivility has been proven to negatively impact cognitive abilities and emotional wellbeing of employees and teams. Whether personally experienced or being a witness to incivility in the workplace negatively affects short-term memory, creativity, and problem solving. These and other adverse effects such as increased stress, anger, or fear and physical ailments such as panic attacks or insomnia don’t just hurt individuals. Workplace incivility often spreads like an infectious disease across work groups and eventually permeates an entire organizational system before being fully recognized and addressed, if at all.
Organizational leaders are largely unaware of how to identify and respond to incivility and are forced to deal with it in its later stages when significant damage has already been done. This can lead to major losses for the company that could have been prevented if the symptoms were caught early. The cost of incivility can be upwards of $30,000 to $100,000 per employee incident per year within a single organization.
Individual employees are not the only culprits. Organizational policies, practices, work environments and other organizational dynamics can contribute to incivility which can undermine organizational effectiveness. Knowing what to look for is the first step to recovering or preventing loss. Having a civil, positive work culture reduces company risk whereas disgruntled and disengage employees can lead to mistakes, poor decision making, or deviant and unethical behavior that becomes a compliance issue and puts you at risk of liability and legal issues.
Let us show you how to identify and remedy this workplace dis-ease.