This blog is the second in a mini-series, where Gemma delves into incivility and the impact it has on workplace culture. In this blog, she focuses on the connection with employee engagement and the role leaders have to play in setting the tone and behaviour.
In case you missed it, you can click here to read part one.
The connection with employee engagement
Employee engagement – that elusive state in which people are emotionally committed to their work and willing to go beyond what’s required – is built or eroded in the thousands of small interactions every day.
When Porath and Pearson surveyed workers who had experienced workplace incivility, the results were striking:
- 80% lose work time worrying about the incident
- 66% state that their overall performance declines
- 38% deliberately decreased the quality of their work
- 63% lost time avoiding the offender
- 25% admitted to taking their frustration out on customers
These aren’t isolated acts of rebellion. They’re entirely rational responses of human beings who’ve been made to feel undervalued. Incivility is one of the fastest ways of destroying employee engagement.
The knock-on effect on culture is equally damaging. Culture is not what is written on the wall or in the company values statements (though these help), it’s the sum total of what gets tolerated. When incivility goes unaddressed, it becomes the culture. Talented, engaged people, who originally wanted to go above and beyond for the organisation, leave. Those who stay may learn to survive by adopting the same behaviours, enabling the cycle to perpetuate.
Where does leadership fit in?
Here is the uncomfortable truth that many organisations avoid: most workplace incivility flows downward. Leaders set the tone through their thoughts and actions, and their behaviour is observed, interpreted and replicated by those around them; whether they intend it or not.
This means that addressing incivility is, fundamentally, a leadership challenge. It requires leaders to:
- model the behaviours they want to see – the manager who listens fully, thanks genuinely and challenges respectfully gives their team permission to do the same. The one who dismisses, interrupts and belittles gives a very different kind of permission
- call out incivility when they see it – the Civility Saves Lives framework encourages bystanders, particularly senior ones, to gently but clearly name behaviour that falls short of the standard. This isn’t about naming and shaming (uncivil behaviour in and of itself) but signalling ‘this is not how we do things around here’. Done well, this is one of the most powerful cultural interventions available to a leader
- create structures for psychological safety – Amy Edmondson emphasises that psychological safety doesn’t emerge naturally, it must be actively created. Leaders can do this by modelling fallibility (“I made a mistake and here’s what I learned”), inviting contribution (“I’d specifically like to hear from those who disagree”) and responding well when people speak up (“Thank you for raising that, let’s look into it”)
- take incivility seriously in formal processes – organisations that tolerate incivility from high performers send a catastrophic signal: results matter more than how you treat people. Every time a brilliant but uncivil employee escapes accountability, the culture takes a step backwards
Organisational incivility
Incivility doesn’t only exist at the level of individual behaviour. Organisations can be civilly inclined in their one-to-one interactions and yet profoundly uncivil in their systems and processes. For example, disrespecting people’s time and autonomy, or through performance management practices that shame rather than develop.
Genuine civility requires looking at the whole system: not just how people speak to each other, but how the organisation is designed and whether that design communicates respect for the people within it.
Where to start
If you’re a leader who recognises an incivility problem in your organisation and wants to act, here are three things to consider:
- Measure the baseline – the adage ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure’ can help shed light on the current situation. Psychological safety surveys, culture audits and 360o feedback processes can help surface what is really happening in your organisation, below the level of what people are comfortable saying in public
- Invest in leadership development – competence in the technical elements of leadership is necessary but will not address this problem. The ability to listen, give feedback with care, manage one’s own stress responses and create safety in a team are learnable skills, and they deserve investment
- Make the link between civility and performance explicit – the Civility Saves Lives framework is powerful partly because it moves the conversation beyond ‘being nice’ and into organisational performance. When leaders understand that incivility is costing the organisation engagement, retention, innovation and (depending on sector) safety, it changes the business case entirely
My final thoughts
In the end, civility isn’t a soft issue dressed up in hard data. It’s a fundamental precondition for human beings to do their best work together. Amy Edmondson’s research shows us what’s possible when people feel safe. The NHS’s Civility Saves Lives campaign shows us what’s at stake when they don’t.
The question for every leader and every organisation isn’t whether incivility is happening (it almost certainly is) but whether you’re willing to take it seriously enough to do something about it.
Cultures don’t change in workshops; although, again, this can be brilliant for raising awareness, it changes in many small moments throughout the day. The repeated choices that leaders make about how to treat the people around them. What small changes can you make to help start the snowball effect of civility?