“Inherent in your silence is acceptance. Don’t silence.”
Lisa Merlo-Booth
Workplace incivility is taking a staggering toll on employees and companies alike:
- U.S. workers experience 212 million acts of incivility every single day.
- 57% of employees say disrespect is a primary reason they quit their jobs
- Workplace incivility and conflict cost U.S. businesses approximately $2.1 billion per day in lost productivity and absenteeism. (SHRM)
Given our current political climate, most people believe these numbers will only increase over the next several years.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
After working with thousands of people over the past 25 years, I know that the relational dynamics that harm personal relationships are the very same ones that damage workplace cultures. Different context, same harmful patterns.
When it comes to conflict, disrespect, and incivility, few things burn out relationships faster than these, whether on the on the job or in the home. Incivility tends to be the more covert, lower-intensity interactions: eye-rolls, ignored emails, heavy sighs––the things that chip away at teams and cultures quietly. Disrespect, in contrast, shows up as more overt actions––insults, verbal abuse, bullying––that directly undermine a person’s worth.
The universal struggle is knowing how to handle conflict when it happens to us or right in front of us. Most leaders are at a loss in these moments and as the stats show, more than half of employees are quitting their jobs because of them. The reality is that very few of us were ever truly taught how to handle conflict effectively and relationally. So we avoid it, enable it, or blowing up in response to it.
- 63% of workers report that management ignored acts of incivility in the workplace.
- 75% of employees reported that leaders could have done more to address incivility.
Many leaders hope that ignoring incivility will somehow make it go away. Unfortunately, while ignoring a toddler’s temper tantrums is effective parenting, ignoring the harmful behavior of an adult employee has the opposite effect. When leaders fail to address these interactions, they enable an unsafe work environment. That avoidance creates a domino effect: reduced job satisfaction, lower productivity, decreased loyalty, and higher turnover.
Rather than reducing disrespectful behavior, ignoring it increases both its frequency and severity.
Inherent in your silence is acceptance. When you silence in the face of harmful behavior, you enable it––and you increase it.
Challenge: The most important element to healthy team cultures is Uncompromising Safety. Every time you say nothing to incivility, rudeness, and disrespect, you become complicit in creating an unsafe environment for yourself and your team. Left unaddressed, these behaviors don’t stay small. They grow, they spread, and they poison your culture. Learn the skills to address them when and where they happen, because any other approach guarantees they will get worse.
