How rude is your company?

It’s said that good manners cost nothing. But what about the bad variety – particularly when they step over the line and become downright rude? In the context of huge public angst about the breakdown of respect in society, an academic study into rudeness in the workplace makes a chastening read.

Summarising the study in the British Medical Journal, Rhona Flin, professor of applied psychology at the University of Aberdeen, argues that rudeness can have a direct impact on efficiency and even safety in the workplace. And merely witnessing rudeness, particularly in confined areas, can impact on a worker’s performance.

The psychological explanation is that rudeness causes emotional arousal that requires cognitive capacity to process it. Thus a loss of concentration and attention to detail ensues.

For employers this is bad news – particularly when you add in the results of a Harvard Business Review study from April 2009. Polling several thousand managers and employees from a diverse range of US companies about their responses to rudeness at work, the responses were unequivocal:

• 8% of employees decreased their work effort
• 47% decreased their time at work
• 38% decreased their work quality
• 66% said their performance declined
• 80% lost work time worrying about the incident
• 63% lost time avoiding the offender
• 78% said their commitment to the organisation declined

The worry is, these statistics merely scratch the surface of the issue. They just measure individual reactions to isolated incidents. What they don’t show is how rudeness can be a malevolent and destructive influence on a company as a whole.

In our experience, simple disputes, magnified by perceived or real rudeness on either side, can develop a festering momentum that can ultimately lead to dismissals, tribunals and depressed morale. Even worse, an established culture of rude or macho behaviour very easily translates into bullying and intimidation.

Of course one person’s straight talking is another’s bad manners; so individual incidents are best addressed by early and discreet mediation - and a huge dose of common sense. Most important though is to embed respect into the heart of your company values. Enshrining positive behaviours through the force of collective culture will, over time, isolate the negative. For if manners maketh the man, they also make the modern and successful company.

For further information please contact Paula Morris. T: 029 2047 4401 E: p.morris@capitallaw.co.uk

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