By Diane E. Lewish Manners ought to matter. But last week something happened to a colleague that made me wonder whether our growing emphasis on casualness is having a negative effect on the workplace. But the woman, a vice president, was busy. Then she hung up. This is not the first time I've heard about rude behavior at work.
Rudeness spreads like a flu, and it is almost as deadly.
We feel it on the road when other drivers cut us off. We feel it when insensitive people make ethnic jokes or demeaning remarks. In this era of economic prosperity and freewheeling ideas about propriety, boorish behavior has become so serious that some experts are wondering whether our dress-down, casual culture is partly to blame. The researchers, who interviewed 700 US workers over a five-year period, found that although a great deal of attention is being paid to workplace violence and aggression, incivility is mostly ignored, even though the costs are high. They range from production losses and low retention rates to actual monetary losses.