Election 2024: Workplace Civility
Author: Helena Oroz, Senior Legal Editor
Every election cycle is predictable in at least one way: the word "civility" is bandied about in HR circles like a birdie in the most genteel game of badminton.
It goes like this. Due to an approaching critical and seemingly divisive national event, HR professionals, managers, and even employees worry that coworker-on-coworker incivility will swell to critical mass, breaking the fragile peace reached post-[fill in last scary thing that divided the nation]. We just forgot about the last scary thing that divided the nation! Can't we just drink our coffee and tea in the tranquility of our offices/cubicles/Teams squares and forget about the past?
The Cost of Incivility
But civility isn't just a quaint idea; it's a business imperative. Time is money, and incivility is expensive. New numbers from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) ballpark the collective cost to employers at about $2 billion per day in lost productivity and absenteeism.
How can that be? Well, it's not hard to imagine that employees don't want to deal with coworkers making their work life difficult and unpleasant. When placed in a situation where political discourse is causing friction at work, most people do their best to avoid the heat source (or skip work altogether).
According to SHRM, people lost about "31 minutes per occurrence," which likely means that they either stopped working or were distracted from their work for about a half hour while dealing with whatever uncivil thing was happening to them or around them.
Anyone who has experienced or witnessed incivility from a coworker knows just how distracting it can be. The emotions, the ruminations about retorts one should have made in the moment, the lingering resentments - all of that can, well, linger.
What about bullying?
Generally speaking, unless conduct is based on a protected characteristic, it's not going to be prohibited under the law - but the law sets the floor, not the ceiling. A private employer is free to define and prohibit bullying behavior it doesn't want to see in the workplace, so long as it does so within the confines of other legal requirements, like the NLRA.
From a business perspective, all of these issues - absenteeism, distraction, coworker resentment and avoidance - are bad for obvious reasons. But escalation is worse: smallish issues can lead to bigger ones, like lack of cohesion and teamwork, people feeling excluded or like they don't belong, breakdowns in trust and communication, and eventually turnover.
The Standard (and Good) Advice
There is quite a bit of advice out there on what employers should do to quell incivility in the workplace, much of it focused on policies and training. There is good reason for this: every employer should have policies in place that provide behavioral guardrails and communicate those policies to employees via training to get the message out there.
Some of the policies employers may want to think about instituting or updating this election season include:
- Code of Conduct: What are your high-level expectations for employees? This is the place to state what your organization stands for and why it's important, declared in concrete terms that connect with daily behavior.
- Harassment and Discrimination: Every employer should have a clear policy (with an effective reporting mechanism) stating its commitment to a discrimination-free, harassment-free workplace. Unchecked incivility can sometimes turn into harassment and discrimination, if based on a protected characteristic. Prohibiting (and addressing) such conduct is also just the right thing to do.
- Attire/Appearance: Employers can set their own standards (within the confines of other laws, of course) for appropriate work wear (including for remote employees who appear on-camera). But an employer that prohibits political gear must be able to define "political" and be prepared for situations that are not clear-cut. In many instances, though, clear rules about acceptable dress will do the trick. If wearing a t-shirt with words or images is considered inappropriate for work, drilling down to "don't wear political t-shirts" is probably unnecessary.
- Social Media: Telling employees what they can and can't talk about on their own time on social media rarely (never?) works out. But different rules apply when employees use social media for their job or otherwise represent that posted views are those of their employer. The best social media policies recognize that employees have a life outside of work that is not their employer's business; but also remind employees that company policies that prohibit harassment, discrimination, and other misconduct apply to online behavior, too.
Warning
Don't go overboard with your policies or you're asking for unfair labor practice issues. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) gives most private-sector employees (unionized and non-union) the right to work together to improve their work situation, and employers are prohibited from interfering with those rights. This includes having overly broad policies in place that chill such collective action. To limit the risk of running afoul of the NLRA, reference your anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies when defining words or behaviors that violate other company rules.
Beyond Policies
Policies and training are great, but there are other things employers can do to keep work a civil, productive place for everyone.
Here's another idea that might just work wonders: know what's happening in your organization. Employees are not always willing to share what's going wrong at work. An employer has to get eyes and ears out there, to the extent possible, to observe whether issues are bubbling to the surface or already exist.
And one more thing: release yourself from the idea that every employee will like every other employee, or that everyone will hug at the end of the day (probably a bad idea on multiple levels). Expect respect, require productivity, but forgo the fantasy of a work utopia - at least until this election cycle ends.