Minding your management: Etiquette expert wants to improve business civility

Desmond So has some worrying news for managers who would rather be feared than liked: being rude to your staff may be costing you money.

"Few companies or managers realise that there are tangible costs to a company's bottom line as a result of workplace incivility," So, the founder of the East-West Institute of Applied Etiquette, told the South China Morning Post.

To drive this point home, So cited the work of Christine Porath and Christine Pearson, who surveyed 800 managers and employees in 17 industries for a study published in the Harvard Business Review, resulting in a stark demonstration of the importance of civility.

About 80 per cent of the respondents said they lost work time worrying about an incident with a superior or colleague, while 78 per cent said their commitment to the organisation declined when they were treated poorly by management.

"Nearly everybody who experiences workplace incivility responds in a negative way, in some cases overtly retaliating," Porath and Pearson wrote in the Review. "Employees are less creative when they feel disrespected, and many get fed up and leave. About half deliberately decrease their effort or lower the quality of their work."

The problems of an uncivil workplace are not only between managers and subordinates. According to a study by temporary agency Accountemps, managers and executives at Fortune 1000 firms spend 13 per cent of their work time mending employee relationships and dealing with the aftermath of incivility. In 2007 alone, Cisco Systems estimated it lost more than US$8.3 million due to incivility.

So says incivility, particularly on the part of managers, does not just mean shouting at or berating staff members. It can be more subtle, such as when an employee waits all week for face time with their supervisor, only to have that manager spend the entire meeting glancing at their phone or answering e-mail.