Growing problem of workplace rudeness exacts hefty economic toll

A recent survey by Robert Half International, the world's largest specialized staffing firm, asked employees to recount the "worst or wackiest" episodes of rudeness they've witnessed colleagues commit in the workplace. Respondents reported a long list of atrocities, everything from office temper tantrums, to texting or answering cell-phone calls during meetings, to grooming in public, to stealing food from the communal fridge.

Although workplace incivility is an under-reported problem, it’s on the rise, according to Lew Bayer, president and CEO of Civility Experts Worldwide of Winnipeg, Manitoba, who comments:  “Many of us have become so accustomed to it, in fact, that boorish behaviour in the workplace goes by unnoticed, or doesn't even seem that rude any more.”

"Our research shows that people are so tired and busy and stressed that they're picking their battles when it comes to rudeness," says Bayer. "They might not say anything about sloppy dress or bad breath, but take a stand about rudeness that shows disrespect for time or for property -- wasting paper, keeping people waiting, spending 40 minutes in a meeting that should've taken 15, borrowing things without asking, returning items in a state of disrepair, using someone else's intellectual property."

In their book The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What To Do About It (2009), American business professors Christine Pearson and Christine Porath say the problem of workplace incivility has been compounded by North America’s increasing tolerance of rude behaviour.  A decade of research led them to conclude that petty incidences of workplace rudeness are exacting a "staggering economic toll," but that few business leaders know how to tackle the problem.  They write that people who experienced incivility "intentionally lowered their productivity, cut back work hours, lost respect for their bosses, put in minimal acceptable effort, and sometimes even left their jobs -- all because of disrespectful words or deeds."

Their book cites a 2005 Gallup poll in which 95 percent of American workers reported experiencing incivility from co-workers.  And although Canadians enjoy a global reputation for superior politeness, Pearson and Porath found that the bad workplace manners reported by Canadians were even worse:  fully 99 percent of white-collar Canuck employees said they had witnessed incivility at work. One in four reported being exposed to it daily.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/miss--manners-134657433.html

Facebook Reduces 6 Degrees of Separation to 4.74—and the number’s still shrinking

A recent study by Facebook, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and other contributors revises the claim that every living person on earth is connected to any other person through only six intermediaries (friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and so on)--a.k.a. "six degrees of separation"--a theory previously developed by Hungarian author Frinyes Karinthy in the 1920s and American social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. 

The new study reports that worldwide fully 92 per cent of all pairs of Facebook users are within five degrees of separation, with an average of just 4.74 intermediaries, and (here comes the part I love) the average number of degrees between users is getting smaller over time.  In a blog posting yesterday, Facebook reported that today's average of 4.74 degrees of separation is already smaller than the average distance of 5.28 degrees in 2008.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/11/22/technology-facebook-six-degrees-separation.html

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/anatomy-of-facebook/10150388519243859

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4570

Postal horror story highlights need 2 assess contractors & effects of downsizing proactively

Today Monica Bugajski is incensed because she feels Ontario Court Justice Marjoh Agro handed down too light a sentence to a mail carrier who, while on contract to Canada Post,  illegally stashed 7,000 pieces of undelivered mail in her apartment and car after her mail route became too onerous.
http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/canada_post_worker_hoarded_7000_pieces_of_mail/5b96ef13
My thoughts are that, at least from a strategic HR standpoint, the 2010 incident raises more issues than just the responsibility of the contractor to seek an appropriate remedy from the contractee if changes to her working conditions make her workload overwhelming.  
In practical terms, wouldn't it have served everyone's best interests better (including the recipients of the waylaid mail) if management had been more proactive by:  
(1) Assessing the contractor's capabilities (or those of a prospective employee, for that matter) carefully both before and after engaging her? 
(2) Reviewing the practical ramifications of downsizing both before and after the fact--and thus avoid overburdening a worker with circumstances that clearly exceeded her problem-solving abilities?

http://www.hamiltonnews.com/news/former-stoney-creek-postal-worker-pleads-guilty-to-not-delivering-the-mail/

Now girls rule--literally!--in British monarchy--that is, if 16 national parliaments concur

The 16 Commonwealth nations have just voted to change the rules for royal succession; so if all goes according to plan, after Prince William, Britain's hereditary monarch will become the next queen or king strictly on the basis of birth order, not gender.  http://t.co/VD6qv8v
Buckingham Palace has always refrained from commenting on this political issue, saying it’s a matter for the British and Commonwealth governments to decide.  Rather, it was Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, who successfully urged leaders of the 15 other Commonwealth nations to agree today that Britain’s royal family should scrap the antiquated system of succession by male primogeniture (after the Belgian, Dutch, Swedish, and Norwegian monarchies have already canned it.)
But before this overdue reform can actually go into effect, it must also be approved by the national legislatures of all 16 Commonwealth countries—and the slowness and complexity of this process has been enough of an obstacle to prevent such reforms in the past.  Additionally, I have to wonder how many of the 16 Commonwealth legislatures have a fair proportion of female members, who will be inclined to push for female heirs taking precedence over their younger brothers and other girl-friendly legislation.  (Please see page 34 of my March-2011 column in PrintAction for a more detailed discussion of why having proportional representation of females in government definitely matters.)
https://www.box.net/shared/gy0bmq180s
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/royal-succession-reform_n_1007210.html

Please share your experiences regarding mentors for women

It’s encouraging to see that my posting yesterday prompted a dribble of renewed activity on a LinkedIn discussion on female mentors that I launched in Oct 2010.  The platform is an interesting and fun group called Girls Who Print, moderated by Mary Beth Smith of Texas.  To bring you up to speed, I’ve quoted how I began the discussion below:

   

Wanted: Girl success stories

 Does anyone have career-advancement stories with female heroines to share? Or female survival tactics for the recession or glass ceilings?

I’ve just finished reading through all 268 interesting entries posted to Mary Beth’s “And you are… ??" discussion since she launched it in May 2009. Back then she wrote: “Who knew guys would accept an invite to something called “Girls Who Print”??!!

Similarly, it was no surprise to me when I first joined Girls Who Print that my female publisher, Sara Young, was already a member. But it also turns out that my (male) editor at PrintAction, Jon Robinson, is a closet feminist: when editing my [Sept 2010] column (see https://www.box.net/shared/15ln6t43jf), Jon didn't just tolerate my long account of how Ms. Kris Bovay rose through the ranks to become chair of BIA; he even agreed with me that female professionals need to read more of that kind of stuff. Kris has forged an impressive career, although both her family responsibilities and the recent recession required her to change course radically. I hope the widespread supporters of Girls Who Print will exploit this space to share other, uniquely female, path-to-success stories.

Journalist, Chris Matthews (a male whose beat is politics), wrote: “It’s hard getting somewhere without a map. It’s the same reason so many of us love biographies. They show us how others have gotten where we want to go. If you want to get somewhere, study the routes others have taken.”

That goes double for women. Practitioners and theorists agree that in order to succeed professional women need to form the same kind of mentoring relationships that have enabled their male counterparts to advance. But studies show that women in corporate settings have often found mentoring relationships with other women unsatisfying: senior women report feeling either unqualified, discounted, or overburdened as mentors, while junior women complain that senior women are unreceptive or competitive in dealing with them as protégés.

I’m betting that this forum could turn out to be the missing antidote.

To review or make subsequent contributions to this discussion, please refer to the following link:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=1969742&type=member&item=31566959&qid=846c47d6-8aab-428d-9304-1cbf6507f12d&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egdr_1319731197620_1%2Egmp_1969742%2Eamf_1969742_41605696%2Egmp_1969742

Here’s hoping not only that more conversation will ensue on line about the important topic of mentoring females, but also that it will somehow yield concrete practical benefits for professional women. 

Why do women flunk at mentoring?

Sadly, regarding women mentoring women, I can recall too many instances in my own professional life that mirrored  Kerry Hannon’s experience, as she described it for Forbes yesterday when commenting on a new LinkedIn survey.  The survey shows that too many women are not being or have not been mentored by other women.  Hannon attributes the problem not only to the fact that too few women hold senior positions, but also to the fact that the behaviour of women executives too often ranges from declining to support other women to outright slapping other women down.  Hannon writes:  “They were very protective of their much fought for status.  Heels high, nails sharp.”  What are your past experiences when you’ve tried to enlist other women as mentors?

 http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryhannon/2011/10/25/boomer-women-flunk-mentoring-new-linkedin-survey/

Hire for “soft” skills along with technical skills

Yesterday, in a guest blog for the online version of the Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman, Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, identified social intelligence as the make-or-break leadership skill set.  His reason:  leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.  Goleman writes:  “Technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional interpersonal skill set:  you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.”

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/the_must-have_leadership_skill.html

In fact, so critical are certain “soft” skills to performing certain jobs successfully that, when hiring, you simply must find a way to determine to what degree job candidates possess them.  But the problem is that soft skills are considerably harder to analyze, quantify, and assess than technical skills.  How-to's on managing this tricky process can be found at the following links:

 “Getting a grip on mission-critical "soft" skills: 5 simple steps”

http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight054.php

“Assessing Job Candidates Beyond the Technical Skills” http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight051.php

2 new resources on how women are faring professionally & globally

A couple of interesting links I’ve discovered this week:
One is a new study by Catalyst revealing how women are assessed differently for promotion than men.  Evidently, women seeking to advance professionally need a proven track record, while men get promoted based on their perceived "potential".  http://www.torontosun.com/2011/10/13/women-blameless-in-pay-inequity-study

The second is “Newsweek’s” recent ranking of the world’s 10 best and 10 worst countries in which to be a woman.  Although they ranked Canada the world’s third best country for females in terms of justice, health, education, and economics, we still scored low in giving women political power.  You can found out whether and where your own country placed on the lists at:  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/22/women-winning-map.html
More fascinating details on the status of women globally at: 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/galleries/2011/09/18/the-best-places-to-be-a-woman-photos.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2011/09/18/best-and-worst-countries-for-women-from-iceland-to-the-u-s-to-pakistan-and-afghanistan.html

Hot HR election issues

Important issues that need to be addressed in Canada’s upcoming 2011 provincial and territorial elections involve human resources.  These include the need to continue attracting skilled labour and the need to invest in post-secondary education based on current demographic and economic trends. 

Recent studies forecast a looming shortage of qualified workers owing to declining birth rates and the approaching retirement of the Baby-Boom generation (starting this year for people retiring at the traditional age of 65.)  This talent shortage is expected to deepen over the next 20 years, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unfilled positions. 

For example, a 2009 report by Dr. Rick Miner, former president of Ontario’s Seneca College, shows a huge pending gap between employers’ needs for talent and the skill set of those seeking employment.  In Ontario Dr. Miner predicts a labour shortage of 200,000—or 1.8 million people--by 2031 and also that 77 percent of the province’s labour force will require post-secondary credentials by then (compared to 60 percent currently.)  In short, Ontario will need both a larger and more skilled workforce than will be available.

A backgrounder to a provincial all-candidates debate organized by the Toronto Financial Services Alliance (TFSA) at Toronto City Hall on August 31^st, 2011 reports:  “Dr. Miner concludes that, with current trends, 450,000 individuals will not have the skills needed to fill vacant positions by 2016.  The figure is expected to increase to 700,000 individuals in following years, while vacancies requiring post-secondary skills will increase to over one million by 2021 and two million by 2031.”

The backgrounder continues:  “Over a 22-year period Ontario will need to train, re-train or recruit 1.73 million people.  This translates into an increase of 78,636 post-secondary graduates per year, an increase of four times the number of people admitted into the Second Career re-training program.  Another way of looking at this figure is that it would represent a 56% increase in the annual number of graduates from Ontario’s post-secondary institutions (currently approximately 140,000, including college diplomas, bachelor, master and doctoral degrees.)”

Additionally, studies by the Conference Board of Canada and others show that, at Ontario’s current birth rate, we will only replace those workers who leave the workforce, and that all net growth in the workforce will have to come from immigration.

So before you vote in the upcoming provincial elections (Manitoba – Oct 4th, Newfoundland & Labrador – Oct 11^th, Northwest Territories – Oct 3^rd, Ontario – Oct 6th, Prince Edward Island – Oct 3^rd, Sasketchewan – Nov 7^th, Yukon – Oct 11^th) it’s important to ask your local candidates what they propose to do to make training programs more accessible, especially for positions that will be in significant demand in the years to come.

 You also need to know things like what candidates plan to do, or plan to encourage the federal government to do, to attracted skilled immigrants, expedite processes for granting visas and credentials, and allow foreign students to find work here upon completion of their studies.

http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/plac-acpl/leave-conge/ann2-eng.pdf

http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight053.php 

http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight033.php

http://www.printlink.com/resources_insight013.php

Women still missing from senior management roles in Canada (sigh)

According to a report released yesterday by The Conference Board of Canada, the presence of Canadian women in senior management positions has stalled in the past two decades. Between 1987 and 2009, the proportion of women in senior management has changed little—men are still more than twice as likely to hold a senior executive position.

Anne Golden, President and CEO of The Conference Board of Canada, said:  “Increasing women’s representation at the senior level is not simply a matter of justice or fairness—although it is that. And it is not simply a “women’s issue.” Companies that fail to integrate women’s perspectives into their high-level decision making risk losing market share, competitive advantage, and profits. We already know what to do. Now we simply need to do it.”

A news release from The Conference Board dated yesterday added that the few women who rise to senior levels often attract substantial media attention, which may give readers the false impression that barriers to women’s advancement are a thing of the past.

Besides quantifying the current underrepresentation of women in management positions, the report (called Women in Senior Management: Where Are They?) also enumerates some of the challenges women still face in the workplace and suggests practices for overcoming the barriers.

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/press/newsrelease/11-08-31/Women_Still_Missing_In_Action_From_Senior_Management_Positions_In_Canadian_Organizations.aspx

Job stress? Try smelling lemons or lavender

Today medical experts at the Toronto Star report that aromatherapy massages are more effective at reducing anxiety and stress than plain ones.  They also recommend you buy lemons, grapefruit, and peppermint tea at the grocery store, then stop at the drugstore for lavender lotion or spray, since scientific tests confirm the benefits of all these fragrant items.  Apparently, lemons work as a relaxant (you could slice one into your bath water, perhaps), while peppermint can help you complete a must-do job when you can't focus by triggering alertness.  Grapefruit's scent curbs hunger, and peppermint enhances the effect, so regularly eating half a grapefruit followed by peppermint tea or gum will help shrink your appetite.  But the fact that really blew me away was that hospitals give anxious patients a whiff of lavender before sliding them into a narrow MRI tube, because it increases the percentage who get through the claustrophobic experience by a third.  Wonder what would happen if employers spritzed their most stressful work areas with lavender . . .  .
http://www.healthzone.ca/health/dietfitness/diet/article/1040238--you-docs-the-6-things-that-make-you-gain-weight

Canada attracts the brightest immigrants according to Maclean's report

To mark Canada's 144th anniversary on July 1st, Maclean's Magazine published a list of 10 reasons why it's the best time ever to be Canadian.  Reasons include that Canada leads the way in medical research, is more peaceful than Switzerland and Australia, and has the world's highest golf participation.  Also according to the Maclean's report, we're more entrepreneurial than the U.S.A., have the roomiest homes on earth, and (not surprisingly, given the previous reasons) attract the brightest immigrants.  
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/07/01/ten-reasons-why-there-has-never-been-a-better-time-to-be-a-canadian/ 

New polar mosque helps attract qualified professionals to Canada’s arctic

My May/June-2011 article with Edward Atkinson for "Above & Beyond:  Canada's Arctic Journal" explains the complicated logistics recently undertaken by Northern Canada's growing Muslim community to build their first mosque above the Arctic Circle.  From a human-resources standpoint, what I find especially interesting about their achievement is that Denny Rodgers, mayor of Inuvik, the community where they established the mosque, credits the new building with the ability "to help us attract quality professionals to move here, bring their families, and become part of the community."  You can find a condensed version of the full article at:  http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Earcticjournal%2Eca%2Findex%2Ephp%2F2011%2F05%2Fnew-polar-mosque%2F&urlhash=JhHS&_t=NUS_UNIU_SHARE-lnk&trk=NUS_UNIU_SHARE-lnk.

This week Canada elected a record number of women--but still not enough

In response to my 19-April-2011 post observing how women in politics operate differently than men, Jodi Krohn, CEO of Premier Press in Portland, Oregon, and one of my fellow members of the Girls Who Print Discussion Group on LinkedIn, wrote back:  “Co-operation, politics without personal attacks, understanding that there are multiple perspectives and finding a healthy balance, would be very refreshing.”

Makes you think, doesn't it? I recall that certain North American native tribes left the decision to wage war up to their Clan Mothers, who had the most to lose (i.e., their children) and were the least warlike faction of their society. Could we actually remake our whole political system along similar, more co-operative, nurturing, female lines--instead of the competitive, combative, male-dominated system we've got?

Speaking of male-dominated politics, by now most people know that Canada’s federal election on Monday 2 May 2011 promoted the national Conservative Party from a minority to a majority government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.  But another, less publicized result of the election is that more women than ever before have been elected to Canada’s Parliament.  A record 76 women will now sit in our country’s House of Commons—or about 25 percent of the total 308 seats—a count slightly up from the approximately 22 percent of seats held by females in Canada’s last federal parliament.

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/MSNHome/20110503/projected-female-mps-41st-parliament-110503/

Not that Canada can start congratulating itself for being egalitarian just yet.  While the record high number of female Members of Parliament is nothing to sneeze at, it’s also nothing to be especially proud of---since the country still ranks 52nd in the world when it comes to proportional female representation in political office.  We are also falling further behind as other nations take more aggressive measures to correct their political gender imbalances. 

Also take note that another telling revelation of how far we’ve supposedly progressed will be coming up shortly:  Let’s see how many females Mr. Harper will include in his new Cabinet ... .

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/voters-send-a-record-76-women-to-parliament-most-of-them-ndp/article2009244/?from=sec368

Why girls on the ballot are better

One of my goals for my March column in PrintAction was to raise awareness that Canada lacks the advantages it could gain from proportional representation of women in politics.  Note that the Toronto Star’s Katie Daubs has recently climbed on the same bandwagon.  Her April-17th article on Canada’s upcoming federal election observes that Halton Riding’s Conservative, Liberal, NDP, and Green Party candidates are all female and that the benefits of this all-girl ballot include greater co-operation among them, more policy discussion, and fewer personal attacks.

https://www.box.net/shared/gy0bmq180s

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/976140--halton-riding-for-once-gender-imbalance-is-a-welcome-sign?bn=1

Reduce absenteeism by hiring managers with emotional smarts

A recent Swedish study has confirmed the need to hire managers who are not only knowledgeable in the work they oversee, but also have adequate interpersonal skills.  The study revealed that workers in various industries were more likely to take sick leave in the days following unpleasant experiences with colleagues or bosses and also in time to avoid a workday they anticipated to be particularly stressful.

http://www.canada.com/health/Sick+calls+coincide+with+work+stress+study+shows/4486611/story.html

Manager Know Thyself

Last spring, after “The New York Observer” posted its congratulations to a big-time TV producer on her retirement and plans to launch a 2^nd career as a guidance counsellor, they received over 200 comments on line.  Most came from her former employees, claiming the story was bogus and that she was a “foul-mouthed, cliquish bully”, to quote “Psychology Today” reporter Carlin Flora.

Flora reports:  “In his new book, “Good Boss, Bad Boss:  How to Be the Best … and Learn from the Worst,” Robert Sutton, Ph.D., catalogs [the] disproportionate effect that managers have on well-being.  A meta-analysis found, for example, that ‘about 75 percent of the workforce reports that their immediate supervisor is the most stressful part of their job.’

"For the majority of managers, who presumably want to fall on the heart-attack-reducing side of the scale, Sutton shares a key insight:  Good bosses know themselves.  And yet, just being in power is a deterrent to self-awareness, making it especially difficult for leaders to correctly ascertain the impact their behaviors and policies have on their employees.  ‘It turns out that followers, peers, superiors, and customers consistently provide better information about a boss’s strengths, weaknesses, and quirks than the boss herself,’ Sutton writes.  …

“[He] suggests they consciously beak out of the power bubble by asking [these info sources] for direct input and feedback.”

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201010/earnings-and-yearnings-dear-leaders