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