Workplace incivility costs employers billions as workers seek political neutrality

And as you know, talking politics can be fraught, especially in the workplace. So let's talk more about what we'll encounter and how we can get around it and how we can coexist in the workplace better. Carolyn Johnson is president of the SHRM Center for Inclusion and Diversity. She's up late with me tonight here on The Final Five. Hi, Carolyn. Welcome. Good evening. How are you? I'm good. So, look, I know that they say what we we were probably both raised to say you never discuss religion and politics at the dinner table. The workplace, especially over the last couple of years, it has certainly changed. It's evolved. And for a lot of people, it can be a very, a very fraught situation when people want to discuss politics around you when you're trying to get your job done. This is very true. And I couldn't agree with more and more with the changes that we're seeing from a research perspective in the workplace, specifically as it relates to civility or incivility. So I agree with you 100 percent. You put out the Civility Index and explain what that is and how you go about determining what what what entails the Civility Index. Sure. So the Civility Index is a quarterly pulse and we survey U.S. workers on their experience with how they're treated and what they see happening potentially to others in the workplace. And we started doing this because, you know, going into next week around elections and around politics, the impact on productivity that incivility has is something that we needed to be able to put a number on. And so our research found that due to incivility, your organizations are losing about two point six billion dollars a day. Right. And absenteeism and lost productivity as a result of incivility and incivility defined or ways in which you could look at it are are people being treated differently because of their political beliefs. Or as you talked about at the top of this around the dinner table, religious beliefs. And then what is management or what are leaders doing to ensure that the workplace is a place where folks can come, feel respected, be respected and get their work done? In terms of respect in the workplace, I think we've had these national conversations time and time again over over the last several decades. And we look at it, treating people with respect, with dignity, making sure that they're free from harassment of all sorts. But when it comes to politics, you have gauged a number in the survey where people say that they want their workplaces to stay politically neutral. Yep, that's right. So let's talk about two numbers. So just last month, Jim, 74 percent of workers saw or experienced incivility just last month, while 87 percent of them said they want their employers to remain neutral. So this for the data that we're seeing is truly a manager gap. And while we're sticking to the numbers, 35 percent of workers say their managers ignore incivility and ignoring incivility can be anything like, you know, not having the same consequences for performers just because they are producing at a different level. It can be silence or it can also be not modeling the behavior that should, quite frankly, be part of your code of conduct. So we're hearing we're seeing one thing happen to folks. We're hearing them say that they're OK having a workplace where politics are not discussed. But that's not what's actually happening. It also comes down to a generational gap, too, between younger and older workers. Yes, it does. And when we talk about the generational differences, For the first time, generational differences was talked about as a bigger issue in the workplace than politics to the tune of 37.