{"id":6935,"date":"2024-08-22T19:09:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-22T19:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brightmine.com\/us\/?post_type=resources&p=6935"},"modified":"2026-10-09T09:15:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T14:15:49","slug":"election-2024-workplace-civility","status":"publish","type":"resources","link":"https:\/\/www.brightmine.com\/us\/resources\/talent-management\/election-2024-workplace-civility\/","title":{"rendered":"Election 2024: Workplace civility"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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by Helena Oroz<\/strong>, Senior Legal Editor at Brightmine<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It goes like this. Due to an approaching critical and seemingly divisive national event, HR professionals<\/a>, 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cost of incivility<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> at about $2 billion per day in lost productivity and absenteeism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to SHRM<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 all of that can, well, linger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What about bullying?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Generally speaking, unless conduct is based on a protected characteristic, it’s not going to be prohibited under the law \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The standard (and good) advice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the policies employers may want to think about instituting or updating this election season include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n