Here’s another looming shortage that B.C. businesses need to address: civility.
In case you hadn’t noticed, things are getting increasingly narcissistic out there in the marketplace, what with the masses absorbed in following and being followed on Twitter, updating their Facebook during work hours and generally becoming willing conduits for more spontaneously generated claptrap than ever before in the history of mankind.
One of the first victims of the resultant wireless attention deficit disorder (ADD) pandemic promises to be basic social graces.
Who’s got time for those, dude?
For business, it appears companies better start making time for them soon.
Regardless of all the instant electronic connections the new communications technology provides, business success will continue to be based on human relationships built with authentic emotional investment, not text-message superficiality.
But don’t take my word for it.
TransLink’s new CEO summed it up best in last issue’s BIV Profile (“Transit lines” –issue 1093; October 5-11). In discussing his post-graduate business experience, Ian Jarvis told reporter Joel McKay: “When I was in university, I didn’t want to take any arts courses or communications. I just wanted to take economics and financing and accounting. Then when you get out into the world you find out what makes you successful is how you relate to people, so when I got out I learned how to work with people.”
The alphabetically pigeonholed generation of the day – be it X, Y or ADD – needs to take note of that social reality. In The Cost of Bad Behaviour, Christine Pearson and Christine Porath calculate the bottom-line business toll exacted by the ill mannered. They estimate, for example, that “job stress … costs U.S. corporations US$300 billion a year, much of which has been shown to stem from workplace incivility.”
The book is focused on the United States and what veteran NBC sportscaster Bob Costas is quoted as calling “the idiot culture we live in,” but the authors’ research includes Canada.
Incivility, it turns out, is alive and well here. According to the book, a survey of white-collar workers in Canada found that “workplace experiences reported by Canadians were even worse than those reported in our own country. Half of the Canadians told us that they suffered incivility directly from their fellow employees at least once per week; 99% said that they witnessed incivility at work.”
Examples of incivility listed in the book include interrupting a conversation, talking loudly in common areas, arriving late, not introducing a newcomer, failing to return a phone call and showing little interest in another individual’s opinion. Add to that: driving while talking on cellphones, littering, spitting, swearing and scrawling graffiti on walls.
Meanwhile, as the book points out, the electronic communications explosion depersonalizes human encounters and removes “the emotional consequences to which [people] might be subjected via face-to-face or voice interactions.”
The authors observe that younger generations have been taught to demand respect, but not to give it.
And in the workplace, the replacement of full-time employees with contract workers continues to erode corporate loyalty and nurture a culture of guns for hire who have no investment in a cause that’s bigger than themselves.
That adds up to a hollow game plan for employees and employers, because profits from the business of me are far less satisfying that those from the business of us.