There is a crisis in the American workplace. And according to a Chicago etiquette consultant, who backs up her claim with a recent study, it is a crisis of civility.
“Technology is happening so fast that our manners have to change to adapt,” says Giovinella Gonthier, who gives lessons in etiquette to individuals and corporations. Our prosperous economy, she believes, is fueling bad behavior.
In fact, Gonthier has a name for what she believes is creating incivility in the workplace: “affluenza.”
“When people have money they feel entitled to be nasty,” she says.
Affluenza may well be a factor in rude behavior at work, but Gonthier acknowledges that stress is also a major culprit.
“People are being asked to produce under difficult circumstances, companies have downsized, and the technology that was supposed to help so much has also made [things] more complicated,” she says. “Workers today have less administrative help, and they’re pushed to create very quickly with fewer resources. This leads to tensions.”
Workplace stress and long hours are indeed creating a phenomenon of what may be called “desk rage” in America. According to a recent study of American workers by the New York-based Integra Realty Resources Inc., a real estate advisory and appraisal firm, increasing numbers of employees are having arguments with each other and breaking down under pressure. About 23 percent of the 1,305 working adults surveyed said they have been driven to tears as a result of stress at work, and 10 percent said physical violence has occurred at their workplace. Nearly a third admitted they themselves have yelled at co-workers.
While one-third of the workers said unreasonable deadlines and workloads added to their stress, 34 percent also cited the rudeness of co-workers or clients as a major source of tension. As a result, according to the study, workers are turning on one another. Forty-two percent said yelling and abuse take place in their work environment.
While discrepancies between the sexes remain in many other work-related issues, workplace incivility apparently is not one of them. When it comes to rudeness, the genders are equal, Gonthier says, “but we are rude in different ways.”
Women tend not to be rude to their peers, people they need for support, but they can be dismissive with people above or below their position, she says. Men apparently are more democratic. “If they are rude, they are also rude to their peers,” Gonthier says.
The simplest way to describe good manners, says Gonthier, is “being mindful of the human being in your space.” But the current state of our economy, she says, is not conducive to acknowledging that human being.
Gonthier, who offers etiquette workshops called “Civility in the Workplace,” was born to French parents and raised in East Africa. She later lived in the Seychelles and became an ambassador to the United Nations. She speaks five languages, though she describes her Swahili as a little “rusty.”
Despite her multicultural background, Gonthier says she finds that because of her accent, people in the United States often treat her condescendingly. “They assume I’m stupid,” she says. A condescending tone of voice, in fact, is one of her biggest behavioral pet peeves.
In addition to blaming affluenza and stress, Gonthier also attributes incivility at work to a “whole generation of people in the workplace raised in the ’60s by permissive parents,” who, Gonthier believes, failed to teach their children manners.
“This generation also has more choices and greater career-mobility,” she says. “They’re not getting rejection letters, but jobs, so they’re feeling a tremendous sense of entitlement. They don’t know anything about sacrifice or struggle.”
Corporate downsizing compromised the bonds of loyalty by taking away people’s sense of security about their jobs, and, Gonthier says, “If people view their employment situation as temporary, that will encourage lax behavior.”
But without etiquette, she says, civility erodes.
Gonthier also believes that casualness in the workplace, encouraged by a generation raised to be less formal, has affected the mentality of the workplace.
“If I am casually dressed, then I can let down my guard,” she says. “If we are dressed for business, we will act more businesslike.”
Before Gonthier does any etiquette training at a company, she goes in and observes the environment, talks to people, and tries to get a sense of what is needed in that particular business.
One of the most shocking complaints she heard was about “brushing one’s teeth at the water cooler.”
Some of the other complaints? Workers who undermine colleagues’ efforts, take someone else’s food from the refrigerator, don’t add paper to the copier when it runs out, and don’t bother to organize for the next shift.
Another frequently heard complaint is not acknowledging fellow employees in the hallway. “We live in a very fast-paced world. People don’t bother to introduce anyone anymore. You’re just expected to do it on your own,” Gonthier says.
She also cites a national study of 775 workers by the University of North Carolina Business School that found 12 percent of these employees quit their jobs to avoid nasty people at work.
Another 52 percent lost time worrying about rude people, and 22 percent deliberately decreased work effort because of rude supervisors. Forty-five percent are thinking about leaving their jobs because of rudeness.
Gonthier’s workshops consist of everything from deference and respect issues to telephone manners. Yes, she says, there are now rules for communication according to different categories. Gonthier suggests the following tactics:
– When making a phone call, always introduce yourself.
-On voice-mail messages, don’t speak too fast, and don’t leave your phone number so fast that the recipient has to play the message several times just to catch the number.
– If your cellular phone rings in public, ask yourself, “How important is this phone call?” Cell phones, Gonthier says, should be used in public only for emergencies, not to negotiate business deals or conduct chitchat.
– In e-mail, be mindful of your punctuation and grammar. Gonthier runs hers through a spell-check before she sends it.
Also regarding e-mail: Gonthier says a “thank you” in the form of an e-mail is only appropriate if you were invited by e-mail; otherwise, she says, it’s black ink on white paper.
Her workshops even offer segments on personal cleanliness. Have things really deteriorated so much that people need to be reminded about hygiene in the workplace?
“We don’t leave any stone unturned,” says Gonthier. Some people, she says, “don’t have a clue about the basics.”
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Giovinella Gonthier can be reached at 312-655-0533.
