It’s become a cliché to say that we’ve all been going through a lot of change!  Indeed, this McKinsey article highlights that building a thriving workforce is the only way to defend against constant change and disruption.  Productivity is another place that organizations often focus on to increase their success.  Many invest heavily in technology, training, corporate wellness training, and operational systems to optimize efficiency and performance. Yet, a silent saboteur often goes unnoticed: workplace incivility.

Incivility, characterized by rude, disrespectful, or inconsiderate behavior, can seem relatively harmless at first glance. A dismissive comment here, an ignored email there…these small acts of disrespect might appear inconsequential. Still, they come with significant hidden costs that ripple across teams, departments, and entire organizations.

The Domino Effect of Incivility

When incivility takes root in an organization, it creates a domino effect that erodes trust, engagement, and ultimately, productivity. Trust is a key to organizational productiveness, psychological safety, and sound decision-making. While overt toxicity like harassment or workplace bullying is immediately recognizable, workplace incivility is often subtler…and perhaps more insidious. It can show up as interruptions in meetings, gossip, condescending remarks, or failing to acknowledge a colleague’s contributions.

The consequences of these behaviors are profound:

• Reduced Employee Engagement: When employees experience or witness incivility, their emotional investment in the organization diminishes. People who don’t feel valued or respected are far less likely to give their best effort.
• Increased Stress and Burnout: Incivility creates an environment of emotional tension. Employees who endure ongoing disrespect spend time and energy processing these interactions rather than focusing on their work.
• Higher Turnover: A toxic workplace drives talent away. Replacing employees is costly, not just in terms of recruitment and onboarding but also in terms of disruption to teams and institutional knowledge loss.
• Decline in Collaboration: Trust is the bedrock of collaboration. When there is incivility in the workplace, employees are less willing to share ideas, take risks, or support one another, hindering innovation and teamwork.
• Wasted Time: Research shows that individuals who experience incivility often spend significant time ruminating on negative interactions, avoiding the instigator, or venting to colleagues. This lost time adds up to hours of unproductive work.

The Role of Neurobiology

A significant reason that the above consequences and below statistics are so profound is because of how the human brain functions.  Interestingly, when our brains process someone being mistreated, one of many of it’s coping strategies is not to make the distinction between whether it’s you or me who is being mistreated, disrespected, or bullied!  

This is primarily due to the fact that the most ancient part of our brain, the limbic system, which includes the amygdala and hippocampus, was developed no more recently than 50,000 years ago before we humans had developed speech. Its only purpose is to keep us alive.  It can’t tell time and doesn’t understand that its sensitivity to danger was established when we were all roaming the Serengeti!  

Many, including me, often speak of this part of our brain as having the sensitivity of a squirrel on crack.  It’s constantly scanning our environment on the hunt for DANGER!  Someone being treated in an uncivil way is dangerous to our limbic brain because it means that people are potentially being thrown out of the herd (and if you’re banished from the herd, death is likely!). So it doesn’t matter who is mistreated, it threatens our limbic brain.  

All of this, of course, happens automatically and without our conscious participation.  It’s ancient wiring.  But because it happens, and the results are documented below, we must take this seriously and get about stopping incivility in our organizations in its tracks.

All of this happens inside a global context where we are all becoming less civil.  But that’s the topic for another blog!