Combating uncivil or bad behavior is ultimately about workplace culture, values, and accountability. Here are some helpful resources and ideas to consider when it comes to your workplace environment and the overall health of your organization:
What Employers Should Know As Election Spurs Online Rants
With the race for the White House shifting into high gear, millions of Americans are sounding off about the state of the contest on social media, and experts say employers should be prepared to guard against legal trouble that could result from missteps in workers’ online political venting. With the polarized state of the electorate, the recipe exists for conflicts — particularly between fellow employees who fall on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Continue reading…
Corporate Ethics Can’t Be Reduced to Compliance
Perhaps the most obviously straightforward method of preventing unethical behavior in the workplace is increasing the number of rules designed to curtail it. However, one of the unintended consequences of a focus on ethics-as-compliance is a checkbox mentality that simply gives the illusion of reducing risk. A compliance-focused approach to eliminating unethical behavior can stunt a company’s efforts to innovate and to take intelligent risks. So what can a company do to excel ethically? Continue reading…
Feds Urged to Fight ‘Unconscious Bias’ in Hiring and Promotions
Beth Cobert, the acting Office of Personnel Management director, is urging federal officials to confront this unseen, but not unfelt, discrimination. “As many of you know, one of the most challenging barriers to diversity and inclusion is unconscious bias,” said Beth at OPM’s diversity and inclusion summit at the Coast Guard headquarters. Calling for greater use of data to identify barriers to diversity and patterns of retention and advancement, Cobert said, “We need to tackle the hard stuff.” Continue reading…
Civility, Culture Tie into Compliance; Regulations Are Not End Point
At one company where the compliance program won multiple training awards, the compliance officer was shocked to learn that senior executives were corrupting his good work. They required their administrative assistants to take compliance courses for them and check the box indicating they were completed. Bothered by the duplicity, an administrative assistant informed the compliance officer, who wondered about the implications for his organization that executives were flouting a core compliance requirement and falsifying their attendance. Continue reading…
How Stressful Work Environments Hurt Workers’ Health
A lot of people would not work in a place where co-workers smoke. And most people will never be faced with that decision because smoking is typically banned in the workplace on the sensible ground that secondhand smoke is dangerous to everyone. Should long and unpredictable hours, excessive job demands, capricious management and other aspects of the modern workplace be banned on the same ground? Continue reading…
No Time to Be Nice at Work
Rudeness and bad behavior have all grown over the last decades, particularly at work. For nearly 20 years Christine Porath has been studying, consulting and collaborating with organizations around the world to learn more about the costs of this incivility. How we treat one another at work matters. Insensitive interactions have a way of whittling away at people’s health, performance and souls. Continue reading…
Workplace Stressors & Health Outcomes: Health Policy for the Workplace
Extensive research focuses on the causes of workplace-induced stress. However, policy efforts to tackle the ever-increasing health costs and poor health outcomes in the United States have largely ignored the health effects of psychosocial workplace stressors such as high job demands, economic insecurity, and long work hours. Using meta-analysis, we summarize 228 studies assessing the effects of ten workplace stressors on four health outcomes. Continue reading…
