How Low Can The Bar Go?
Human interactions are increasingly more ill bred. Politeness and tolerance appear to be quaint, old-fashioned virtues, while incivility and distrust are on the rise. Whether it is a dramatic doubling of complaints to the Better Business Bureau over four years or inappropriate condolence messages on customized Internet memorials, respect and courtesy are fading more into the background, and disrespect, cheating and distrust abound.

Disrespect:

• Ralph Nader’s Consumer Project on Technology has petitioned for Internet suffixes such as “.isnotfair” and “.suck” enabling easier opportunity for people to vent about what they don’t like.
• Children in developing countries are ripe for recruitment for the armed services. Since adults view them as more expendable, they receive less training and are assigned the highest risk tasks.
• Icebox.com is an incubator for edgy shows and pushes the envelope with tasteless, offensive characters.
• There are some 2,300 hate sites currently accounted for on the Internet.

Theft and cheating:

• Much corporate cyber-espionage is attributed to insider thievery. This includes network hijacking and stealing and selling corporate secrets to unprincipled competitors.
• There is a rise in employee theft, including check fraud, forgeries, mailroom theft and misuse and abuse of credit.
• A recent feature article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled “The Cheater Principle” featured stories of people who do not hesitate to rip off their companies, the airlines, convenience stores or local movie theaters – whatever they feel entitled to steal.

Distrust:

• There is a continued deterioration of trust in the workplace. A survey by Aon’s Loyalty Institute reports that 13% do not have basic trust in their employers.
• A new reason for electronic monitoring of employees centers around sexual harassment issues.
• Spy software is now being marketed directly to individuals and has strong market potential based on general distrust and secrecy.

Implications:

What are the limits to incivility? How Low Will The Bar Go? What happens if organizations turn the other way and ignore this? The elasticity of civility is a function of several elements: (1) the degree of trust you have for the person or thing, (2) your level of respect or disrespect, (3) the level of autonomy, anonymity or peer group insulation vs. being accountable to the community at large, and (4) who or what is judging you. Levels of acceptability are different to different groups. Moreover, perception towers over reality in many of these instances: what appears in the eyes of the beholder will vary among observers depending on their interpretation of the person, place or thing.

How much value is lost in our organizations due to information and other thievery by “people or companies that appear to have the noblest intentions”? Many companies are obscuring these losses for fear of the impact on their reputations as well as their stock prices. Experts are now awakening to the importance of trust in the workplace!

Organizations can take the lead by understanding the elasticity of civility, identifying what is happening and move to restore and enhance it internally. What can you do to create greater trust and respect that will be valued by both employees and independent contractors at large? Warren Bennis speaks of five basic components to creating trust in an organization: competence, community, shared commitment to the same mission, communication and cupidity. His premise is based on an organization of networks rather than traditional hierarchies.

Issues Analysis provided by: Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.
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