Workplace Rudeness Impacts Your Bottom Line
Christine Pearson and Christine Porath

A new book by Christine Pearson and Christine Porath, The Cost Of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business & What To Do About It, explores how incivility in the workplace costs businesses billions each year. Far from a minor inconvenience, workplace incivility is one of today's most substantial economic drains on American businesses.  It spreads stress, smears reputations, reduces productivity, and raises employee turnover.  One company, Cisco Systems, estimates that it lost a whopping $8 million each year due to incivility. 

Targets of bad behavior become angry, frustrated and even vengeful. Job satisfaction falls, and performance plummets. Some employees leave. But those who stay may take a bigger toll on the organization. As a senior vice president of a Fortune 50 firm told us, "They can and do sit in the boat without pulling the oars... and that may be worse than leaving."

Some statistics show incivility causes:

--48% decreased their work effort,
--47% decreased their time at work,
--38% decreased their work quality,
--66% said their performance declined,
--80% lost work time worrying about the incident,
--63% lost time avoiding the offender

Consider these additional statistics: 12 percent of all employees say they've left jobs because they were treated badly. Fortune 1000 executives spend roughly seven weeks per year resolving employee conflicts.  And an astonishing 95 percent of Americans say they've experienced rudeness at work.