Foster civil interaction to improve collaboration
I recently teamed up with Nick Roder - an experienced Mobile Intensive Care Ambulance (MICA) paramedic (and my uncle) - to give a talk at Agile Australia where we explored what organisations can learn from paramedics about teamwork, collaboration and leadership. We shared how paramedics deal with their unique, complex environment, and how they create a collaborative culture that enables effective teams.
This is the third in a series of four articles, detailing the insights and practical techniques from paramedicine that you can use to help your people do their best work, every day. (1) Design processes for humans
What is incivility?
Christine Porath, a leading researcher on the impact of incivility at work, defines incivility as disrespect or rudeness. It could be overt things like mocking, teasing or insulting someone. Or yelling, slamming doors, or talking about people behind their backs. It could also be more subtle behaviours like responding to emails in a meeting, not smiling or acknowledging others when you pass them in the hall or not listening when someone is speaking to you.
Importantly, perceptions of incivility can vary from person to person. What one person finds rude, might be totally acceptable to another person.
Unfortunately, it seems that incivility in the workplace is nearly universal. 98% of people report experiencing uncivil behaviour at work and 50% said that they were treated rudely at least once per week1.
The impact of incivility and rudeness
Rudeness and incivility undermine team effectiveness
There is a growing body of evidence in both medicine and business that rudeness and incivility undermine team effectiveness. In their 2015 study, Riskin et al concluded that "not only does rudeness harm the diagnostic and procedural performance of [medical] practitioners, it also seems to adversely affect the very collaborative processes that might otherwise allow for teams to compensate for these effects"2. In other words, incivility affects both an individual's cognitive abilities as well as their ability and willingness to collaborate with and help others.
Incivility is also a common cause of stress in the workplace. For example, given that paramedics often work in traumatic circumstances you might expect their main cause of stress to be the work itself. However, they report that how people behave has a larger impact on their stress levels.
Rudeness can lead to reduced creativity, lower productivity, increased absenteeism, lower quality of work and in the worst case, employee churn and damaged customer relationships.
Interestingly, the impact is not just on the person on the receiving end of the behaviour. People observing uncivil behaviour are also impacted. So, if a team lead is rude to a team member in a meeting, the whole team’s performance may suffer as a result.
The implications for organisations are profound. The recent addition of psychosocial hazards to the work health and safety regulations established employer obligations in mitigating risks of psychological harm caused by things like bullying, harassment, violence and aggression3. But the focus is on limiting harm to individuals, not managing team effectiveness. It seems that what is good for the employees is also good for the organisation.
The benefits of civility
One of the things that I find fascinating about paramedics is the amount of time they spend in simulation training. They simulate a vast range of scenarios, so that they are prepared when the time comes.
When debriefing these simulations, paramedics consistently identify humanistic skills as the most important to productivity. Here are three reasons they value civil behaviour:
It sets the tone of the team. Civility reduces tension and encourages collaboration and problem solving. It’s effectively a mission statement: “we’ll work this out together”.
It maintains team integrity. Paramedics work with limited resources and information. Imagine if a paramedic is rude to a bystander who witnessed an accident, or does something to disengage their own team. They may lose the information or solution that they need to get the job done.
It sustains people’s mental health and maintains their desire to engage with the workplace. Safety is necessary, but not sufficient for high-performing teams. A workplace should aspire to growth and excellence, but also prepare people for the next challenge despite the adversity of the previous one.
Actions you can take
While leaders play an outsized role in establishing organisational culture, these actions can be taken by people at any level of the organisation.
Start by modelling good behaviour. Be conscious of how you interact with your colleagues and hold yourself to a high standard. Hopefully you don’t mock, tease or insult people, but if you do, please stop now! Even if you think that it is “good natured” it’s possible, even likely, that others don’t see it that way.
And don’t forget about the more subtle actions you can take. Put your phone away in meetings. Pay attention when someone is speaking to you. Smile and say hi when you see people in the hallway.
Asking for feedback is a good way of monitoring how you’re doing. This not only helps you improve by giving you other perspectives, but it has the added benefit of building psychological safety and encouraging a growth mindset in those around you.
Establishing team or company norms can help to set expectations. Norms are an agreed set of behaviours that are acceptable in your context. Whenever we run a team inception, we include a section to establish team norms. We’ve run this activity with everyone from university students up to the C-Suite and we’ve found it to be effective at all levels. It helps you be clear about what behaviour is expected and what won’t be tolerated.
Establishing norms also paves the way for you to reward good behaviour and penalise bad. Rewards might be public recognition, a personalised thank you note or some kind of financial reward.
Equally important is taking bad behaviour seriously. Organisations who don’t address rude behaviour often pay the price. When leaders ignore bad behaviour, they are giving implicit approval of the behaviour. Staff stop reporting incidents because they feel that nothing will be done. The behaviour continues unabated, stress levels increase and often the simplest solution for staff is to quit.
Finally, include civility in your recruitment and employee training approaches. Look out for indications of rude behaviour in interviews. Get multiple perspectives by involving team members in the interview process.
Including civility in employee training could be as simple as making people aware of the concepts and impacts. Or you might include role playing or even filming interactions so that people can get another perspective on how they behave.
Conclusion
A few years ago, Allen Holub gave the following definition of Agile4 which has stuck with me:
- Work small
- Talk to each other
- Make people’s lives better
Fostering civil behaviour helps you make people's lives better. Importantly, this is not some soft “new-age” management thing. It actually delivers tangible business benefits. Eliminating rudeness from your workplace increases productivity and collaboration, improves creativity, reduces stress and increases staff engagement and retention.
Being nice is not just the right thing to do. It works.
References
Porath & Pearson, 2013, The price of Incivility, accessed 17 Nov 2024
Riskin et al, 2015, The Impact of Rudeness on Medical Team Performance: A Randomized Trial, accessed 17 Nov 2024
Safe Work Australia: Psychosocial hazards, accessed 18 Nov 2024
Allen Holub X (Twitter), accessed 20 Nov 2024
