09/03/2025

This Survey Offers 766 Billion Reasons to Clamp Down on Workplace Rudeness

Rudeness between co-workers is on the rise and getting worse

Some workplace norms can be unexpected when you first join the world of work, and others are arguably a little archaic — Gen-Z’s dramatic rethinking of traditional work clothing habits could be a good thing, for example.

But other norms just seem to make sense, like being friendly, professional, and above all, civil to your colleagues and bosses. New research from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) explains that office civility does more than make your co-workers feel comfortable, it also helps in "creating a dynamic, diverse and productive workplace where everyone can thrive."

The problem is that SHRM's own research shows that incivility is rising in the American workplace. SHRM looked into countless reports of "rudeness, terse emails and snippy interactions," Fortune reported. SHRM concluded that these and other forms of workplace incivility harm productivity and even drive up secondary effects like employee absenteeism, all of which can harm the company bottom line. The size of the problem is astonishing, however, and it lends support to the notion of a tide of incivility and rudeness in the average American workplace: SHRM estimates that bad office behavior is costing U.S. businesses about $2.1 billion per day. That’s over $766 billion a year, more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.