Workplace incivility increased after Trump-Biden debate, survey shows
Workplace incivility increased after Trump-Biden debate, survey shows
Ahead of the 2024 election, “Marketplace Morning Report” has been reporting on political polarization in America, particularly how companies intensify or ease political divides. As part of this series, “Office Politics,” we’ve heard about tools to help employees with divergent views have civil conversations.
A recent survey showed that after the June 27 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the number of uncivil acts in U.S. workplaces rose from 171 million per day to just over 200 million per day.
So what does that actually look like, and how can it be addressed? Sara Taylor is president of DeepSEE Consulting, which specializes in diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. She discussed workplace incivility with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: So not the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate in September, but the Trump-Biden debate in late June, where Biden looked and sounded frail. There was a survey of workplaces following the debate. What did it find?
Sara Taylor: It found that folks really are experiencing incivility at a significant level. We saw that across society, 58% of Americans believe that society is uncivil. And, an explosion of 201 million reported acts of incivility in the workplace a day, just since that debate.
Brancaccio: If you think of the size of the U.S. workforce, that’s either some people are seeing loads of these per day, or every single person who’s working has seen one and a quarter of these. It’s an extraordinary number.
Taylor: Yes, absolutely.
David Brancaccio: My goodness. This is what? What are acts of incivility? People being jerks to each other, I guess?
Taylor: Well, and that’s where I think folks really can get confused. We think about incivility almost as if it’s a switch that we can turn on and turn off. We’re civil. We’re not civil. And in actuality, what we learn from the field of cultural competence is that it’s more nuanced than that and that all of us are operating from a stage of development in how effective we are as we interact with others.
Brancaccio: In other words, you’re saying that it could be made better. It’s not sort of a law of physics that human beings treat each other this way.
Taylor: Yes, we tend to blame the other side. Almost all of us perceive ourselves to be more respectful than we actually are. So the very first piece is to stop looking at the other side for them to change and start looking at ourselves. How do I advance the conversation, to be more effective, to be more civil and less polarized?
Brancaccio: If a candidate loses on Election Day, but tries to take power by other means, there will be people in the workplace who find that deeply offensive. It will be a challenge for either side to try to be in listening mode and try to find common ground.
Taylor: In the thousands of groups and organizations that we have worked with, we’ve never ever seen a group or an organization that is more developed than its leaders. Not that our leaders are somehow better, smarter, more wonderful. But our leaders set the bar and create the culture for what will cascade down in their organizations.
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