Civility in the workplace is the practice of treating coworkers, managers, and clients with basic respect, courtesy, and professionalism in every interaction. It covers everything from how you speak in meetings to how you word a Slack message. While that sounds simple, the absence of civility carries measurable costs: U.S. workers collectively experience over 81 million acts of incivility per day, according to SHRM research, and each incident drains an average of 37 minutes of productivity from the people who experience or witness it.
What Civility Looks Like Day to Day
Civility isn’t one grand gesture. It’s a collection of small, consistent behaviors: greeting people when you pass them, listening without interrupting, giving credit where it’s due, keeping disagreements focused on ideas rather than personalities, and responding to messages in a reasonable timeframe. It also includes respecting people’s time by showing up prepared for meetings and not pulling colleagues into unnecessary ones.
Incivility is the mirror image. Researchers at the University of Michigan define it through behaviors that are rude, condescending, or ostracizing. Think of a manager who rolls their eyes during someone’s presentation, a colleague who “forgets” to include you on emails related to your own project, or someone who takes a dismissive tone in a group chat. None of these acts are dramatic on their own, but they accumulate. The pattern is what makes incivility so damaging: it’s low-intensity enough that people hesitate to report it, yet persistent enough to erode trust and morale over time.
Why It Matters for Retention and Productivity
The business case for civility is straightforward. Workers who experience or witness incivility take an average of 1.9 extra days off per month in response. Over a quarter of U.S. workers (26%) said they were likely to leave their jobs due to experiencing or witnessing incivility, based on SHRM’s quarterly workforce data. When you factor in recruiting and training costs for replacements, even a modest increase in turnover driven by a toxic atmosphere gets expensive fast.
Productivity losses go beyond absenteeism. After a rude exchange, people spend time replaying the incident, venting to coworkers, and avoiding the person who treated them poorly. That 37 minutes of lost productivity per incident doesn’t just vanish. It compounds across teams and departments. A five-person team where one member is consistently dismissive can quietly drag down the output of the entire group, not because anyone stops working, but because everyone starts spending energy managing the interpersonal friction instead of doing their actual jobs.
Where Incivility Ends and Harassment Begins
Civility and legal compliance are related but not the same thing. The EEOC defines harassment as unwelcome conduct based on a protected characteristic: race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 and older), disability, or genetic information. Harassment becomes unlawful when enduring the conduct is a condition of continued employment, or when the behavior is severe or pervasive enough that a reasonable person would find the environment intimidating, hostile, or abusive.
Petty slights, annoyances, and isolated incidents generally don’t meet that legal threshold unless they are extremely serious. A coworker who is consistently curt with everyone isn’t committing harassment in the legal sense. But if that curtness is selectively aimed at people of a particular race or gender, and it happens often enough to alter working conditions, it can cross the line.
This distinction matters because organizations that focus only on preventing illegal harassment miss the broader problem. A workplace can be technically compliant with anti-discrimination law while still being miserable to work in. Civility standards fill that gap by setting expectations for how people treat each other regardless of whether a protected characteristic is involved.
Civility in Remote and Hybrid Work
Virtual communication strips away the tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language that soften in-person exchanges. A blunt two-word Slack message (“do this”) might be efficient, but to the person receiving it, it can read as dismissive or hostile. Stress and anxiety make people less self-aware of their own demeanor, and remote work layers on additional stressors: isolation, blurred boundaries between work and personal life, and the pressure of an “always on” culture where you feel expected to be reachable at all hours.
Some managers overcompensate for the lack of face-to-face contact by flooding their teams with emails, messages, and meetings, which creates its own form of disrespect for people’s time and focus. A few practical norms go a long way:
- Structure your messages. Even in Slack, include a brief greeting, a clear request, and some indication of timeline or next steps. Sending a lone “hey” without context forces the other person to guess what’s coming and can spike their anxiety.
- Close the loop. A quick “thanks” or “I’ll get back to you by Thursday” prevents people from wondering whether their message disappeared into a void.
- Know when to switch channels. If your typed reply is turning into a paragraph, move the conversation to a phone or video call where tone is easier to read.
- Separate personal and business messages. If a colleague has experienced a loss, reach out to express condolences in a separate message. Don’t bundle it with a work request. And keep the condolence brief rather than asking them to update you on their situation, which puts the burden on them to manage your concern.
How Organizations Build a Civil Culture
Civility doesn’t happen by accident, especially in organizations that are growing quickly or have gone through leadership changes. The most effective approach starts with writing down specific behavioral expectations. Not vague values like “we treat each other with respect,” but concrete examples: we don’t interrupt in meetings, we respond to internal messages within one business day, we raise concerns directly with the person involved before escalating. These guidelines should be communicated in a team meeting, not buried in a handbook no one reads.
Making civility a stated core value gives managers something concrete to point to when behavior drifts. When two employees are in a pattern of sniping at each other, a manager can sit down with both of them and reference the shared standards rather than making it feel like a personal judgment call. Conflict resolution training helps here too, both for managers who need to mediate and for employees who need to learn how to raise a problem constructively. One useful principle: the cost of admission to raising a problem is being part of the solution, or at least being willing to talk about what a solution could look like.
Hiring and promotion decisions reinforce culture more than any policy document. When someone who is brilliant but consistently rude gets promoted anyway, every other employee receives a clear message about what the organization actually values. Conversely, when leaders model civil behavior, especially under pressure, it sets a baseline that filters through their teams without needing to be enforced through formal channels.
What You Can Do as an Individual
You don’t need organizational authority to practice civility. Start with self-awareness: recognize when stress is making you short-tempered, and take extra care with communication on those days. If you catch yourself firing off a terse email, pause and reread it from the recipient’s perspective. A few extra words of context or a warmer sign-off cost you five seconds and can prevent a 37-minute productivity drain on the other end.
When someone is uncivil toward you, responding in kind almost always escalates the situation. A calm, direct response works better. Something like “I’d like to discuss this, but I need us to keep the conversation professional” sets a boundary without creating a new conflict. If the behavior is part of a pattern, document specific incidents with dates and details before raising it with a manager or HR. Vague complaints like “they’re always rude to me” are harder to act on than “on March 4th, during the project review, they interrupted me three times and referred to my work as pointless in front of the team.”
Civility is ultimately a skill, not a personality trait. Like any skill, it improves with practice and deteriorates under neglect. The workplaces where people genuinely enjoy showing up are rarely the ones with the fanciest perks. They’re the ones where people feel heard, included, and treated like adults.