- Support: Do employees feel supported by their colleagues and leaders? Are there adequate resources and training available for individual and professional development?
- Communication: Is communication clear, open, and transparent? Are employees kept informed about important decisions and changes?
2. Workplace Civility Assessment:
Once you have a clear picture of your work environment based on the template, let’s delve deeper into civility with the “Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory.”
- Identify civility strengths: Analyze your results to see where your workplace scores high on elements like respect, cooperation, conflict resolution, and positive communication. Identify factors contributing to these strengths.
- Pinpoint areas for improvement: Use the inventory to identify areas where your workplace scores lower, indicating potential incivility issues. This could include areas like gossip, negativity, unfair treatment, or lack of support.
3. Reflecting on Civility:
Based on your assessment, consider:
- Overall civility level: Based on your analysis, can you describe your workplace as highly civil, somewhat civil, or lacking in civility? Explain your reasoning.
- Specific incivility experience: Share a specific situation where you encountered incivility at work. Describe the incident, the impact it had on you and others, and how it was (or was not) addressed.
4. Moving Forward:
- Recommendations: Based on your assessment and experience, suggest potential strategies your organization could implement to promote civility and address any identified incivility issues. This could include training programs, communication initiatives, conflict resolution techniques, or policy adjustments.
- Ongoing monitoring: Remember, measuring and managing civility is an ongoing process. Use the “Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory” and other tools regularly to track progress and adjust strategies as needed.
By critically analyzing your work environment and utilizing available tools, you can gain valuable insights into workplace civility and contribute to making your organization a more civil and respectful place for everyone.
You may think your current organization operates seamlessly, or you may feel it has many issues. You may experience or even observe things that give you pause. Yet, much as you wouldn’t try to determine the health of a patient through mere observation, you should not attempt to gauge the health of your work environment based on observation and opinion. Often, there are issues you perceive as problems that others do not; similarly, issues may run much deeper than leadership recognizes.
There are many factors and measures that may impact organizational health. Among these is civility. While an organization can institute policies designed to promote such things as civility, how can it be sure these are managed effectively? In this Discussion, you will examine the use of tools in measuring workplace civility.
To Prepare:
• Review the Resources and examine the Clark Healthy Workplace Inventory, found on page 20 of Clark (2015).
• Review and complete the Work Environment Assessment Template in the Resources.
Post a brief description of the results of your Work Environment Assessment. Based on the results, how civil is your workplace? Explain why your workplace is or is not civil. Then, describe a situation where you have experienced incivility in the workplace. How was this addressed? Be specific and provide examples.
