According to the co authors of a new book from the US, bad behaviour and rudeness in the workplace could be costing companies billions in lost productivity.

Professor Christine Porath of the USC Marshall School of Business and her co-author Christine Pearson, a professor of management at Thunderbird School of Global Management, discovered just how much poor manners at work can impact a company’s bottom line while researching "The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It”.

Behaviour like texting in meetings, spreading malicious rumours, taking credit for other people’s work, ignoring emails and even refusing to say a simple "please" and "thank you" are much more than just annoyances, say the authors, who claim that stress caused by bad behaviour could be costing businesses a staggering $300 billion by affecting the performance of those on the receiving end.

The Authors’ research suggests that eight out of 10 employees who are victims of insults or bullying in the workplace lose work time worrying about it, while a similar proportion feel that their commitment to work declines as a direct result. Civility costs nothing, but implementing a culture of civility in the workplace could have real payback in terms of productivity and bottom line profits. "It starts with the top," Porath insists. "There should be a thread of civility through everything a company does." When these threads start to break down, she warns, companies are in danger of losing their best employees, to the long-term detriment of the business. Even with currently high levels of unemployment she points out that there’s still "huge concern with Human Resource executives that there’s a shortage of talent. Businesses are fighting for talent."

Cover of The Secret (Extended Edition)

Take a look at the non-fiction shelves of your local bookshop and you’ll find them groaning under the weight of countless self-help manuals. There are books that claim to help you find your inner anything. All you have to do is part with your hard-earned cash, make the author a smidgen richer, and invest a bit of your valuable time to be smarter, wiser, richer, happier, more attractive, better at your job… or whatever else you want.
Self help books are sweeping the world. Millions are printed every year, claiming to do everything from helping you into that “size zero” to catapulting your career into the stratosphere. The hub of this phenomenon is, of course, the United States, where, according to research company Marketdata the self help industry is set to be worth a staggering US$11 billion by 2008.

The idea of self-help books is nothing new. They’ve been around since the mid to late 1800s, when famous titles included William Maher’s “On the Road to Riches” (1874) and Edwin T Freedley’s “The Secret of Success in Life” (1876). But today they’ve gone stratospheric, and it seems we’re not just buying them, we’re also buying into them.