The Spokesman Review, WA
12-02-06
E-mails can send wrong message
Experts see huge potential for workplace woes
Betsy Z. Russell
Staff writer
Experts say the sending of explicit or offensive e-mails between employees can
destroy both the morale and productivity of a workplace and can even escalate
into violations of sexual harassment laws. Yet people may not recognize just how
offensive their behavior is because of the technology involved.
"One of the challenges is that technology tends to lower social inhibitions and
also social wisdom," said Joseph Grenny, president of VitalSmarts, a Provo,
Utah, research and business consulting firm.
Kootenai County Prosecutor Bill Douglas this week called sexually explicit emails between his employees "a distraction" and said the "climate is fine" in his
office – despite allegations of sexual harassment against his chief deputy
prosecutor from two female employees who recently quit their jobs in the
prosecutor's office.
But Anthony Townsend, a business professor at Iowa State University and
an expert on workplace ethics and technology, said, "He really ought to be in
a more proactive position, because this is the kind of thing that can just continue
to boil for a long time. There is no easy out for him."
Townsend said that if allowed to continue unchecked, the sending of sexually
oriented e-mails in the workplace can create a hostile job environment and
violate discrimination laws.
"That's where the law is on this," he said. "You can't excuse it as horseplay. In a
modern environment, you can't excuse it as simply not knowing. It's simply
against the Civil Rights Act – it really is a form of sexual harassment."
Yet such behavior happens, and happens a lot, in part because the technology
masks the implications of people's communications.
"It's a problem everywhere. It's not whether it's government or non-government,"
Grenny said. "We're having these technologically oriented experiences that we
don't have social manners designed for yet."
In person, Grenny said, an employee wouldn't be likely to pull out a pornographic
magazine and flash it in front of a co-worker. Nor would he be likely to continue
off-color comments after seeing from a co-worker's facial expression or other
non-verbal cues that such comments had crossed the lines of appropriateness.
"What's lacking here is all these visual cues," he said. "Our capacity to think
about social consequences hasn't caught up with the ease and the velocity of the
communication."
Townsend said e-mail also tends to blur the lines between the personal and the
professional. "I think the hard thing for this office and for everybody to get their
heads around is that e-mail is both a personal and a professional part of our life,"
he said. When someone sends an e-mail, he said, "it feels personal." Yet, if it's
happening at work, it's a work-related act. "What we do in our private lives with
our e-mail is our own business, but … it's when you're doing it in the office."
Grenny, author of the book "Crucial Conversations," said he concluded from his
research that the underlying problem is that others don't challenge people who
engage in offensive or even dangerous behaviors in the workplace. As a result,
the behaviors continue and escalate, hurting workplace productivity, morale,
quality, and even safety.