Teaching the Next Generation How to Disagree at Work

Why would you leave a job? Better pay? More benefits? Those are positive reasons. But surveys have found that as many as a quarter of employees quit jobs because of tensions with coworkers.

A new survey from the Society of Human Resources Managers (SHRM)–which represents over 300,000 people working in the human resources field worldwide–finds that incivility in the workplace continues to be a major challenge, particularly as generational and political differences come to the forefront for employees.

The top contributor to workplace incivility in the SHRM index? The answer might surprise you: political differences. In fact, 41 percent of workers said they experienced or witnessed incivility related to politics.

“The workplace is kind of a hub for what’s happening out in civil society,” says Sara Rahim, who serves as a social impact strategist and program manager at SHRM. “So if we’re seeing greater polarization just in the state of America right now, naturally that’s going to translate into the workplace. She also cites generational differences as a point of tension.

Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale University, who has spent years working on how organizations can improve employee culture, argues that promoting civility is often overlooked as an organizational goal.

“We pay a lot of attention to productivity,” she says, “but we often overlook accountability for creating a workplace where people can thrive.”

Could America’s colleges and universities train the next generation of workers to be a little more civil with each other? With such a large number of Americans now pursuing higher education, these institutions can play a major role in preparing students to navigate differences in the workplace.

Indeed, that’s the goal of the Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, released last year by the Greater Good Science Center. The playbook features science-backed strategies that administrators, academics, and students can use to build their skills for bridging differences.

One way to navigate personal differences is to explain how you came to a belief or worldview and explore how others did the same–rather than simply debating them. By questioning your assumptions about other people, you can help create a less threatening environment. Here’s an overview of key practices that can be cultivated in school and imported to the workplace.

Focus on personal stories

Mark Urista is a communications professor at Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon. The campus sits between two politically polarized counties. The famously liberal Portland, Oregon, is around 70 miles away. Benton County has voted for the Democratic candidate for president every year going back to 1988. On the other side is Linn County, which Urista describes as “very blue collar, very conservative,” adding that the last time it voted for a Democrat for president was in 1976.

“So if you think about some of the major tensions right now in this country I kind of feel privileged to be at a college that serves as a laboratory for how to bridge them,” Urista says.

He teaches speech communications classes at the college, largely focused on public speaking and argumentation. In order to help students broach thorny topics, he encourages them from the beginning of the course to humanize themselves.

“The very first day, I get students to start engaging in self-disclosure so they can reveal a little bit about themselves, make themselves vulnerable, understand who their classmates are,” he explains.

The students are then assigned to give a speech advocating for the class to take action on an issue they care personally about. The rest of the class is expected to offer constructive feedback and let the speaker know whether they were persuaded or not.

As one example of how this program worked in action, Urista says that in the spring a female student decided to deliver a speech about how men are struggling in society.

“I love my friends. Back in high school, I had a close group I laughed with, vented to, made the kind of memories that last forever,” she said in that speech. “But when we all moved to college, something shifted. The girls in the group stayed in touch, but the guys, slowly, just… disappeared. Not out of malice or drama. They just stopped reaching out, stopped responding, and stopped showing up.”

She went on to call attention to the epidemic of loneliness among men. She asked her classmates to “be vulnerable,” to “check in on their friends, plan a hangout, start an awkward conversation,” do any small thing they can to help reduce the loneliness among American men.

“I’m sure you can imagine, this created quite the controversy,” Urista says. “You get a lot of students saying, ‘Well, males, they’re part of the historically privileged group, you know? Why should we be making an effort to support them when we see all these other groups that are struggling, right?’”

As the class civilly debated the issue, eventually some men in the class spoke up and said they appreciated the student for giving her speech.

“Sharing that comment openly in the classroom helped shape a climate that allowed us to have a more productive discourse,” Urista says.

Urista’s work is backed by social psychology research around the world that has found benefits to opening up to one another.

For instance, in Europe, the Roma people have long been marginalized, with many Europeans holding contemptuous attitudes toward them. But using an exercise called 36 Questions–where you ask a conversation partner a series of questions to get to know more about them as individuals–Hungarian students who held negative attitudes towards Roma people became more positive towards them after just an hour of conversation with a Roma student.

Similar exercises elsewhere have produced similar outcomes.

One 2015 study found that when college students were assigned to strike up friendships with gay and lesbian people, they grew closer to those people, showing greater closeness and improved attitudes towards gay and lesbian people more broadly.

A separate study from 2008 found that cross-group friendships helped reduce cortisol levels–that’s the hormone tied to stress–between whites and Latinos.

Understand values

Another way to promote civility in the workplace is to encourage employees and employers alike to understand the values of others. After all, cultural and social differences mean that we don’t all even necessarily agree on what constitutes incivility–one person’s habit may be another’s faux pax.

When we discuss our differences, we often focus on positions or beliefs without thinking about the underlying values we ourselves and other people hold. This makes it more difficult to understand where other people are coming from and relating to their experiences and beliefs.

This is a practice that Justin Turpan honed as a student at Tulane University. Working with the bridging-differences organization BridgeUSA, he helped organize events where students discussed contentious social and political topics. Focusing on understanding the other person’s values helped make these conversations more meaningful and less combative.

During one discussion on gun control, for instance, a supporter of gun rights and a backer of gun control were able to both acknowledge that they valued the same thing: safe and secure communities. Acknowledging these values helped them have more constructive conversations.

To make this practice work, it’s important to avoid our conversations devolving simply into debates.

“Debate was not designed to create a group that works well together,” explains Heidi Brooks. “It was designed to help us be more rigorous with thought and to be able to have the issues on the table.”

She imagines her classrooms as miniature societies.

“They’re micro-socities designed for learning,” she says. “And so these micro societies need some practices…listening and curiosity. And that’s not the same thing as judgement, and as critique and analysis.”

But understanding someone else’s values can also help you be more persuasive when you are making an argument. One study published in 2015 found that when arguments were framed in ways that appealed to someone else’s values, they were more convincing. For instance, framing an argument for gay marriage in terms of values that conservatives hold dear–like loyalty or patriotism–was more persuasive than making those arguments rooted in liberal-leaning values like fairness.

Find shared identities

We often find ourselves at loggerheads with our colleagues on campus or in the workplace because we view ourselves as coming from distinct groups. We think to ourselves, that other person is nothing like me.

But when we look closer, we can often find that we share more in common than we think.

GGSC Senior Fellow Allison Briscoe-Smith put this skill into practice by starting a series of interfaith events at the Wright Institute, where students and other civic leaders across the spectrum of faith and spiritual beliefs convened to discuss their distinct practices and where their traditions overlapped.

The series of events helped people across campus connect across religious differences when they saw themselves not just as followers of different religions but collectively as people of faith.

One 2001 study found that building a common identity can go a long way in healing even racial differences.

Researchers had interviewers post up outside of a college football game to ask participants to answer questions about their food preferences. They found that Black interviewers netted interviews more often when they wore paraphernalia associated with the same university as the interviewee. This helps demonstrate how the shared identity of supporting the same university helped bridge the racial divide.

What we can all do

The SHRM Index isn’t all bad news. In a section where employees were asked about how their managers are addressing workplace incivility, 51% said that their manager “actively helps to guide employees through acts of incivility” and 54% said that their manager “actively encourages employees to address incivility through talking and having conversations,” just as Urista does with his class.

The survey finds that employees who described their work team as civil were much more likely to report positive team cohesion. For instance, 86% of workers who said that they belonged to a civil team said their “team members celebrate one another’s successes,” as opposed to just 47% of those who belong to uncivil teams.

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  Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook

  Practices to help campus communities connect across lines of race, faith, ideology, and more.

  Check It Out

But challenges remain, especially as Generation Z–whose school life and work life was intimately shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning–enters the workplace and encounters the norms that older workers have.

Rahim says that it’s important for people to ask themselves how they can contribute to building a culture of civility: “How am I showing up in the workplace? How am I building psychological safety for my team? How am I creating a space in which feedback is welcome?”

Brooks agrees.

“We all have a responsibility to bring some positive energy… into work spaces,” she says. “It’s part of what it means to be a citizen.”