E-mails can send wrong message

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 e-mails 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.

“If they want to make sure it never happens again, what they’ve got to do is change the culture where people are silent when more innocent versions of these violations are already happening,” Grenny said. “If you increase people’s ability to confront bad behavior quickly in the workplace, these problems almost never happen.”