Let’s Protect Our Frontline Workers from Rude Customers

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From videos of drunk and disorderly airline passengers to stories of hospital visitors angrily refusing to wear masks, customer-facing work seems to have gotten a lot more difficult – even dangerous -- over the past few years. It's important that organizations understand the experience of frontline workers now, and help to better protect their employees, says Christine Porath, professor of management at Georgetown University. She's studied incivility for 20 years, and has spoken to workers in many industries in the last few years about what it's like working with customers today - with stress, anger, and incivility seemingly on the rise. And she has advice for managers and leaders. Porath is the author of the HBR Big Idea article "Frontline Work When Everyone Is Angry."

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New
0:08.1	Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for
0:13.8	free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Ellison Beard.
0:43.2	We've all heard the stories and seen the videos. Cafe patron, shouting racist insults, hospital
0:55.4	visitors, angerly refusing to wear masks, drunken disorderly airline passengers. Customer
1:01.2	facing work seems to have gotten a lot more difficult, even dangerous over the past few
1:05.5	years. What exactly are frontline workers experiencing now? How are they handling it? Is the
1:11.1	problem really worse than ever? And if so, why? Also, what can companies do to prevent
1:16.5	people from behaving this way? Or at least better protect their employees?
1:21.3	My guest today has studied incivility for two decades. And a few months ago, HBR asked
1:26.1	her to look into these questions. She's here today to talk about what she found, and
1:30.6	give us some advice on how organizations and individuals should deal with unruly customers.
1:35.8	Christine Perrath is a professor of management at Georgetown University. She wrote the HBR
1:40.7	Big Idea article Frontline Work when everyone is angry. Christine, thanks so much for being
1:45.1	on the show. Thanks for having me.
1:51.3	Let's start by talking about the types of workers that you studied and talked to for
1:59.1	this article. Who are they? So, HBR really encouraged me to go global with this. We had
2:07.4	been thinking and seeing that this was a real problem in the US, and really wanted to
2:13.6	know was it the same in other places. So, we intentionally tried to get data from across
2:22.1	the world around what people were experiencing and witnessing when it came to root-ness.
2:31.5	And what types of workers we're talking about? I mentioned baristas, flight attendants,
	...

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