📻 Our founder and Research Director, Dr Emma Russell recently appeared on the BBC's All in the Mind podcast to talk about email incivility -- and it's well worth a listen.

Some of the key insights Emma shared:

→ Email incivility is distinct from bullying or abusive supervision -- it's lower in intensity and intent is often ambiguous. But its organisational consequences are far from minor: reduced productivity, lower well-being, increased absenteeism, and higher staff turnover are all well-documented outcomes.

→ How we instigate incivility maps onto the stress response -- fight (hostile tone, strategic CC-ing of senior colleagues to 'put someone in their place'), flight (ignoring messages or answering selectively), and submit (overusing email as a means of affiliation and connection).

→ The highest-risk scenario for sending an uncivil email isn't simply feeling angry -- it's the combination of anger, time pressure, and depleted energy hitting simultaneously.

→ Most people rarely or never perpetrate incivility. A very small group are chronic, repeated perpetrators -- and they require targeted support rather than blanket awareness-raising.

As work intensifies and burnout rates rise, the conditions that breed email incivility are only deepening.

🎧 Listen to the episode here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002vybz