It’s Time to Talk: Civility Is Disappearing — and We’re All Paying the Price
August 6, 2025 1:00 EDT
Let’s stop pretending everything is fine.
August is National Civility Month, and according to SHRM’s Q2 2025 Civility Index, the average American worker experiences at least one act of incivility every single day. That’s more than 223 million acts of rudeness, dismissal, or disrespect — daily. In the workplace alone, incivility costs organizations over $2 billion a day in lost productivity, absenteeism, and stress.
The impact is real.
We must find basic human decency — the kind we learned in kindergarten and forgot somewhere along the way. We’ve normalized interrupting, shaming, side-eyeing, ghosting, and gaslighting. We confuse honesty with cruelty, disagreement with disdain. We scream online and shut down in real life. Enough.
Join us for an open forum that’s not a panel and not a keynote, but definitely raw. This is a frank, honest, maybe even uncomfortable conversation about how we claw our way back to civility — starting in our workplaces, and starting with ourselves.
We’ll challenge one another to:
- Disagree better without disrespect.
- Use empathy without enabling bad behavior.
- Call out incivility when we see it — no matter who it comes from.
- Set the tone, and look at the role HR can play in that.
This isn’t about being nice. It’s about being accountable, aware, and human again. The world won’t change until we do. Let’s go first. You will leave this conversation with ideas to test with your team the very next day. And from there, you can measure if civility starts to increase day by day.
SHRM HR Knowledge Advisors will join the live webinar to answer your questions in real time — right in the chat. If we don’t get to your question during the session, don’t worry! SHRM members can head to SHRM Connect after the webinar to keep the conversation going with these advisors for 30 extra minutes. This benefit is only for members who join the live webinar and is not included later on demand.
Meet the Presenters
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Tina Beaty
As Chief Marketing & Experience Officer for SHRM, Beaty is responsible for the brand strategy, creative content planning, event experience, audience-centric approach across 7 segments, corporate communications, the management of SHRM's global B2B and B2C marketing execution, and the SHRM Speaker Bureau. As a change agent, Beaty has ushered in a six-part audience-centric model designing the marketing strategy for membership, products, and e-commerce solution sets while facilitating innovation in the martech stack and building out ABM capes. She was a main architect on the product development and go-to-market strategy for the new SHRM Executive Network targeting senior HR and business leaders maximizing the human capital in their companies at the enterprise and mid-market level. Prior to SHRM, her leadership of an integrated communications campaign for the Indexed Annuities Leadership Council helped changed perceptions of fixed indexed annuities, leading to a 30% increase in industry sales. She led Welch’s mealtime research PR campaign, shifting brand voice; counseled government clients in reaching a consumer audience through earned media; and placed executives, such as Carly Fiorina, on a national stage. Her storytelling has landed clients in The Washington Post, on Bloomberg, and the TODAY Show - just to name a few. Additionally, Tina is an advisory board member for Miami University's (OH) journalism and communication school and is a president emeritus for Washington Women in PR. Previously, she was named to PR News’ Top Women in PR.
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Jennifer Dulski
Jennifer Dulski has a wide range of executive experience including leadership roles at Facebook, Google, and Yahoo!, and founder, CEO and president roles at early stage and scaling startups.
She is currently CEO and founder of Rising Team, a team performance platform that helps companies increase engagement, strengthen culture, and scale leadership development by equipping managers to lead science-backed, interactive team sessions without an outside facilitator.
She is also a member of the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and teaches a course called "Managing Growing Enterprises."
She writes about leadership for LinkedIn Influencers, Fortune, and Fast Company, and her first book, Purposeful, was published by Penguin Portfolio in 2018 and is a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.
SHRM certification has approved this webinar for 1 PDC toward SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP recertification. A program code will be provided at the end of the webinar.