For Young Professionals, Workplace Courtesy Is No Longer a Given

Over the past several years, many leaders have noticed a subtle but meaningful shift inside their organizations: the erosion of basic workplace courtesies, particularly from younger employees new to the professional workplace. Not misconduct; not ethical lapses. But something more subtle. Employees announcing time off instead of requesting it. Cameras off in meetings. Missed meetings treated casually. Messages left unanswered for a day or more. Delegating up.

Matt Kirchner addresses these patterns directly, sharing firsthand stories from his own companies and examining what has changed in professional norms, and why.

This is not a critique of younger employees. We're all for promoting emerging leaders and believe early-career professionals bring energy, ambition, and a willingness to attempt what others might dismiss. But many of these individuals also entered the workforce after losing formative years of in-person education, internships, and social development during COVID-era isolation. As a result, expectations that once felt intuitive often now require explicit instruction.

This episode explores specific areas where standards are slipping and explains how organizations can reestablish expectations without embarrassment or blame. Matt closes with a practical framework for addressing unprofessional behavior consistently and constructively, with the goal of strengthening culture rather than policing it.

Listen to Learn:

• The workplace behaviors that are quietly reshaping organizational culture
• How pandemic disruptions affected professional social development
• Why virtual meeting norms have outsized cultural impact
• What “delegating up” reveals about accountability and ownership
• A structured approach for restoring workplace standards without alienating newer employees

Resources in this Episode:
Read the article in Products Finishing: "Relearning Common Courtesies in the Workplace"

Follow Matt on LinkedIn

View more resources on the episode page!

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Transcript

TechEd Podcast Introduction: 0:09

Announcer, this is the TechEd podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education, to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American Dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host, Matt Kirchner,

Matt Kirchner: 0:38

welcome into the TechEd podcast. I'm your host. Matt Kirchner, it's just me. This week, we are going to be talking about fascinating topic, at least a fascinating topic to me. Fair warning to the audience, this episode is about workplace etiquette, especially among those newer to the workforce. So if you don't want to listen to a little bit of a rant about how we've strayed away from basic workforce decency, and then talk about some common sense advice on how employers and others facing this problem can address it. Then tune out. Let me also mention that the inspiration for this episode was a recent magazine column that I wrote, as many of you know, I write a magazine column every single month for gardener, business, media. And they own several properties, several magazines, if you will, trade publications in which that column is printed, among them production, machining and products finishing magazine. So if you like what you hear and you want to pass it along in written form, we will link that up in the show notes, because much of what we're covering here is also covered in that column. And I want to give credit where credit is, due to my relationship with Gardner Business Media and the opportunity to share our thoughts on leadership every single month. So let me start out with this. I love working with younger team members. Absolutely love it, and believe it or not, the deeper I get into my career now, some four decades, or whatever it is, the more people fit into that category of younger team members. But I love working around younger people. There's a certain satisfaction that comes along with teaching people something new, showing them the ways of business, showing them that they have capabilities they maybe never knew they had. I love that part of what I do. There's also part of working with young people that I love, and that is that you can ask them to do the impossible, literally, they haven't been in the workforce long enough. If you ask somebody who is well into their career to do something that seems over the top, they might say, I'm not doing that. They've got all these preconceived notions. Younger people in the workforce don't have any of that. So you can literally ask them to do the impossible, and many, many times they will impress you by proving that they can do it. So I love that. I love the fact that I feel like at least myself in the workplace. I try to skew a little bit younger. I've always worked around younger people. I was never afraid to promote younger people, by the way, and because of that, when other people might be saying something like, you know, we we don't want to have an individual hasn't paid their dues yet in a role of leadership, I was always like, if someone can do the job and they can do it, great, who cares how old they are? Who cares how long they've been in the workforce? Let's give them the opportunity. And because of that, I've often been surrounded by younger leadership teams and younger management teams in the businesses that I've had the opportunity to run. So love promoting younger people I was, I don't talk about this too much on the podcast, but 25 years old when I had my first vice president's role in a manufacturing company, actually a technology company at 29 when I became a president and CEO of another company. So always had people that took a chance on me, even though the years that stood behind me weren't quite what other people have had. Maybe I didn't have the years of experience that others had, but I was always hungry, I always tried to keep a good head on my shoulders, and I always felt like I understood business well enough, and because of that I grew really, really young into positions of responsibility. Love giving people that same opportunity doesn't mean we don't also promote people that are deeper into their career. That's important too. So both have opportunities, but when we do have that chance to find someone younger and give them an opportunity to lead, I love being able to do that. So have I made it clear enough that I love working with younger people, and in fact, in the same way that I had this rule when my kids were young. So several decades ago, I promised myself that I would be listening to the same music that they were listening to when they got to high school, and I kept that promise. And part of the reason for that was staying tuned into younger music. Younger pop culture made me feel younger at heart in the same way. Working around younger people makes me feel the same way. So I love working with younger people. But let me start with a story. This goes back a year or two ago, and we had an individual I'll call him Josh, and actually. Have his name isn't Josh, but we'll call him that I have his permission to share this story with the audience. And Josh came in one day. We had a whole team of interns working one summer. So all these young people, four of them, were still in school. We had them write a business plan for a new business. We were looking at starting. What a cool opportunity that was for those young people to learn how to write a business plan, learn about business. It was really, really fun. So Josh was one of those interns that was working in that business. And Josh walked into a meeting one morning and he said, I won't be to work on Friday. I'm going out of town with my parents and my family. And I looked at him and I said, Okay, are you are you asking for the day off, or are you just coming in and telling me that you're not coming to work on a day that you're scheduled to work? And he said, Well, I'm going up north on a long weekend with my family, so I won't be in on Friday. He said, My mom said I can't work on Friday. And I was I said, this not threatening, but more just curious. I said, even if it costs you your job. And Josh said, Well, my mom said that we're going up north, like it didn't dawn on him that he should be asking me for the day off. So let's talk about this just a little bit. I'm sure I'm not the only one that has noticed this kind of behavior. And the truth of the matter is that we have gotten to a point in the workplace where, especially younger employees, just have this acute under appreciation for what basic workplace courtesy is. And first, I would tell you that it's not their fault. It's not their fault that poor Josh had no idea how to let me know that he wanted to take the day off on Friday. We think about what so many of these young people went through when they were coming of age, right? They came of age, some of them during the pandemic, we locked them in their bedrooms, we made them study and take classes on Zoom, all of the opportunities that so many of us had throughout the last 100 years, probably more to interact with people in social settings, to build those social skills, to understand what it's like to function in a whole variety of different situations and different environments. They didn't have that they were locked in their in their bedrooms, going to zoom classes. Then when the economy opened back up, and people started getting back out into the world. They missed all of these experiences, whether they were internships, extracurricular activities, group projects, all of the ways that we learned in school. So I don't blame them necessarily, for this lack of appreciation for how to act in the workplace. I actually, in many cases, blame the pandemic. Now let's go back to my friend, Josh. I said to Josh, when he said his mom told him he had to take the day off on Friday, I said, Josh, look, I said, Never in a million years would I tell you that you couldn't take a day off that you wanted to take off with your family, but basic workplace decency and courtesy says that you would come to me and you would ask for the day off rather than just telling me you're not going to come to work on a day that you're scheduled to work. He paused for a moment, and he said, Matt, would it be okay if I took the day off on Friday to go up north with my family? And I said, Josh, of course it would have fun. That was an opportunity for us to show him that there are certain expectations in the workplace, and an opportunity for him to learn what those are, so I can come up with even more examples, actually a lot more examples. One recent Friday afternoon, at about 230 in the afternoon, I went walking through our office looking for two of our younger team members. Like I said, it was 230 in the afternoon. Neither of them are anywhere to be found, and they had both cut out early. They hadn't said they were cutting out early. They hadn't said that they had other obligations. They hadn't asked if it was okay if they cut out early. They just left the office. In most of our companies, we have a culture that says people respect and freedom. We give our team members tremendous amounts of latitude to do their jobs where they want, when they want, how they want, but it still comes back to a basic understanding between an employer and an employee of how you should act, and certainly, leaving the office at 230 in the afternoon without saying anything to anybody would be on the other side of the realm of acceptable, at least as far as we're concerned. Let's talk about some of the things that we see in virtual meetings, right? So my rule of thumb in a virtual meeting is, if you wouldn't do it in an in person meeting, it's not okay to do it in a virtual meeting. Hold yourself to exactly the same standard, or as close to that standard as possible. So many of these, these folks, the younger folks, will come to a meeting and they have their cameras turned off, right, and so they don't even have their cameras on. You can't see them. It's a meeting. We want to be able to see you turn your cameras on. The other one, that just drives me crazy sometimes. And we all at some point, maybe get a text from a family member. An urgent issue that we need to deal with, and maybe you'll just look down at your phone really quick and sneak off a quick text to somebody so that you don't interrupt the meeting. I get it. We do that in in person meetings sometimes as well. If it's something that's mission critical or urgent, that's not what I'm talking about. What I am talking about is people who will sit in a meeting literally with their eyes on their phone for the whole meeting, texting back and forth, sending emails, whatever it is that they're doing on their phone that wouldn't be okay in an in person meeting. You couldn't, least in the past, and shouldn't be able to now, sit in a meeting with a group of people and just work on, work on your phone and text you wouldn't do that in an in person meeting. Why would you do that in a virtual meeting? Sometimes you see people that are just working on something totally different. I even saw somebody in a meeting not too long ago turn their chair 90 degrees so literally, turn their chair 90 degrees from the camera, so that their shoulder was facing the camera and their eyes were facing their computer, and they sat there and worked on something else during a meeting, while people were asking questions, while people were presenting, while people were having conversations. Again, you shouldn't be able to do that in an in person meeting. We'll talk about that in just a minute. Why would you do it in a virtual meeting? And then you get the people that try to be coy a little bit right? So you get the folks that you know they're working on something else. You can see their eyes darting around. Everybody knows they're working on something else. But then every once in a while, they'll like nod their head as if they're listening, or they'll smile at something that somebody said that they heard other people laughing at, as if the rest of us don't realize that they're working on something else and pretending to be paying attention to the meeting. How about the people that will get up? Sometimes they'll turn their camera off, sometimes they leave it on, and they just disappear from a virtual meeting for a series of minutes, and then they show up a couple minutes later with a warm cup of coffee, and, you know, they were off making coffee or doing something else. Again, we wouldn't do that in an in person meeting. I mean, it wasn't okay to just get up and walk out of the meeting to go do something and then come back into the meeting. Why do we think that's okay in a virtual meeting? It shouldn't be, I will tell you this. I get invited quite often, as you would imagine, to guest lecture to college courses. So I'll get an as I lecture to a group of entrepreneurs, not too long ago, an entrepreneurial course. I should say, we get get the opportunity to present to a lot of engineering people. A lot of people may be studying advanced manufacturing, studying business. So I get invitations relatively frequently to join a course at a university or a college and guest lecture. I got so tired of a couple mannerisms and ways of behavior that I've started asking a couple questions when a professor or someone else asked me to come guest lecture to their students, and the first question I ask is, Is this a virtual meeting, or is this an impersonal meeting? In other words, is it a virtual course, or are we meeting at the at the college or university? And if they say it's a virtual meeting, I say, Are the students required to keep their cameras on? I got invited a couple times to present virtually to two groups of college students, and I'm literally, like, sitting there talking to my own camera. Nobody's got their cameras on. All the cameras are off. You don't even know if they're listening. And I just got to the point where I'm like, unless you require the students to have the cameras on while I'm delivering the guest lecture, I don't have any interest in doing it, because I'm not going to sit there and just talk to myself for 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes even longer. The other thing is, if it is an in person event, I ask them if the students are required to close their computers and pay attention when I'm presenting. And if the answer to that question is no, again, it's a no. For me, I don't want to sit there and talk to a group of students that are working on their homework and not paying attention to me if I'm going to take the time out of what is, believe it or not, a really, really busy schedule to go and present to these to these students. The least they should be able to do is have the common courtesy to pay attention to me while I'm there, and if they're not interested, I'm not interested. So I guess it's, it's a mutual understanding. But that's the second thing that I ask about, is, are the students required to to close their computers and pay attention? I don't know exactly where this comes from, but I'm seeing it more and more, you know, the workplace as well. So we're seeing more and more people going into an in person meeting and thinking it's okay to just have their computer open, working on something else, reading on something else, not paying attention to the meeting. And this happens quite often in education circles, believe it or not, where you'll be presenting to a group of people, and a third of them will be sitting there with their computers open, computers open, sending emails, reading emails. I don't know what they're doing, but they're not paying attention to me. I'm not sure when we got to that point, but that's one of the things that now I'm just maniacal about, is let's close the computers, let's focus on the meeting as it's taking place. And more and more young people in the workplace should recognize that that is just common workplace decency, as is being punctual for meetings. And so we were really maniacal in our companies to start meetings on time. And I'm not perfect, either, right? If I get distracted, or sometimes I may not realize what time it is, or sometimes I might have a meeting that we're. Ends over and join the next meeting a couple minutes late. I try to avoid that whenever I can, and whenever it happens, I am unbelievably apologetic to the other members of the team or the other members of the meeting and the other attendees for not being more respectful of their time. And we've had situations in companies where people just totally missed a meeting, forgot it was on the calendar, didn't see it. That happens to me sometimes too there again. It's like, oh my goodness, I'm so embarrassed. I can't believe I missed that meeting. I'm really, really sorry. How can I make it up to you? And we've had people, especially younger team members, that just kind of shrug their shoulders and say, Oh yeah, I overslept. Well, wait a minute. I mean, this is not okay. I mean, we're not gonna pillory you for making a mistake, but you at least have to be contrite about the fact that you wasted everybody else's time waiting for you in a meeting that you didn't show up for because you weren't disciplined enough to get yourself where you needed to be on time. So punctuality at meetings, showing up where you're supposed to be. Here again, these are things that, to me, were just commonplace back in the day, and sounding like an old man, I guess, but back in the day and that we've just gotten away from. And another thing I'll give you this example. And it's been a long time since I've reported to somebody in the workplace other than myself, but for a long time, I reported to a board of directors. For probably 17 or 18 years prior to that, I reported to president of a company. Look, when I was I wasn't the person that either owned or ran the business. If a board member sent me and at that time, more so an email or maybe called me even, nobody was texting quite as much back then, if at all. If somebody reached out to me with an email or a call, they would get a call right back my next available opportunity, I would get back to that board member. It didn't matter if that was a weekend, you know, if it's a Sunday morning, if it's a holiday, whatever, if it's important enough to them to reach out on a weekend or on a holiday, I would get back right away. And the in today, there's, you see a lot of folks, you'll, you'll text him even during the weekday. I mean, you'll send them a note on a, you know, Wednesday afternoon, at one in the afternoon, and you don't hear back for 24 hours. Or same thing with an email or same thing with a phone call. It just shocks me that people don't recognize how important it is to get back to and we're not big hierarchy people in our businesses, we have pretty flat organizations. But you know, when the guy with the big title after his name or her name sends you the sends you a text or an email that you get right back, that's just kind of common courtesy. It's the way that the world works. Okay, any other ideas that we have here? Just a couple more, I would say this practice of delegating up, and we've talked about that, I think, probably, in the past. But what that means is that when somebody who is working in an organization brings work to their quote, supervisor or boss, again, not super hierarchical in our businesses, but we do have a, you know, a certain hierarchy. And says, Hey, can you, can you read through this and see if you catch any typos? Would be an example. And my answer is always no. I mean, get it to where it's perfect, and then send it to me, and if I catch a typo, I'll say something. But it's not my job to proofread your work. Or I got this quote to a certain point. Can you finish it off for me? No. I mean, if you want some help, or you have a question, happy to help, but we're not going to have you just delegate work up in the organization. So I'm super, super disciplined about pointing that one out. Another one is like people, and I know that we're in a different age, right? And that people have a different understanding of whether call it work life balance or work life integration. You know, there's certain aspects to life that go well beyond your work life. And I get that, I can tell you that I was always somebody that just put work first, and I always have been. I like to work. I enjoy working. I liked working when I was younger. I like being at work. I liked accomplishing things. I like getting things done. I'm still that way, right? So I don't have big lines between my work life in my personal life, but when you see somebody that like maniacally shows up at exactly the same time every morning and leaves it exactly the same time in the afternoon, that's somebody that you know is is probably leaving a little bit of work on the table at the end of the day, who has to discipline themselves to walk out the door specifically at an exact point in time every single day. And I know people have commitments. People have family commitments. Family commitments, people have healthcare commitments. I mean, I get it, but it's just a little bit weird to me when someone puts really, really big, thick lines around what they're willing to do during the work day and beyond and what they're not willing to do. I will tell you, by the way, that leaving last used to be like a badge of honor. I remember early when I worked for a consulting public services company. This goes back a long time, very first job I had after I graduated from college, and it was a badge of honor to be the last person at work. I mean, we would kind of compete a little bit to see who could outdo each other, who could get more work done, who could accomplish more, who could move up in the organization more quickly. I mean, that was that was that was super competitive, and you did it on purpose, and now we've kind of evolved to to a day where a lot of folks don't quite have that same work ethic, if you will. So what do we do about this? What do we do about this idea that the workplace has morphed, that expectations have morphed, and I think a lot of times leaders who are, you know, maybe. Beyond the younger generation, if you will. I hate using words like that. Are afraid to call it out. Are afraid to say anything, afraid they might make somebody mad, or might hurt their feelings, or, you know, it's not their fault, and we and we shouldn't blame them for it. I get all that stuff. We have to be careful about how we address these things, but I can tell you, we have really specific ways in our businesses to now focus on this type of behavior, and the first thing that we tell people, especially newer team members, is, look, it's not your fault if you didn't learn basic workplace etiquette and basic workplace decency, right? Not everybody had the same experiences. I grew up in a family where my my dad owned a business. I mean, he set an example, right? So we knew what it was, what it was like to work hard, to take care of a customer, to keep your commitments, to not be afraid, to, you know, to spend a little bit more time working, because you knew that that was going to pay dividends for yourself and your family over the course of the long term. And indeed, it did. So you had certain examples set for you, or you learn them early in the workplace, or you learn them in your education journey, I get that not everybody has those same experiences, and it's not their fault that they didn't have the same examples set for them that maybe I did. It's also not their fault that they came of age during this thing called covid, as we mentioned, and just for a whole variety of reasons, missed out on several years of what otherwise would have been great opportunities to interact with other people and learn what was appropriate and not appropriate, both in the classroom and in the workplace. So we don't blame them. We just say, Look, we recognize that you may not have had all of these examples set for you. Maybe you didn't learn all those things, but there are certain staples, certain basic standards of behavior in the workplace that we are going to expect from you and we are going to hold you to and so if, and this is what I did, by the way, with those four interns I told you about before the summer, and that's where really we got the idea the summer that those four interns were working in our business, I just said, look, if I see you guys doing things that is that are inappropriate in the workplace, whether it's how you manage your schedule, whether it's how you treat other people, whether it's how you the expectations you set for yourself, whether it's how you interact with other individuals in the office, what have you? If we see things we don't like, we're gonna mention them, and we're not going to criticize you. We don't want you to take it personally, but we want you to learn from it. And so if we see you doing something that we don't like or that we think is is out of the you know, outside the realm of basic workplace behavior, we're going to say so. And in that case, not only did I say it to one of them, but when I saw the behavior, I'd pull everybody into the conference room and say, Okay, so. And so just did this. We're all going to learn from it, right? No judgment. We're not going to point fingers at them. We're just going to learn from it. So number one, we have to be willing to let them know that their behavior, if it's substandard in terms of workplace etiquette, is going to be called out. Number two, when we see it, we discipline ourselves. Because a lot of people in the workplace are uncomfortable calling out behavior on the part of somebody else. Well, you have to get over that. You've got to be willing to look somebody the eye and tell them in the eye and tell them when they're doing something in the workplace that they need to do differently, and so we discipline ourselves to call out the behavior. We're not going to let it slide. We're not going to wait for a week and see if it corrects itself right there immediately, sit that person down, or, for that matter, a group of people down, and say, here's what we saw. Here's what is actually appropriate. And now that you know that we're going to expect you to act appropriately, lesson learned. And then next time you see that behavior, then you have to continue to call that individual out. Or if you see other behavior that isn't appropriate, you have to call them out until they get to a point where they're understanding what basic workplace decency is. I can tell you that good workplace etiquette, good decent behavior in the workplace is a difference maker in organizations. Right? When we treat each other well, when we treat customers well, when we hold ourselves to a higher standard, when we maintain good workplace etiquette, we're going to have a better company. We're going to treat customers better. We're going to treat suppliers better. We're going to treat each other better. We're going to perform better. And it is perfectly okay to expect your organization to perform better, and in fact, it's actually not okay not to expect your organization to perform better, because continuous improvement is what drives every single organization, or at least should drive every single organization on the planet. So that's what we're doing in our companies. That's what we're doing and recommending to other people to do is call out workplace behavior, poor workplace behavior, when you see it, and have the confidence to be able to mention to the individual what you want to see them correct, and then take the time to make sure that they follow through and correct that behavior. When you do that, you will have a stronger organization, as I mentioned, all of this is in a column that I wrote for Gardner Business Media, and we will link that up. That column up in the show notes. You can share it with anybody that you want, because there are lots and lots and lots of young people that need to hear this message. I love working with young people. It keeps me young. It keeps. Our organization's young, they bring fresh ideas, they bring fresh energy. They can do the impossible. But we also owe it to ourselves when we don't see the behaviors that we're looking for, to call it out and correct them. So with that, that's this episode of The TechEd podcast. We'll be back next week with another guest. This is one of those messages. Every once in a while, they come along where I feel so strongly about them that I want to take time and share them with the audience here at the TechEd podcast. So take what you heard, share it with others. You have young people working in your in your organization, would love for them to hear this particular episode as well. We're going to see everybody next week before we get to that. Mention the show notes, you will find those at TechEd podcast.com/decency podcast.com/decency, TechEd podcast.com/decency, D, E, C, E, N, C, y, you'll find those show notes there, including the link to the article that I mentioned. We do have the best show notes in the business, and we have the best social media presence as well. Wherever you consume your social media, you will find the TechEd podcast. So check us out on YouTube, you can find us on Facebook, you can find us on link. Us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Tiktok, wherever you go, you will find the TechEd podcast. When you do reach out, say hello, we would love to hear from you. We'll see you next week on the TechEd podcast. Until then, I am Matt Kirkner, thanks for being with us. You.