Push Comes to Shove

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ON THE AGENDA

The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda

Alison Kadlec
Feb 1, 2012

This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.

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You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform

Allison Rizzolo
Jan 24, 2012

Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.

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Press Releases

Push Comes to Shove:
Passengers and Travel Workers Call Rudeness a Real Problem

A Public Agenda Holiday Feature on Travel Civility

Both admit to being part of the problem; for the travel industry as well as travelers, there are lessons to be learned

Are you dreading the snarl, shout and shove of holiday travel? You aren’t alone. New research points to rudeness and bad behavior as major sources of stress and aggravation for both passengers and transportation workers. As Americans take to the air and the road, chances are that rude and disrespectful behavior will be pumping up tension and tempers this holiday season. An informal canvass of travel industry workers conducted by the nonpartisan opinion organization Public Agenda, with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, and a survey of passengers conducted by the online travel site Travelocity together suggest that stressful travel conditions, a general decline in values and parents who don’t control their children are sore spots for Americans on the move.

65% of passengers say rudeness is a serious problem in travel these days, and 52% of travelers say rudeness is a major cause of stress. 54% of travel employees say passenger rudeness as a top cause of their on-the-job stress and tension.
Nearly half (49%) of travel workers say they have personally seen a situation where disrespectful behavior threatened to escalate into physical confrontation. And an additional 19% say disrespect had led to a situation actually getting physical.
62% of travel personnel say they sometimes or often see their fellow workers being rude, and another 50% admit that they have lost patience and been impolite to passengers themselves. But when this happens, 56% say it is typically because employees were provoked and treated badly by passengers. While most passengers give travel personnel high marks for overall courtesy, 67% say that when they have a run-in with rude travel employees, they are likely to be rude in return.
Nevertheless, 62% of transportation employees say rude and disrespectful behavior is “mostly limited to a few people,” and 45% say they are often treated with courtesy and respect.

According to Public Agenda President Ruth Wooden, “Incivility is not just a minor daily irritant. In a national study Public Agenda conducted in 2002,^* we found that 79% of Americans say lack of respect and courtesy is a serious problem. And where do we see some of the worst behavior in everyday life? Where do we see good people go bad? Too often we see it - or cause it ourselves - when we travel. Bad manners and rude behavior can make modern travel a trying and sometimes unpleasant experience.”

“It’s important to keep in mind that 35% of the travelers surveyed said they don’t find rudeness to be a serious problem,” says Amy Ziff, Editor-at-Large at Travelocity. “However as a travel company, we think this is a great opportunity for people to learn from their behavior and the behavior of others. The vast majority of travelers say they shrug rude encounters off quickly, but a simple ‘excuse me’ or a smile can also go a long way.”

Crowds, Long Lines, Unruly Children

Both travel workers and passengers see two trends in travel incivility – a general loss of respect and the practical effects of working and traveling under tough conditions.

Passengers (52%) and travel workers (69%) say a decline in values and morality leads people to be less polite and respectful, and 63% of passengers and 72% of travel workers say the problem is caused by too many parents “failing to teach respect to their kids.”

Travel conditions, too, are taking their toll. About 7 in 10 (69%) travel workers cite “stress due to lack of adequate staff and resources” as a major source of rudeness, and most (66%) acknowledge that crowds and long lines lead people to lose their cool. 51% of travel workers say that things are so hectic and people so rushed that they forget to be polite.

Parents may not want to hear this, but topping passengers’ list of rude behaviors is “uncontrolled children” (80%). 80% also point to passengers who kick the back of the seat in front, followed by swearing (67%), loud talking (66%) and littering (55%).

Travelers’ Opinions Count

The Public Agenda and Travelocity research points to consequences for rude behavior that go beyond hot words and high blood pressure. Of the passengers responding to Travelocity, 50% say that they have stopped doing business with a carrier where they have encountered rude personnel. 36% say they have complained to management and 37% say they have written a letter. 72% say they have told their story to friends.

Although a serious issue for the travel industry, fewer than half (46%) of travel employees responding to Public Agenda report that they have received training in how to deal with rude or disrespectful passengers. Of those who have received special training, only 9% call it very effective; 43% say it has been somewhat effective, and 45% say it has either been not too effective or not effective at all.

It’s Contagious

According to Ruth Wooden, “From this informal research, we see that passengers and travel workers are very aware that courtesy and manners are a two-way street. Passengers expect, appreciate and generally receive courteous treatment. But when treated badly, they are likely to respond in kind by being rude themselves. And they are also likely to complain, tell their friends and avoid the offending carrier.

While travel workers often feel provoked by rude and unreasonable passengers, nearly half of travel workers say they sometimes see other employees being disrespectful to passengers and 16% say they see this often. It is also clear that rudeness is contagious. In Aggravating Circumstances we found that nearly 7 in 10 Americans say they are less likely to be nice when they have to deal with someone who is rude and impolite. But far more (92%) said that respect and courtesy are contagious too; the more people engage in civil behavior, the more it flourishes. In the end, this may make travel a more civil, less dehumanizing experience for all of us.”

*This new research is based on the landmark public opinion study Aggravating Circumstances: A Status Report on Rudeness in America. The 2002 report on Americans’ views on rudeness and civility was conducted by Public Agenda with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts.

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