Many of you may not have heard the term “phubbing” or “being phubbed,” but you probably have done it to someone else, or experienced it first-hand.
In today’s workplace, we need new words to explain our interaction with technology. Phubbing is the combination of being snubbed by someone who is using their smartphone to ignore you. And it’s no surprise this social behaviour is affecting our workplace relationships.
Why should a HR professional who works in a unionized environment care about this concept of phubbing? Well, the main reason is it erodes trust, and whenever you erode trust in a unionized environment, you get more grievances.
More grievances make it harder to maintain positive labour relations in the workplace. Phubbing can very easily damage trust and employee engagement, and now research from Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business is shining a light on this issue.
How do supervisors destroy trust, by violating the psychological conditions that breed trust and lead to employee engagement? Here are the results of the research:
- 76 per cent of those surveyed showed a lack of trust in a supervisor who phubbed them
- 75 per cent showed decreases in psychological meaningfulness, psychological availability, and psychological safety with phubbing
All of this will reduce employee engagement. HR needs to be aware of phubbing and how it affects its organizational cultural. HR must take the lead role in organizations by understanding the vital importance of face-to-face relationships in the workplace and put measures and practices in place to decrease opportunities to phub and to increase opportunities to have meaningful conversations.
Read more at about phubbing here.
Discussion questions:
- What are five things HR can do to decrease the incidents of phubbing?
- What are five things HR can do to formally increase the incidents of meaningful conversations between supervisors and employees?