Incivility Is Becoming a Security Issue for CSOs

For years, security leaders have monitored traditional threat indicators, including crime statistics, access-control breaches, insider risk, and workplace violence trends. But a quieter, more corrosive threat has been spreading inside our organizations and public environments: incivility.

This is the premise of a recent thought-leadership paper from the Security Executive Council, which highlights the troubling rise of incivility and negative behavioral trends in America. What was once dismissed as simple rudeness or an HR issue has crossed into the realm of security, safety, and enterprise risk. National data show that 58% of U.S. workers believe society has become fundamentally uncivil. From an enterprise perspective, Americans experience an estimated 200 million acts of incivility every day, which translates into nearly $2 billion in lost productivity due to distraction, absenteeism, stress, and disengagement.

These aren’t cultural anecdotes. These are risk metrics.

The modern workplace is increasingly strained by disrespectful interactions from customers, colleagues, and, at times, managers. More concerning, roughly 17% of Americans admit to behaving uncivilly toward a business in the past year. This behavior is no longer rare; it is becoming normalized.

Security professionals understand escalation. Disrespect rarely stays static. It can evolve into harassment, intimidation, and, in some cases, violence. Each act of incivility represents a micro-risk—an ignition point in workplaces already burdened by stress, labor shortages, and social volatility.

The organizational consequences are significant. Workers who endure sustained incivility are more than twice as likely to leave their jobs within a year, compounding recruitment and retention challenges. Two-thirds of employees report that incivility reduces their productivity, and nearly 60% report that it damages morale.

And they increasingly look to leadership for solutions. More than 70% of employees believe their manager could have done more to prevent or address incivility, yet only one in four thinks their organization is effective at curbing it. That leadership gap is precisely where the modern CSO can, and must, step in.

Today’s risk environment is no longer defined solely by external actors or classic insider threats. It is shaped by real-time human behavior: frustration, anger, defiance, diminished coping skills, and broader social breakdown. The security executive’s role now extends into behavioral climate management—not as culture police, but as strategic stabilizers responsible for maintaining safe, predictable environments.

This pattern is visible far beyond the corporate office. Retailers nationwide report sharp increases in theft, organized retail crime, and customer aggression, much of it accompanied by violence. In one major survey, the number of retailers citing violence as a top concern rose more than 70% in a single year. Nearly 45% have reduced store hours because of crime, and more than a quarter have closed locations for safety reasons.

When organizations withdraw from communities out of fear, we move beyond loss prevention and enter a resilience and continuity crisis.

Employees feel this strain acutely. More than half say their employer does not take enough action to keep them safe. While the percentage who fear being harmed by a coworker remains relatively low, it is rising—and even a slight increase is a warning signal for organizational stability.

What concerns me most is the readiness gap. Despite years of high-profile incidents, 65% of companies still lack a formal workplace domestic-violence prevention policy. In a recent HR survey, 55% of professionals didn’t know whether their organization had a workplace violence prevention program.

Imagine half of leadership not knowing whether the company has a fire evacuation plan.

Some organizations are responding—piloting body-worn cameras for frontline staff, expanding physical security, deploying analytics, and tightening access control. These steps matter, but many are reactive. True risk reduction will require behavioral intelligence: identifying early warning signs, tracking patterns of hostility, and intervening before conflict becomes a crisis.

The next evolution of security leadership will not be driven solely by better hardware or more intelligent AI. It will be defined by how effectively we understand, measure, and influence human behavior.

Civility is no longer a soft concept. It is a hard control.

Uncivil environments damage productivity, accelerate turnover, increase incidents, and erode brand trust. When leadership fails to address it, employees disengage and customers distance themselves. Culture erosion becomes a security risk.

For CSOs and risk executives, the implication is clear: we must expand our definition of protection. We are no longer defending only buildings, people, and data. We are now responsible for the behavioral integrity of the environments where our people work.

The future of our profession will be judged not just by how well we stop attacks, but by how successfully we prevent hostility, de-escalate conflict, and build cultures where respect is the norm—not the exception.

And that responsibility now sits squarely with us.