In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the Marketplace Morning Report reported on political polarization in the United States, particularly how businesses are intensifying or softening political divisions. As part of this “Office Politics” series, we’ve heard about tools to help employees with divergent viewpoints have civil conversations.

A recent survey showed that after the June 27 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the number of uncivil acts in workplaces in the United States pink from 171 million per day to just over 200 million per day.

So what does this actually look like and how can you fix it? Sara Taylor is President of DeepSEE Consulting, specializing in diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. She discussed workplace incivility with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: So this is not the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate in September, but the Trump-Biden debate at the end of June, where Biden looked fragile. A survey was carried out among workplaces following the debate. What did he find?

Sarah Taylor: It has been found that people actually experience incivility at a significant level. We’ve seen that in society as a whole, 58% of Americans think society is uncivil. And an explosion of 201 million acts of incivility reported in the workplace per day, just since this debate.

Brancaccio: If you think about the size of the U.S. workforce, that means either some people see tons a day or every person who works sees one and a quarter. This is an extraordinary figure.

Taylor: Yes, absolutely.

David Brancaccio: My God. It’s what ? What are acts of incivility? People make fun of each other, I guess?

Taylor: Well, and this is where I think people can really get confused. We think of incivility almost as if it’s a light switch that we can turn on and off. We are civil. We are not civil. And in reality, what we learn from the field of cultural competence is that it’s more nuanced than that and that we all operate from a developmental stage of how effective we are in our interactions with others.

Brancaccio: In other words, you are saying that it could be improved. It is not a law of physics that human beings treat each other this way.

Taylor: Yes, we tend to blame the other side. Almost all of us perceive ourselves to be more respectful than we actually are. So the very first step is to stop looking at the other side for change and start looking at ourselves. How can we move the conversation forward, to be more effective, more civil and less polarized?

Brancaccio: If a candidate loses on Election Day, but attempts to seize power through other means, some people in the workplace will find this deeply offensive. It will be a challenge for both parties to try to get into listening mode and try to find common ground.

Taylor: Among the thousands of groups and organizations we have worked with, we have never seen a group or organization more developed than its leaders. Not that our leaders are somehow better, smarter, more wonderful. But our leaders set the bar and create the culture necessary for what will trickle down to their organizations.