An honest day's work
From little fibs to huge whoppers, lying in the workplace is pervasive. What should HR do about it?“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get your email”… “That report? Almost done!”… “What a great haircut!”
Let’s be honest: most of us have taken liberties with the truth during the course of our careers, even if the lies in question – like the examples above – have seemed harmless. After all, who hasn’t told the occasional porkie to get out of trouble or to avoid hurting a colleague’s feelings?
Bending the truth at work is an age-old tradition and one that’s attracted plenty of interest from scientists and business experts over the years – most recently, from Carol Kinsey Goman, a leading body language expert and author of The Truth About Lies in the Workplace: How to Spot Liars and What to Do about Them.
According to Goman, the instinct to lie is part of our make-up: “They say there was an evolutionary advantage to being a good liar… it wasn’t just survival of the fittest, it was survival of the trickiest.”
But while we lie in all areas of life, there’s evidence to suggest we’re most untruthful at work. In one study, University of Oxford researchers called people at home and asked them to flip a coin, telling them that if it landed tails up they’d receive a financial reward. Despite this, more than half the respondents admitted the coin had landed heads up.
In a lab setting, on the other hand, 75 per cent claimed it had landed tails up. From this, lead researcher Johannes Abeler infers that people are more willing to lie at work than at home, where they have a stronger sense of self-identity.
The cost of lying
Goman’s own research, which involved interviewing 547 people, certainly confirms that lying in the workplace is widespread: 53 per cent admit to not telling the truth at one time or another. And although many of the lies may be trivial, the impact of all this dishonesty cannot be underestimated. Aside from the damage to the personal reputation of the liar should they get caught out, the financial fallout can be significant – not least for HR.
“If you hire a bad hire because they fooled you in the interview, the cost of replacement can be really high,” says Goman. “In the US, we have it anywhere between $7,000 and $40,000, and that’s not counting the most senior execs.”
Then there is the impact on the wider business. “The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners says [dishonesty at work leads to] an annual global loss of $3.5 trillion,” says Goman. “Trust is the glue for collaboration: the minute trust is destroyed… there goes collaboration, there goes innovation, there goes productivity and eventually there go dollars. It’s hard to quantify because it’s not as overt as theft, or fraud on an expense account, but certainly anyone who works in an organisation realises when distrust damages core relationships, it is immensely expensive.”
According to Goman, there are two main kinds of lies: self-serving – “the kind that [help us] cover mistakes, get out of what we don’t want to do, avoid punishment, look better” – and other-serving, which protect other people’s feelings. While even the latter can have a negative impact (for example, underplaying someone’s failings during a performance review), many of these lies are simply the oil that greases the wheels of daily interaction.
David Shulman, associate professor at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, and author of From Hire to Liar: the Role of Deception in the Workplace, agrees. “Most workplace lies aren’t actually anti-business,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek last year. “They’re really in the interest of getting the job done.”
But some lies are damaging. Goman’s research shows the most insidious lies vary in line with the pecking order. “With senior leaders, the lies that drive people crazy are the lies of omission… simply not talking about the elephant in the room or sugar-coating the truth. With direct supervisors, the most annoying lies are when the supervisor takes credit for the entire team and/or places blame on the team. With colleagues, there is a lot of back-stabbing.”
The most destructive lies are those that have one of two outcomes, says Goman: they damage someone’s reputation or they negatively affect the way the team, department or organisation is performing. “And that’s like having termites in the building: they’ll eat at the foundation and bring down the entire house.”
A culture of honesty
So what can be done to create a workplace culture where this kind of lying is the rarity not the norm? The first step, says Goman, is to lead by example. “If [employees] see a lot of deceptive behaviours in their senior leadership team, they’re going to think, rightfully so, ‘that’s the way we do business here’ and they will model those behaviours.”
In HR, this is all the more important when managing sensitive situations – such as a merger – where complete honesty with the wider workforce is simply not an option. “Find a way to tell the truth by saying upfront, ‘There are things going on with this merger that we’re not going to be able to talk about, until they’re made public, for a variety of reasons’,” advises Goman.
“Set the stage for it as much as possible and, if you do have to tell a falsehood, think carefully about how you’re going to explain it when it’s exposed, because you’re going to now have to win back the trust of people who know you lied to them.”
The other thing HR can do is to avoid devising policies that actively encourage dishonest behaviour. “If you tell people they can’t have any discretionary time off, that they have to be sick, then if something important comes up – a child has a recital – then they’ll call in and say they’re sick. If you create policies that are so obviously out of step with what’s happening, you’ll create liars out of honest people.”
How lying is dealt with when it does occur is also crucial, and while in theory dishonest employees are accountable to their line managers, in reality the responsibility often falls into HR’s lap.
Unfortunately, there is no simple formula for dealing with a liar, says Goman: it depends on who the liar is, their standing within the organisation, the impact of their dishonesty and what you hope to achieve. While confronting them head on might be tempting, this approach might not suit every situation.
Goman gives the example of a woman who reported a colleague for spreading rumours that she was sleeping with the boss. She expected the colleague to be carpeted; instead, the boss called them both in and asked them to sort out their differences. “Years later, she said, ‘Now I understand he was giving this person a way out. He didn’t want to fire him, or berate him publicly, but the guy stopped lying, because in an indirect way he was telling him he knew.”
So is honesty always the best policy? Psychologist Robert Feldman, author of The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships, believes so. “Those little white lies do matter… Cumulatively, they create an environment of deception that enhances the probability of larger lies being committed.”
Goman, however, takes a different view of what she calls ‘social lies’. “If someone says, ‘How are you?’ at work, they don’t want to know about my headache or that I really didn’t get enough sleep… They want me to say, ‘Oh, I’m doing great, how are you?’ It could be a big lie, but if I go into the other, I’m going to depress my colleagues; it just isn’t helpful. Those kinds of lies permeate the workplace and those are the ones we ought to be grateful for.”
How to spot a liar
According to Goman, 81 per cent of people lie in job interviews. If you’re in charge of hiring, here’s how to tell if someone’s lying to you:
• Get straight answers. Most people prefer not to lie, and will avoid it by choosing their words carefully. “If you ask me if I’ve ever taken drugs, I may say, ‘I don’t do drugs’, which doesn’t answer the question,” says Goman.
• Look for stress signals. Lying causes stress. Our heart rate, blood pressure and respiration rate increase, and we may exhibit certain behaviours. For example, we may rub our hands, sweat or blush, and our voice may get higher. But don’t jump to conclusions. “Stress and deception clues look alike,” warns Goman.
• Establish a truth baseline. To avoid confusing a nervous job candidate with a dishonest one, it’s important to know how someone behaves when they’re not lying. To find out, ask a few questions about things they have no reason to lie about: How long have they lived here? What are their interests? Then notice how much they gesture, how relaxed or tense their face is, how much eye contact they give you, how fast they’re breathing. If these body language clues change at any point, they may be lying.
• Don’t obsess about eye contact. It’s a myth that liars can’t look you in the eye. “Some liars actually over-extend eye contact, because they know the myth, too,” says Goman.
• Ask them straight up. If a candidate seems stressed – for example when talking about their last job – and you suspect they may be lying, call them on it. Ask: “Is there any reason you should be upset by talking about your last place of employment?”
• Beware your own biases. Subconsciously, we tend to think attractive people are more honest. Plus we instinctively trust people like us: from the same social class or ethnic background, for example. “We have to fight against that,” says Goman.
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