Based solely on tone, an employee could be forgiven for wondering if their organization considers setting fire to the office less serious than submitting a form after a deadline. Policy-writing expert and author Lewis Eisen examines this absurd reality: Many laws governing serious crimes use simple, respectful present-tense statements, yet many corporate policies are worded more harshly, complete with subtle frustration that broadcasts noncompliance and dysfunction to everyone who reads them. A shift in tone can keep your efforts at building positive relationships and fostering a cooperative workplace from being quietly undermined by outdated policy wording.
Many organizations today claim that “respect for others” is one of their core values. The intention is admirable.
Attend a compliance and ethics essentials workshop, and you’ll repeatedly hear speakers emphasize the need to focus on the human side of GRC:
- Be respectful to others at the organization.
- Capture people’s hearts as well as minds.
- Model the conduct we want to see.
- Strive to create a culture of compliance.
The list goes on.
These are excellent goals, to be sure, and yet as you read through many organizations’ handbooks, you’ll see a disconnect: The policies and directives often sound like they were written by angry parents scolding naughty children.
Leaving aside the substance of a rule — I never question the decision itself or the strategy behind it — these statements need to be worded respectfully if they are actually going to capture hearts, model conduct and move the organization in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the traditional approach to writing policies does exactly the opposite. Authoritarian wording tends to generate resistance rather than cooperation.
Drawbacks to the traditional approach
Because it’s rooted in status, hierarchy and outdated attitudes, traditional policy wording is, well, bossy. Instead of addressing readers as adults and colleagues, it positions them as underlings who will inevitably run amok unless tightly controlled.
Let’s take a simple comparison. (Statement A was extracted from a real finance policy, by the way):
A. Employees must submit requests for reimbursement of travel expenses no later than 14 days after the trip. Any request not submitted within that time may be refused.
Statement B has been reworded:
B. Travel expenses are eligible for reimbursement only when submitted within 14 days after the trip.
Both rules are strict: We face a deadline of 14 days after a trip to submit our receipts. But when you read it closely, Statement A also includes a subtle, though clearly perceptible, undertone of frustration. It communicates this subtext:
- Noncompliance is widespread.
- People in the finance office are frustrated.
- They want everyone to know it.
Statement B, in contrast, is not laden with emotion. The strict requirement is presented in a helpful manner rather than a reproachful one.
We can all sympathize with those in the office who wrote Statement A. When people don’t follow the rules, we can become frustrated. But when that frustration bleeds into policy wording, it starts to do institutional damage.
Its presence broadcasts both the noncompliance and the personal dynamics around it to everyone, including new hires. Worse still, if the organization publishes its policies on the web for the sake of transparency, the entire world will learn about that dysfunction.
Do we really want to air that dirty laundry for all to see?
The origin of heavy-handed language
I’ll admit it: For over 30 years, I was the author of harsh-sounding policies. I was part of the problem because that’s what I was taught to do. But why? Where does that heavy-handed tone really come from?
Take a moment and think back to the first rules you ever encountered. One was probably telling you to eat your vegetables, not to make a mess and maybe even something about not hitting your sister. These were all rules issued by our parents and our teachers.
What we took away from those interactions was an incorrect assumption that rules about behavior are supposed to sound bossy. After all, the bossiness emphasizes the power hierarchy: “I am telling you what to do, and it’s not open to discussion.”
As children, though, we were seeing only part of the picture. What our parents and teachers were modeling for us was their understanding of how caretakers make rules for children. That skill is different from how adults make rules for other adults.
From there, if things had gone right, most of us would have corrected that mistaken assumption when we arrived in the business world. So why didn’t that happen?
In many industries, talking respectfully to one’s employees is only a relatively recent phenomenon. As recently as a couple of decades ago, it was not uncommon to hear bosses screaming at their subordinates, yelling, cursing and hurling abuse, with employees having no choice but to endure it in silence. That dynamic was an accepted part of the workplace. Bosses spoke like that and they wrote like that, and it was the norm.
Today, we live in a different world. Good leaders don’t speak to their staff by yelling orders. But a lot of them still write that way. The wording of written policies has stayed static, so now it is completely out of step with the workplace changes of the past few decades.
Most adults do not respond well to dictatorial commands. They hear that heavy-handed tone as disrespect and instinctively tend to resist. Old-style policy wording is a serious impediment to an optimally functioning workplace.
The power of the present tense
The goal, then, is to change the dynamic of rule statements from combative to collaborative, while still preserving the strictness of the requirement.
A number of drafting techniques can help with that shift, but one of the easiest is simply to start using the present tense. Take these examples:
- The office is open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Incident reports are due 48 hours after the incident.
- Guests are eligible to enter work zones when accompanied by an employee.
The present tense tells us what is. It provides the decision without emotion, condescension or threat. It’s clear, succinct and respectful.
Policy writers could learn a lesson or two from the world of legislation and how it handles the strictest rules on the books, criminal laws.
Here’s the prohibition on arson in South Dakota:
“(Sec 22-33-9.1) Any person who starts a fire or causes an explosion … is guilty of first degree arson. First degree arson is a Class 2 felony.”
Look at that! It’s drafted totally in the present tense. Let’s jump over to Texas:
“(Sec 20.02) A person commits an offense if he intentionally or knowingly restrains another person.”
A review I conducted a few years ago of penal codes across all 50 states reveals that 80% of them use some variation of the present tense. Although the codes of 10 states have stuck with the quaint public-crier approach (Whoever shall set a barn ablaze …), these are the exception, not the rule.
Note that some of the states in the 80% technically use a combination: The prohibited act is expressed in the present tense, while the penalty is framed in the future. That sequencing reflects the legal reality of imposing punishment only after guilt has been firmly established, but the activity itself is described in the present tense.
The US is not unique in this respect; other jurisdictions rely on the present tense almost exclusively, including Canada, the UK, New Zealand and most of Australia. Even many non-English-speaking nations use the present tense as a matter of course: France, Germany and Spain among them.
Iceland is an interesting case. The criminal statutes are written in the present tense in Icelandic, but the official English translations are rendered using “shall.” That shift actually betrays the translator’s bias, instinctively reaching for what they assumed sounded more “legal” in English even though it distorts the original tone.
The bottom line is that criminal prohibitions are not loose recommendations. They’re serious laws dealing with arson, unlawful restraint and robbery, yet they are most often enacted with simple, declarative present-tense statements, with no finger wagging, no we-know-best attitude, and no parent–child dynamic.
An absurd situation
What I have outlined here is the bizarre reality: The strictest laws for the most heinous crimes in the country are worded more respectfully than many organizations’ corporate policies.
Ponder that for a moment. Based solely on the rule’s tone, an employee could be forgiven for wondering if their organization considers setting fire to the office to be a less serious offense than submitting a form after the deadline!
Too often, we speak more respectfully to criminals than we do to our own colleagues. That’s just plain wrong.
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Competing schools of thought
“But wait!” you might object. “In my office, there are people who are unwilling to follow the policies.”
True, there will always be people who look for ways to get around the rules. In the absence of an explicit rule banning fireworks inside the office, for example, some rogue individual might set off a starburst and claim not to know that it was prohibited.
But so what? There are people who break penal codes, too. Using fear as a guide for policy wording is letting the tail wag the dog. Do we want to aim our policy statements at the rogues or do we want to address the vast majority of people who want to follow the rules?
Nor is contract law a good template. When I was in law school, I was taught that policies should be modeled on the language of contracts. That’s not true. Contracts are adversarial by nature. They’re defensive in construct, meant to set out obligations of each side and designed to protect the parties. They have no role in shaping corporate culture.
Policies, in contrast, should not be adversarial by design. Clearly, if your goal is to get buy-in and engagement, the collaborative route is a better way to go.
Another misleading model is general government legislation. Obviously, many of the same governments that use present-tense forms in their penal codes still resort to old-fashioned dictatorial language in other statutes. But all that tells us is that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. There’s no reason that all the legislation produced by governments couldn’t follow the example set by the penal codes.
It is also true that some standards organizations like ISO, and even the DOJ sentencing guidelines, are particularly traditional and still resort to old-fashioned “shall” statements. That choice is merely habit, not necessity, because there’s always a way to reword a mandatory requirement without relying on must or shall. The relationship between buy-in, engagement and word choice is simply not on the radar of those organizations — at least, not yet.
Policies as strategic decisions
Engaging policies are worded to invite cooperation rather than demand obedience.
Done well, policies are not about keeping people in line; instead, they are about bringing clarity to strategic decisions and targets. Whatever the area — human resources, operations, training, finance, IM/IT or security — rules are about helping people do the right thing.
Instead of saying, “Employees must X,” a well-written policy says, “The organization has decided Y.” It’s a shift from being dictatorial to being informative, from commanding to advising. Statements like “Employees must have three years’ experience to apply for the manager’s position” become “Employees qualify for the manager’s position once they have three years’ experience.”
Respectfully worded policies invite people to rally behind them. They support and promote them. They own them.
You may be so used to a condescending tone of voice in policies and other rules that you don’t give it a second thought. But that reaction is becoming more idiosyncratic than standard.
One generation of workers will absolutely not tolerate being spoken to disrespectfully: millennials. More than any previous generation, they want to feel respected in the workplace.
A quick read through a company’s policies will tell you everything you need to know about management’s attitude toward command-and-control orders vs. empowering employees. Underlying subtext like “we don’t really trust you” can rise quickly to the surface when no one is paying attention.
Moving forward
So why is harsh language still so common?
It’s not generally a deliberate decision to sound combative when communicating with employees. It’s simply that the issue is not on the radar for most organizations. They review their policy wording through the lens of accuracy, currency, plain language and perhaps gender-neutrality, but they often overlook tone entirely. It’s not just a matter of avoiding legalese or writing in plain language. It involves a whole shift in perspective: using wording that encourages compliance, fosters collaboration and conveys respect.
There is no single wording fix that will instantly transform a policy into a respectful, collaborative instrument. But every sentence reworded in the present tense, every “you” replaced with “we” and every “must” and “shall” refashioned into a clear, informative statement all help move the bar in the right direction. These changes affect how people experience policy — how the rules are heard, interpreted and applied.
The good news is that you don’t have to rewrite everything at once. You just have to start. You’ll notice an improvement in reaction and engagement from your colleagues as early as the consultation stage.
It’s hard for employees to believe that leaders truly care about them when the policies make it clear that the real goal is no-questions-asked obedience. If you’re feeling discouraged by low compliance, cast a critical eye on your policy language. A respectful tone is one of the most effective tools for increasing engagement.
The post Why Are Your Policies Yelling at Me? It’s Time to Rethink Tone in Rules. appeared first on Corporate Compliance Insights.
