Google studied teamwork and determined a very important factor was 'to be nice'.

Overall, that makes common sense... I mean - isn't that what our mothers taught us? Isn't that consistent with 'playground and sandbox philosophies'? 

One key question is - how do we define nice? Does that word mean the same thing to you as it means to me?  

Another important question is - what do we do when somebody isn't it nice? For example, someone makes a not-nice communication error. What, if anything, do we do about that? 

A lot of other questions arise when we think about the importance of being nice at work:

• What happens to being nice when your company has the habit of struggling to be profitable?
• What, if any, lines should we draw around acting nice when you are reacting to people who haven’t been nice?
• How do we act nice when customers refuse to pay our bills?
• How much slack do we cut for people who, from time to time, fail to be nice?
• How do you measure niceness when recruiting new employees?