Toxic Workplace — Yaniv Preiss
toxic /ˈtɒksɪk/ adjective
- poisonous.
- very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way.
What is a toxic workplace
A workplace can be great in many aspects and terrible in others. After a while, we usually get used to it, whether it’s glorious or causes friction.
Taking a moment to reflect on your match with the workplace can be beneficial. It can be about the role, career path, professional excellence, growth and development, business results, the purpose of the company, the tasks, the relationships and many more.
Even a great product in a growing market with a perfect strategy can result in a negative work experience and negative results for the business, which are not related to toxicity, such as: not knowing the employees, lack of recognition of the employees, not giving feedback to employees, setting unrealistic goals, not setting expectations and not investing in professional growth.
A toxic workplace can be either consistently or temporarily toxic, or only “toxic” for you, meaning, friction in goals, values and behaviors.
The challenge is to figure out as objectively as possible if the workplace is really toxic, or whether you need to develop and grow, in case you have unrealistic expectations or immature idealism that makes you feel this way.
Dr. Donald Sull and Charles Sull studied over 1.3 million reviews of employees on Glassdoor and listed the top 5 attributes that drove employees to resign (note, a better salary is not among them):
- Disrespectful, lack of courtesy and dignity
- Noninclusive toward LGBTQ, disability, age, gender…
- Unethical and dishonest
- Cutthroat, backstabbing, ruthless competition
- Abusive, bullying, harassment, hostility, humiliation, threatening
The price of a toxic workplace
High employee turnover — employees resign from toxic workplaces 10 times more than resigning for better pay, a more stable company or a high-stress environment. The cost of replacing one employee can reach twice their annual salary.
Employees in such a toxic environment are less productive and collaborative — they are busy in self-preservation and competing with their colleagues, while doing the minimum to avoid getting into trouble.
Besides the expected absenteeism and burnout risk, toxicity also translates into physical illness — odds of suffering a major disease increase by over 30%.
Signs of a toxic workplace
Here are a few warning signs to look out for, in your behavior and your colleagues:
- You searched the internet for “toxic workplace”
- Not sleeping well at night, dreading work tomorrow
- Feeling stressed, scared, busy self-preserving and inventing excuses
- Work is usually stressed and arbitrary short deadlines are common
- Hiding and covering errors instead of sharing and learning from them
- Not asking questions, to not annoy or be seen as unprofessional or not knowledgeable
- Not asking for help, to not be seen as dependent or incompetent
- Avoiding certain unpleasant individuals
- Doing favors to others but no one is reciprocating when you need
- Punishments such as public humiliation
- Taking away responsibilities regardless of performance
- Voice raising, showing anger in public
- Using bad words toward people in the room
- Using bad words toward people not in the room, a.k.a gossip
- Not knowing why we do things, managers dictate
- Lack of transparency, rumors, people making up information they lack
- Blame game, e.g. in retrospective or post-mortems
- People take credit for others’ work and achievements
- Tasks start with finding a potential person who would be the cause of the future failure
- High turnover
- Favoritism, special treatment for specific individuals who can break the rules
- Absenteeism, people are sick a lot
- Positive toxicity, where people must act happy all the time
- Lack of inclusion, e.g. discriminating and openly joking about race, age, sexual orientation, religion, appearance, gender, etc.
- Not allowing and even punishing members for helping each other, no real team, rather individuals who optimize for their own work, performance is measured solely on an individual basis
- Micromanagement — telling what to do, when to do it, how to do it, then redoing your work and telling you you cannot be trusted
- Inconsistent and unpredictable behavior, unclear decision-making
- Everything is about the manager, e.g. “You make me look bad”
How to handle a toxic workplace
There are several options in case of continuous toxicity:
- Try to change the culture — unless part of the senior leadership, it is very likely to fail
- Quietly search for a new job and leave as soon as ready
- Give in for a while and keep drinking the poison until some conditions change, for example, gaining enough industry or work experience
- Ignore the toxic environment as much as possible and continue being you
As a manager in such an organization, you can create a more positive subculture for your group by implementing 1:1s, giving feedback, coaching and delegating. This will help increase both results and retention, but your manager might consider it a waste of time and “cuddling your direct reports”.
Toxic people
Alan Collins identified 6 types of toxic people:
- Energy drainer — puts you down for no reason, can’t be happy with others’ success
- Fake complimentor — lacks empathy, puts you in a difficult position
- Pessimist — talks down to you, cares about themselves, talks you out of your dreams
- Criticizer — doesn’t support your decisions, nothing is ever right
- Manipulator — tries to control everything, pretends to like you or others
- Victim — blames others for misfortune, seeks attention, excuses for failures
How to deal with them:
- Communicate your boundaries in 1:1, clarify specific unacceptable behavior and impact, including examples
- Practice self-care — more activities that bring joy, less ones that cause stress
- Reach out to trusted friends, family and colleagues, ask for advice or emotional support
- Document toxic behavior instances and times for accurate future escalations
- Limit contact with them
- Reach out to managers if the above is ineffective
