15th June 2017
Are you working in a positive working environment? You should be, because you spend over 20% of your entire life at work. 39 hours a week, 50 weeks a year are spent in the workplace for most people, so spending it in a toxic environment is neither fun or healthy. Some red flags are obvious – tyrannical bosses, oppressive deadlines and no opportunity to voice your grievances. Others exist in more subtle places, like policies and business culture.
1. A Negative Culture
Negativity is like a virus in isolated office environments. A study by Lund University showed that rude and inconsiderate behaviour can be contagious. This contagion can quickly spread so that negativity is commonplace and a toxic culture is created without anyone realising. And this can have a serious impact on your bottom line. At least one Harvard study found toxic behaviours like engaging negative gossip ends up hurting the business’s bottom line.
2. Bad Communication
Another sign of a dysfunctional, toxic workplace is the persistence of communication problems between stakeholders and departments.
Problems can be demonstrated by a lack of communication, whereby employees find out about decisions after they have been implemented. Other variations of dysfunctional communication patterns include indirect communication, withholding information and giving misleading information.
Without effective communication, working together to accomplish your business’s goals is practically impossible. Studies performed on any collective group, from schools of fish to premier football teams identify communication as the number one key to success.
3. Stagnating Career Progression
When you aren’t clear on how your performance will be measured, you’re already set up to fail. This can occur when you start a new job in a business that lacks effective onboarding, but more often when you move within your own company, if there is no performance measurement policy, or training plan, you aren’t going to have a good time. No one turns up to work to do a bad job, but to do the best job you need to have the frameworks and guidance to understand how to do a good job.
4. One Rule For You, Another For Them
If your Staff Handbook outlines policies, such as internet usage, harassment or confidentially, and they aren’t supported universally, your HR department is contributing to an toxic environment. Business behavioural policies should be supported and respected universally by all members of staff. No one should be exempt from policies that are supposed to apply to everyone. And if your HR department says “that’s just the way it is”, you’re in a toxic workplace.
When a company’s policies and procedures are not followed, chaos, inconsistency and poor quality follow. Customers, vendors and employees wind up hating having to deal with the company and its staff.
5. Health Of Your Teams
Truly toxic workplaces lead to burnout, fatigue, and sickness. If you and your colleagues are dropping like flies, calling in sick and leaving the rest of the team to pick up the slack, your business needs to make a change. Workplace sickness is a warning sign to watch out for, and can indicate a culture of chronic overwork.
High levels of stress are demonstrably bad for the body, leading to digestive problems, immune deficiencies, increased blood pressure than can lead to heart conditions or even a stroke. Over the long term, chronic stress will wreck havoc on your staff, leading to illness, crashing morale and ever-worsening productivity.
Unlike toxic employees, shaking off a toxic work environment needs much more investment. Not only do you need to identify your root causes, you need to change minds, update policies and change the culture and feel of your business. You need to make your employees want to come to work and do the best work possible. And the people best positioned to start the change is your HR department. An HR audit and policy review is the first step towards a happier and healthier working environment and a culture of supportive proactivity.
