The Impact of Toxic Workplace Culture
Toxic Culture and The Great Resignation, and What to Do About It
Over the course of my career, I’ve done hundreds of informational interviews with prospective job seekers. While many of the questions inevitably focus on learning more about the role and the interview process, inevitably during the conversation, questions about the company culture and a conversation around what the company culture is like arise.
Intuitively, this makes sense - We spend a lot of our lives at work. Nobody wants to work for a company that has a crappy culture, and nobody wants to work with people who are jerks. Most companies understand that job seekers care about company culture and even devote sections on their website or memos about who they are and what they stand for to illustrate what their company is like to attract candidates. There’s a whole industry built around helping companies attract top talent through culture.
But despite these efforts, there are a lot of company cultures out there that are still pretty toxic, and it’s costing companies attrition, and costing employees (and by an extension) societies and communities lives.
In their article Toxic Culture is Driving The Great Resignation, Donald and Charles Sull shared some of their conclusions from examining data to better understand the impact that company culture has on the Great Resignation. The question they were interested in was what’s driving people to leave their companies. Through a combination of their own analysis of 600 companies, looking at public data and analyzing millions of Glassdoor reviews, the Sull’s came to an unsurprisingly conclusion - having a toxic culture is what they believe is driving the great resignation.
Here is what they had to say:
A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover. Our analysis found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior. For now, the important point is that a toxic culture is the biggest factor pushing employees out the door during the Great Resignation.
Their findings also list that other drivers of predictors of why people leave as
Job insecurity and reorganization (3.5)
High levels of innovation (3.2)
Failure to recognize employee performance (2.9)
Poor response to COVID-19 (1.8)
Source: Sloan Management Review, January 2022
To be sure, the Great Resignation seems to be about a lot of things and can be very different for each individual. But it’s not hard to see on the surface why this makes sense Toxic cultures were a problem before the Great Resignation and a global pandemic, and throw in the challenges of the weight of the world over the past two years and it’s not hard to see why working in a toxic culture would drive someone to leave.
But if we agree that toxic workplace cultures are what’s behind the negative reviews on Glassdoor and why people say they are leaving, what actually contributes to a toxic culture that causes people to want to leave?
The Sull’s offer what they call the “toxic 5” or five traits of a toxic culture which they Shared on the Dare to Lead Podcast. These five traits are:
Failure to promote diversity, equity and inclusion
Workers feeling disrespected
Unethical behavior
Cutthroat environment
Abusive Managers
On the surface, the findings around why people are leaving and the traits of a toxic workplace culture are reasonable and relatable. But what spoke to me about their research were the five traits of a toxic culture are things that when we witness or experience them, get imprinted in our eyes and minds and we can’t unsee them once the day is over. They spill into our non-work lives. Sure, we all have things about our workplace that annoy or frustrate us but that we can let go of once the day is over. However, if you have an abusive manager, it’s going to be hard to not think about that when your day is over.
Earlier in my career, I was brought into a situation by one of my direct reports about unethical behavior, and I literally could not think about anything else until the issue was resolved (fortunately it was, and in a proper way) The toxic traits that drive people to leave are bad, but what makes them so toxic (and arguably what causes people to leave) is that they cut at our humanity so much that we can’t tune them out and they hinder our health to the point where we feel we have no choice but to leave.
But what got me interested in this piece comes light when you consider some of the other work that the two of them have done. In a previous article, the Sull’s analyzed the company culture of Fortune 500 companies by looking at their “company values” of Fortune 500 companies (aka “what they said” and then evaluated how effective they were against those values (aka what they did) by analyzing 1.2M Glassdoor reviews.
Not shockingly, based on their research, there was no correlation between the cultural values that a company said they had in their published statements, and how well the company lived up to those values based on employee feedback.
The “Say-Do” Gap
Each and every day, well-intentioned companies strive to live up to the values of their corporate culture, and many fall short.
All companies struggle with what is known as the “Say-Do Gap.” The 'say do gap' refers to the discrepancy between what we say and what we actually do in reality. There are examples of these everywhere.
The companies that say they value Diversity, Equity and Inclusion but who don’t pay or promote people in equitable and inclusive ways. Companies that say they stand for marginalized groups of people, but then fund lawmakers who write bills and laws that demonize them. The companies that claim their company is highly collaborative but who continue to reward top performers who don’t work well with others or demonstrate cutthroat and individualistic behaviors.
And the companies that said they valued employee safety, but want to bring back people to the office without clear safety protocols as a result of COVID-19.
When new employees walk into a company after they’ve been told things that they believe to be true, but then what actually happens is something entirely different, they notice it. Over time, that adds up. But when these behaviors start to get rewarded and start to get into the realm of toxic, it’s not hard to see why someone might want to leave.
There is nuance to this - there are things like micro-cultures, or “mini cultures within a culture” in organizations that can exist. It’s why there are companies like Amazon which are known for being highly competitive and cutthroat can also have pockets of the organization that are collaborative and collegial.
From my experience, a lot of this depends on the leader of that specific business unit, function or team, and their ability to set the tone, while also having enough influence from their boss or leader to be able to balance what they are espousing versus the rest of the company culture. For example, at Deloitte, I specifically always prioritized working for leaders whose values about people, relationships, collaboration, and diversity aligned with mine.
As a result, even though I worked in a group that was predominantly male and predominantly white, I worked on teams that were over indexed to women and people of color. Even in the broader organization (not that diverse) I was able to find a microculture that in was diverse.
But over time, if you work in a company that says that it values one thing, but consistently rewards people who exhibit behaviors that is in direct conflict with that value, employees (who came to your company based on what you said) will notice what gets rewarded and if it doesn’t alone, will most likely leave.
What To Do About Toxic Culture
Earlier in my career, I worked with organizations to figure out how to transform their culture in order to reinvent themselves in new markets and industries. I can tell you from my own lived experience that changing culture, especially a toxic one is not easy, nor does it happen overnight. It requires changing mindsets, systems, and daily practices which is a very tall task. It's also a reason why most transformation projects fail.
But if we all agree that toxic culture is bad, what do we do about it? My approach is to focus on your own microculture, so your team, business unit, or organization. And with that, here are a few suggestions
For Managers
Manage the Say-Do Gap - The topic of culture sometimes has this elusive feeling, In the infamous words of Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.” But one of the best things you can do is to get clear on what your culture is and what it isn’t. This starts with articulating “say” versus “do.” Outline on your team or business unit of what your culture stands for, and then the specific behaviors that you want to see that align to that culture.
Make space for human being - One of the ironies about the boundaries of work and personal life blurring is that while we allow work to creep into our personal lives we don't allow our personal space to creep into our work. Our work can dominate our personal life, but so many of us work in cultures that don’t allow us to show up as the human we are in our work life.
So much of toxic culture is tied up in the inability for people to be human in the workplace. Regardless of what your company culture is meant to stand for, finding and creating ways that allow your employees to be human is another step that you can take. COVID-19 gave many of us some permission to do this, but this should have been done a long time ago. Most of us think that we’re rational beings that sometimes have emotions, but in reality, we are emotional beings that sometimes act rationally. Toxic culture has an impact on physical and mental health and we spend the majority of our days at work, which means leaders and managers who control corporate culture have more impact on workers’ health than their doctors.
Explicitly Call out Positive Actions That align with your culture - What gets measured gets managed. When others see you providing encouragement and feedback around behaviors that create a positive culture, it will empower and enable them to demonstrate more of those behaviors.
For Employees
Name what’s bothering you or making you uncomfortable - If you’re struggling with the culture but can’t put a pin on what or why, the best place to start is by identifying the pain and calling it by name. Is it your manager? Is it the environment? It may be difficult or painful to face but putting a name to it puts you on a path toward figuring out what you can do about it.
Check your health benefits and health resources - Every company has a set of resources for their employees when it comes to health and well-being. Make sure to double check what’s available to you, and consult your doctor as well. From my own lived experience, I remember the first time I told my Doctor that I was concerned about how the company culture was impacting my well-being and he more or less said to me, “it’s about time we talked about this!” We then had a discussion about some of the options and resources I could take advantage of. Toxic culture is not your problem to solve, but you do have resources to navigate through it.
Find your trusted partners - Drawing on decades of research on relationships, my former colleagues Anh Phillips and Jen Fisher wrote in their book Work Better Together: “Authentic, trust-based relationships increase job satisfaction, leading to greater engagement, higher productivity, longer employee retention, and even decreased health care costs.” Having connection and trust with colleagues is critical to well-being and satisfaction. Furthermore, chances are if you are experiencing elements of a toxic culture, other people are feeling it too.
This can be tricky, as if you aren’t in a situation where you have a level of trust with other people it can be hard to confide in them or ask for help. But this is also why finding ways to build connection with your peers is critical to well-being and satisfaction. Even when you are dealing with a challenging environment, having people you’re connected with and trust can help serve as a sounding board, or help you seek more help or other opportunities.
Model positive behaviors as a teammate/peer - The more that we can collectively look out for one another, the chances we increase our ability collectively to create cultures where people can thrive. I’m a big believer that being a great teammate is an underrated skill, and one way you can do this is to proactively and intentionally look out for your peers.
Going out of your way to check in on them to build connection and trust, helping them see the values of the company and how they can align to them are all actions we can take that can be a huge difference maker especially within a team or micro-culture.
Even if you’re not directly experiencing the impacts of a toxic culture, there’s a chance someone around you is. The more that you can be a support mechanism and vehicle for others, the more you’re helping create the culture that allows people to thrive.
Toxic workplace culture has an outsized impact on us as individuals but all of us on a collective society. It’s a tough nut to crack, but taking these steps as leaders and employees can help us all help each other in creating better and healthier workplace cultures.
If you’re working in a toxic culture or struggling with a toxic workplace and want to chat, drop me a note
Al