Navigating and Overcoming Toxicity in Workplace Culture

Ever thought about the deep-seated toxicity lurking in your workplace? Hold your breath as we navigate this uncharted terrain with consultant psychologist Linda Doe, who brings to the table her vast experience in business psychology. We dissect the meaning of a toxic office culture, the tell-tale signs to look out for, and the devastating impacts it leaves in its wake, including poor mental wellbeing and sometimes alarming rates of staff turnover.

But that's not all! We peel back the layers of the onion to reveal how toxic cultures persist in the era of hybrid and remote working. Linda sheds light on the importance of protecting our mental health, setting clear personal boundaries, and building a solid support network. Beyond that, we explore the role of team building events in nurturing a psychologically safe environment, even in remote settings. The conversation doesn't stop there - we dive into the critical role senior leaders play in setting the culture of an organization and the need for self-differentiated leaders to cultivate an authentic, positive work environment. Tune in to discover how behavioral changes can make all the difference in turning around a toxic work setting.

AWA Host: Karen Plum

Guests: 

• Linda Doe - Consultant psychologist, MD of Apana Business Psychology and holistic wellbeing champion
• Brad Taylor – Director of Consulting, AWA
• Lisa Sarjeant – Senior Associate, AWA

AWA Guest details: https://www.advanced-workplace.com/our-team/ 

CONTACTS & WEBSITE details:

AWA contact: Andrew Mawson 

 AWA Institute contact: Natalia Savitcaia 

Music: Licensed by Soundstripe – Lone Canyon

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Thanks for listening to the DNA of work podcast

Transcript

Karen Plum: 0:00

Hello there. Have you had a toxic relationship at work? Does your organization have a culture that accepts or even condones toxic behaviour? What does toxic behaviour actually look like? Do different generations have different definitions of what this looks like? What can you do about it? So many questions. How about some answers, I hear you cry! Let's dive in and we'll do our best to answer them for you.

Karen Plum: 0:30

Welcome to AWA's podcast, which is all about the changing world of work and trying to figure out what's right for each organization, because we know that everyone is unique. We talk to people who have walked the walk, who've got the t-shirt and who've learned lessons that they're happy to share with us. I'm your host, Karen Plum, and this is the DNA of Work. So we have a lot of questions about toxic behaviour, relationships and culture at work. It's not an easy topic, but given how damaging these situations can be, I thought it was time we tackled it. In this episode I have three guests to help. Later I'll be chatting to two AWA colleagues who are expert HR practitioners, but before I speak to them, my first guest is Linda Doe. Linda is a consultant psychologist, she's the managing director of Apana Business Psychology and she's a holistic wellbeing champion. I started by asking Linda - when people say they have a toxic relationship at work or that there's a toxic workplace culture at their organization, what do they mean?

Linda Doe: 1:40

There's a big difference between an individual toxic relationship and a toxic workplace culture. There is no one definition, that's the first thing. The kind of received wisdom around toxicity is that it's to do with whether you feel included or not within an organization. And the felt sense of inclusion is really really important to this because it's about how you feel. So the idea of inclusivity, of being tick boxes, etc. etc., it's not. It's about how a person feels within an organization, whether they feel safe to be themselves, whether they feel safe to make mistakes, raise issues. And a toxic organization is one that feels very non-inclusive and exclusive, that is possibly also being unethical.

Linda Doe: 2:37

We might use the phrase like cutthroat, and I can think of industries over the years that we would describe as cutthroat, that these days would be described as toxic. So lang uage changes, our appreciation of what's acceptable in an organization and not has changed over the years. The essence of toxicity is about being respected, of feeling accepted, feeling respected within an organization. A toxic organization can be an abusive organization, where there's bullying, where there's harassment, where people feel not valued. One of the things that we also need to be aware of is that expectations of the generation coming into work now are very different from the expectations of, say, the over 50s now or the over 60s, and what's toxic to them is not necessarily what's toxic to the older generation.

Linda Doe: 3:32

We could look at that in an odd way and go well, when you're older, you're wiser, you've seen it all before, you're more likely to put up with it. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Toxicity for the younger generation might look a bit different and they might find it easier to use the term and also have expectations about what work should be like, that it ought to be inclusive. They have a language for that inclusivity and very often when we talk to older people about toxic workplace cultures, it's about management and management style. For the younger generation it can be much more about feeling included. Whether there's homophobia, whether there's harassment going on, it's a whole different dialogue and I think anyone that has kids knows that there's a whole language out there that's like a new generation thing. So there's a lot going on there.

Karen Plum: 4:25

Yes, and there's an expectation that they will be heard and that their opinions will be valued. And I think the Gen Z people I spoke to just expect to be involved and they want to be involved, they want to contribute and perhaps, as you say, earlier generations didn't have that strong sense and perhaps that's carried through their working lives to just some dull resignation that, yes, well, it's always been like that and it probably always will be.

Linda Doe: 4:53

And that, I think, also taps into this idea of things being inescapable. A toxic workplace culture very much feels like there is nothing you can do about it and there's nowhere to go and you can't escape it. The other part of the definition for toxicity for me is really specifically around fear. Do I go into a workplace feeling fearful, or do I go into a workplace feeling valued and respected, where I can speak up? Now that can be speaking up about anything from whether you know I want to have a coffee break now to whether I want to talk about the fact that I'm going through IVF. There are huge topics, huge issues that people want to feel included about, but the essence of toxicity is whether there's fear in being able to talk at all, really.

Karen Plum: 5:43

Yes, yes. So fear being a key indicator, if we're looking out for the signs of toxic relationships, what are the other things we might observe?

Linda Doe: 5:54

So things like micromanagement, managers being too close to your every day, there not being sufficient conversation or the actual vehicle for being able to have a conversation. So in some toxic workplaces time is so pressured, time is such a challenge that there isn't time for conversation, so there isn't time for psychological safety. Issues don't get raised, issues get buried. Communication is poor. Communication in terms of toxicity is around psychological safety and being able to speak, being able to speak up. The broader kind of impacts are looking at things like the level of mental wellbeing within the organization, sickness levels, absence levels, people leaving, the number of older workers that are no longer willing to put up with things that go; the number of younger people that come in that choose a different organization because they're at a point in their career where they can vote with their feet and they take one look at the situation and say I'm not doing this, mate and off they go. For some industries that's really difficult because we know that in particular industries there is an all-pervasive toxic culture going on across the industry.

Karen Plum: 7:09

It's the sort of well, that's the way to get on around here. Everybody before us has had to work in this way, and if you want to get on, then it's going to be no different for you.

Linda Doe: 7:18

So that's a lovely example. I worked with a board of a company who were looking at the future, were looking at legacy and were looking at succession planning and we had a conversation about working hours and working practices and how people survived or thrived within the company. And the first part of the conversation was why do they need to thrive, w e always had to survive. An d it came to the point where I said yeah, but round this table, every single board member is divorced. Isn't that interesting and it was a penny dropping moment and it led to a conversation about is this how you want it to be for the future? And it really requires a decision from directors, from board level leadership levels, to say how do we want this to be?

Karen Plum: 8:09

Do we want to be a survival only option? And presumably they feel that it attracts the go-getters the cutthroat.

Linda Doe: 8:18

Let's look at banking in the city of London. That might be an obvious place to start of looking at toxicity, but actually we might look at media organizations, who are known within their industry for being cutthroat and non-inclusive. And when you think of the kind of people going into those industries, there's a real disconnect with a younger generation who are bright, innovative, creative and have a digital world at their fingertips where they can create anything from nothing. And yet they're going into an industry that feels wrong, that feels non-inclusive, feels abusive, feels bullying and that doesn't respect the age and experience of a lot of the people that work within it. I've heard that a lot.

Karen Plum: 9:04

They have all the talent and all the skills that the organization needs, but the organization doesn't know how to behave well enough.

Linda Doe: 9:12

And the irony of that is that when we have open, sharing, creative, psychologically safe spaces within organizations, we see lots of creativity and innovation. So for me there's kind of a 'der' moment there, you know, of why are you creating an environment that actually doesn't give you the best from people?

Karen Plum: 9:37

So do you think that people are choosing to work away from the office in order to try to avoid the worst of toxic relationships or toxic cultures? Clearly, working away from the office is now extremely popular, so is this a way of getting away from those sorts of behaviors, or does it just follow you home anyway?

Linda Doe: 9:58

There's different aspects to that. Whether people are choosing to work at home to get away from toxic culture. I think actually, people are choosing to work from home because they've seen an opportunity and it's productive and it's useful and it's helpful and I think at the moment we've got a real issue with looking at what's actually going on because of the effect of the pandemic and looking at why people are shifting and moving. There are a whole load of factors going on. It's early days to know why people are really working at home more. One of the big drivers will be that their organizations are asking them to, and there are a lot of people working at home who don't want to be there and a lot of people that are managing people working at home that don't want them to be there. So it's quite complex as a picture.

Linda Doe: 10:44

In terms of whether people can escape toxicity by working from home, which is a slightly different question. In some ways you can, in that the micro management, the micro aggressions, the everyday contact with toxic behavior can reduce. However, the culture of the parent, if I can use that phrase, organization remains the same. You going home and working from your office at home isn't going to change your relationship with the organization fundamentally if they are a toxic organization. Equally, if you have a toxic manager and you're working at home and you're no longer seeing them day to day, you can breathe a huge sigh of relief that you're not doing that, but actually it's not changing the way they value you or the way they may promote you or the way your career may go, because you're avoiding that situation. And for a number of years I've talked about avoidance in organizations, because it's avoidance that breeds toxicity and it builds over time.

Linda Doe: 11:46

I think it also gets us into that old debate of who's responsible for a toxic workplace and who's responsible for dealing with it. How do we take accountability and responsibility for our own well-being and our own mental health, if we know we're in that situation? How much of that is our responsibility? How much of that is the organization's responsibility or the manager's, and what decisions are we going to make to deal with that? For some organizations now, there are four different generations within that organization, so any organization that doesn't understand that and doesn't understand how people communicate differently, is not going to crack this kind of well-being, creative, inclusive working environment.

Karen Plum: 12:34

So just generally, as a person, I have a toxic relationship at work. What should I ideally be doing?

Linda Doe: 12:44

So I think what you're really talking about there is how am I going to survive? And I think the first thing is awareness yourself of what you're doing and what you're getting yourself into. So you're actually saying to yourself I want to stay at this organization. I recognize there are toxic behaviors or toxic relationships going on. Be very clear with yourself why you're choosing to do that and be really honest with yourself of whether that's actually in your career interests or not, why you're actually choosing to do that. I would suggest that you work very hard on your support network and it may be that you can do that with some allies and support people within the workplace. But if you really feel that you can't, then having a support network outside of the workplace is very, very important. So you may look at professional help through coaching or through mentoring outside of the workplace, or it may just be friends, family, where you own the fact that you are in a vulnerable position mentally because you will be dealing with toxic stuff and you will need to be mentally fit and ready for that. So actually looking at your own well-being in a more holistic way of am I fit, am I well, am I sleeping? Am I as fit and healthy as I possibly can be?

Linda Doe: 14:07

A toxic workplace culture will not go away on its own and you are not there as an individual to change that workplace culture. What you are there to do is to look after your own mental well-being and those of your colleagues who you feel are supportive and you want to support them. Try to be objective about the situation and see it as a workplace that you are choosing for very objective reasons. Make a list of why you're there and keep those benefits somewhere, because if those start to change, that tips the balance on whether it's worth it for you. So be clear about why it's worth it.

Linda Doe: 14:47

Find ways to deal with your stress. S pecifically look at what it is that stresses you out, what are the pressures on you and how are you going to deal with those. Be very, very clear about boundaries, and those can be in terms of how much energy you're prepared to give to this organization or relationship, how much time you're prepared to give in terms of the hours that you work and how much you want this to bleed into your personal life. So what happens a lot with toxic working relationships and toxic working is it goes home and it becomes part of an almost daily conversation about the toxicity of the workplace. Especially if you're working at home, you have a toxic work and home space.

Karen Plum: 15:36

It's a very, very important point about the toxicity coming into your home, because your home should be your safe place, shouldn't it?

Linda Doe: 15:44

Absolutely, absolutely. The essence of non-toxicity is conversation, relationship, honesty, trust and openness. One of the ways that we get that is through interpersonal relationships, and what we don't get when we work from home are interpersonal cues and interpersonal sensitivity and emotional intelligence that can really travel between people. How do we actually create a psychologically safe environment when you're working remotely and it is different. It is a greater challenge and there are things to consider over and above just working using technology.

Linda Doe: 16:27

I would love to see a return to team building events. I know they've gone out of fashion and I know it's felt to be an expenditure that people don't want to expend, but they have a real impact, particularly on male mental health, because the way that men interact and are authentic and open, tends to be around what I call side-to-side conversation. So it's when you're not looking at somebody, when you're sat next to them and you're building a stupid model of an elephant which I have done on numerous occasions. They will have a conversation about what's going on for them. It will start with - this is a stupid task, isn't it? But it will then merge into a whole conversation about what tasks are stupid and what tasks aren't stupid, and how life is going and why they haven't got time for this stupidity, and it will open up a whole conversation around mental health. It becomes a psychologically safe way to have a conversation and then it can travel into how they work together, how the team work together, if it's steered and facilitated well.

Karen Plum: 17:39

I think that's such a great point and something we can agree and bond on. This is a stupid task, and we can then talk about things that matter more to us as we build our elephant, and maybe we can tackle the elephant in the room. Next, I wanted to explore toxic workplaces a bit further, and I talked to two of my colleagues Brad Taylor, AWA's Director of Consulting, and Senior Associate Lisa Sarjeant. Both are HR professionals and have worked with many clients and encountered a fair few toxic environments along the way. I asked them what signs an HR director would look out for to see whether there's a toxic relationship or culture developing in their organization.

Lisa Sarjeant: 18:22

In the role of HR director, you're in quite a prime position to spot the signs and symptoms of a toxic culture because I think, more than most other roles in any organization, you are very visible and you are very engaging and interactive to all teams across the business and it's the nature of the job. You will have a number of different ways of identifying toxicity through staff surveys, feedback, grievances that are coming through., T he nature of those things like absence information, high levels of absence, reasons for absence can all point into that one direction of the culture and what that is turning into in terms of people's behaviours. T aking time or not engaging, poor communication and a really big one for me is where people close off and they're not open in terms of knowledge sharing and you get into that challenge of not being able to get the job done because people are too protective of their own area of the business and their own information, and then that's where you start to break down, unfortunately.

Brad Taylor: 19:39

I think you'll sense it in the organization, actually from a number of sources. I think you will probably sense it when you start speaking with people around the organization, particularly if you call groups together because you want to work on something and maybe you're trying to address the culture or you're looking at inclusion, it could be any of those things and you'll sense the degree to which people are opening up and talking about things or a sense that they're potentially holding back on something. You just sense it coming through. And I think also you sense it from your colleagues on the senior leadership level. If you raise something and perhaps you're met with defensive behaviour, or perhaps you're met with a wall of silence. And that then, I suspect, starts creating this defensiveness within yourself, that your guard rises because you are aware that something's not quite right. That instinct of perceiving a threat, will start to kick in.

Brad Taylor: 20:35

That's the state the organization is probably operating in all the time. There'll be a dissonance going on inside about actually does this conversation feel like it should do, or is there something else going on? It's not always easy to identify per se, because you're questioning your own perception. Is this just me or others seeing it the same way too? But to get that information and to try and clarify and collaborate what you think you're seeing could be very challenging.

Karen Plum: 21:01

So you've worked with lots of different organizations, both of you. Have you seen evidence of toxic cultures in, perhaps in client organizations? Where the organization is trying to address that culture. Do they genuinely try to tackle it, Lisa?

Lisa Sarjeant: 21:20

What I see is them talk about behaviours, organizational values. It's all very well to look at that and to identify what is it about our culture, that is our DNA and how we are, but also what do we aspire to be. So, if the culture isn't quite right, what is that desired state and how do we get there? And so, by articulating the right values to drive the right behaviours is great, provided that they are then lived and breathed and put into action right from the top. One of the problems that I've seen with many organizations is that the behaviours are mirrored, cascaded down from the CEO, really, and the top team, and it's so important that the top team are behaving in the way that you want the organization to feel like, to be like and how you're stating it to the outside world, because if you state that we respect each other but then in reality you don't, you just going to damage trust and that toxicity will never go away.

Karen Plum: 22:36

It has to be authentic, otherwise they say one thing and do another. And I guess, Br ad, these days we talk about the great resignation and, you know, high levels of turnover and people certainly from perhaps the younger generations, gen Z, not being prepared to put up with toxic cultures, then there's a lot more at stake, I guess.

Brad Taylor: 23:01

Yes, there is really. I think culture boils down to how am I expected to behave in order to survive or thrive around here? And people you know, to Lisa's point, they're taking those cues from the way the senior leadership team behaves or the very senior leader top of the organization, and that calls for self differentiated leadership as well. So have you got a leader with a clear sense, a perspective of what they're about and they're willing to challenge behavior and address it first of all, to try and correct the culture and send signals that the intent is there to do something positive about it? Because if they don't, the environment the working environment, as we know, is changing so fast now that people can just easily look for another job. It used to be perhaps you've got to try and sneak out and go to job interview. Well, a lot of those are online now and a lot of people are working from home most of the time, so it's no problem at all.

Brad Taylor: 23:49

Just a slot job interview in somewhere amongst all of that. And also the fact that the younger generations now are so much closer - the power distance gap has decreased, so therefore they're gonna be so much more conversational and they will sense much, much more quickly and earlier on whether, does this feel like an authentic leader I'm speaking with? Does this feel like someone I want to work with? Is this indicative of the culture of what the organization might be like, that they'll make those decisions and they'll gravitate to where the better cultures are.

Karen Plum: 24:21

If we're wanting to end on a bit more of a positive note, how can we fix a toxic environment once we have a real sense that we have one? What are the sorts of things that we can look to do?

Lisa Sarjeant: 24:34

I think top teams really need to hold the mirror up and they need to acknowledge it. They need to accept that this isn't right. This is a problem. This isn't actually good for business. It stifles creativity. It stifles productivity, because people are, even if they're not absent from stress, then they may just be doing the whole presenteeism and showing up and not really performing. So they need to acknowledge it, first and foremost, and get underneath the cause, and that's going to be quite a hard task because quite often it is about how the top team are behaving and role modelling to the rest of the organization, and so they need to be very careful that they don't just try to bring in a set of consultants who are going to talk to them about working as a team.

Lisa Sarjeant: 25:32

There'll be some elements of learning and development that I'm sure, and coaching that could help the top team. But you've also - and it's a hard question for the CEO - got to ask yourself have we got the right people here? Is it possible that we can adapt our behaviors as the team that we are, because that's usually what it's going to take. Can we lead in the way that we want to behave in line with our values? We can't ring fence people and say well, like you said, Fred, we know it's Fred and but he does a great job, so let's just leave him alone. That's not going to work, that won't help you change the culture. So you've really got to tackle that one as a starting point.

Karen Plum: 26:14

Yeah, what's your definition of a great job for Fred? I mean, Fred might be great at doing the specifics of his role, I suppose, but in terms of working with other people, as a manager developing other people, being a role model, all of that sort of stuff, clearly he isn't doing such a great job.

Lisa Sarjeant: 26:36

The collateral damage that you get from the wrong behaviors is not - you can't ignore the damage that if Fred is exceeding his targets, the damage to the rest of the business and the potential for the business that if he was behaving in the right way, to be even greater success for the organization. So yeah, can't leave him alone.

Brad Taylor: 27:00

Toxins have to be removed. If you get poisoned, you know, you want to remove the poison from your body, don't you? It has to be dealt with and that could be very, very painful. And I think then if we talk about senior leadership team, I think team interventions can be good, but I would say they need to be effective and to be effective there needs to be probably a high degree of discomfort associated with that session, because as humans were all learning all the time.

Brad Taylor: 27:30

I'm sure we'l l all look back - e veryone listening is going to think of a situation and they think ah I wish I'd handled that differently, if I went through that now - that's what life is about. We learn and we adapt to we hopefully do better next time around. So I think a good facilitated session will have a high degree of discomfort, but from that, that's where you really get to the root of issues and ask those deeper questions about what's really going on here and how would we want to behave if that situation occurred again. That's where the growth then has the opportunity to come through. So I would say that's probably the way of going about it. Things that just wallpaper over, like we're gonna redesign the office or we're gonna move to a new location or whatever yeah, that can be a signal that there's some intent there, but it's the behaviors. It's the behaviors that really make the difference. You gotta be able to demonstrate it for people to believe and start to accept that there's now a change.

Karen Plum: 28:26

And if you have a good culture to start with, that's not toxic, as far as you know, are there any sort of things we can do, top tips or whatever to make sure that it doesn't go in the direction of being toxic?

Lisa Sarjeant: 28:37

Yeah, there are a lot of really good initiatives that can help to maintain that great culture. Things such as stay interviews, where you interview existing employees and you find out what it is about the organization that makes them stay. Why do they like it. The feedback you're getting at exit interviews is going to be distorted and it's all a bit too late, whereas regularly asking people who stay and are happy and effective can give you really great insights and so you can keep repeating that good stuff. Great open communication, two-way communication, is really going to aid the maintenance of a good culture.

Brad Taylor: 29:22

I think Lisa's absolutely right. It's identifying those ingredients that are making the culture so great and then looking for that in everyone else that you bring in. Or are you seeing signs that run counter to those ingredients that you've identified are promoting a great culture, a great cultural environment and a non-toxic environment? So, yes, being watchful and particularly, all organizations again go through change and sometimes they know they need to pivot. Perhaps they need to become more sales-orientated or they need to go in a particular direction culturally or something else in order to be able to achieve a new market that they're going into. And that's the vulnerable times because they'll be looking to bring in slightly different people who behave in different ways to be able to achieve those objectives. So again to Lisa's point being clear on what are those core ingredients at the start that must be preserved A, for those people who are coming in to be accepted by the wider system, but B, to enable it, the organization, to gradually pivot and achieve a market objective that it wants to do successfully, I think is really, really important.

Karen Plum: 30:25

I love the idea that if you know what makes your culture really sing, you can focus on doing more of the really good stuff, because, for sure, if you take your eye off the ball, things can definitely go south over time. My thanks to all my guests, Linda, Brad and Lisa for this walk through the toxic workplace world, somewhere I suspect we've all been at some time in our careers. It's important to be alert to those signs of toxicity, they can poison relationships, damage culture and are hard to unpick once they get embedded. And, as we've heard, the latest generation coming into the workplace is far less likely to just put up with toxic culture. They're far less accepting of the status quo and will simply vote with their fleet. If you'd like to hear future episodes of the DNA of work, just follow or like the show. You can contact us on our website, advanced-workplace. com. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time. Goodbye.