Top Ten Signs You Are a Toxic Workplace and How to Fix It
Employee burnout is something all organizations face regardless of industry, employee experience or position within the company. When that is coupled with the stress of the past 18 months, including COVID, political unrest, and other stressors in our lives, we find that people can begin buckling under that pressure. Keeping that in mind, as leaders, we need to figure out ways to not only retain our employees but, keep them from reaching the point where they burn out. We addressed retention in our last blog post and went into detail about ways to improve your culture and unearth underlying issues within your team. In this case, a reputable hr consulting service may be necessary.
With that being said, another attribute to employee retention is identifying and changing toxic work environments. Are you propagating a toxic work environment? How do you know you are not?
Here are our top ten warning signs that you might be in a toxic work environment and ideas on how to improve it.
Emails
As one of the primary ways of communication, especially in a remote work environment, people rely on email for quick communication. However, misusing or overusing this form of communication could add to the stress of your employees. For example, are you emailing staff on the weekends or at night and expecting an immediate response? Even if you are sending an email at night or on the weekend and not expecting a response immediately, it could send the message to your staff that they should be working when you are. Often, we attend to work at odd hours, when we have want to address something quickly so we don’t forget, or just want to clean up our to-do list in order to get a head start. However, not everyone works that same way and you need to be respectful of your employee’s time including their personal time. If you need to write emails on the weekends or at night, it is best to save them as a draft and send them during more acceptable work hours.
The Talk
While email and chats are great modes of communication, one of the best ways to get a message across is to actually hold meetings and talk to your staff. As we know, a lot of our message is not in what we say, but in our tone. As an exercise, the next time you are in meeting with your team or staff, reflect on the meeting in real time. Do you hear silence during staff meetings and your voice is the only one that is heard? Maybe you are talking “at” your staff and not “with” them. What’s the difference? When people are being “talked at,” there is very little interaction and the speaker isn’t concerned with feedback. When you are “talking with” your staff, you are interested in hearing their input, it becomes more collaborative, and everyone feels as if they have a part. Consider handing off the leadership of your staff meetings to other employees. This has the effect of engaging staff, promoting more ideas, and could help lighten the overall tone and mood of the meeting.
Out of the Office
We often hear from employees that they don’t feel as if they are really ever “out of the office.” Many times, leadership expects them to respond to emails and calls regardless of if they are on vacation. Organizations often mandate that employees can only go on vacation if they are reachable by phone and/or email. While emergencies can certainly arise and it may be just a quick call or email, it can morph into being on call for the entirety of an employee’s time off. As leaders, we need to find ways to support each other in taking time off with fear of repercussions for doing so. Consider coaching your employees to respond only when they return from vacation. It is freeing to turn off the gadgets to get away. If you find your staff burning out or saying it isn’t worth taking a vacation since they aren’t truly out of office, encouraging a work-free vacation will definitely help.
Vacation
We often hear from our clients that they cannot handle it when their staff do go on vacation. In fact, they might limit the number of days an employee can take off in a row or only allowing an employee to take one day off at a time. With many organizations running with a lean staff, there aren’t a lot of people who could take up the slack when someone is out. However, if you offer vacation or PTO as a benefit to your staff, you need to let them utilize that benefit without imposing a feeling of guilt or fear. Would you make an employee feel guilty for using another benefit like medical insurance? Would you rather cover for an employee needing a week-long vacation to destress and unwind or would you rather lose that employee who burns out because they feel they can’t take their time off.
Never Ending Workload
As we mentioned before, more organization run on a lean staff, which leads to employees taking on more and more work as other employees leave. The old employee might be gone, but their work doesn’t. Instead of replacing that person, their work is handed off to another person on the team. Employees are constantly pushed to take on more work, which often makes quality suffer. It is important to constantly evaluate employee workload and determine if changes need to be made. This could mean reorganizing, hiring more staff, or evaluating if some tasks can be more efficient. If employees feel they keep taking on more and more work without relief, they will leave, which continues this cycle.
Not Listening to Staff
Your employees are often the front line of working with clients and customers. They are involved in the details, understand the history, and usually have an opinion or ways to fix what is broken. However, leaders tend to think they know what is best and make decisions with half of the information without hearing the whole stories. When employees feel their leaders don’t trust or listen to them, they will become disengaged. If employees feel their leaders keep making decisions contrary to everything they’ve been told, they can start to burn out and question if they should even try to come up with solutions. If you trust and listen to your employees, they will surprise you with their ideas, their innovation, and their ability to take care of the customer or client.
Hardest Worker
There are many in leadership roles who think they are the hardest working employee at the company. After all, they answer emails and calls at all hours of the night, work weekends and while on vacation and are always so busy they forget to eat or drink all day. Leaders who think
they are the hardest worker and no one else can compare to them, could be contributing to a toxic environment where other employees feel they will never compare to “the hardest worker.” When employees feel like they will never be as good as “the hardest worker,” they can start to question their own work, feel unimportant or expendable to the organization, and start to distance themselves from their coworkers and the organization. Leaders need to start recognizing if they carry this trait and make changes to take the focus off of how hard they work and redirect it to recognizing employee contributions.
Lessons Learned
In many work environments, leaders often have one-on-one meetings with their employees to talk about completed work, if they did anything wrong, and what lessons were learned during the process. While this is standard way of holding one-on-one meetings, leaders often miss one final piece – what lessons did they learn. If a project didn’t go according to plan, it is often the employee who takes the brunt of the blame and are expected to have “learned” something from the experience. Employees are often fearful of speaking up to tell their manager that one of the reasons the project was late or had issues was because of the manager themselves. This is often paired with leaders constantly feeling the need to “teach” staff without considering they already know or have knowledge on a topic. If employees constantly feel they have to be perfect and detail lessons learned at every meeting, they could start feeling demoralized. It is important to acknowledge that leaders can learn as well and showing our employees that we have that ability is not a weakness, but a strength.
Command and Control
In this remote world where we depend on virtual meetings for daily business, leaders often feel they need to take control of every virtual meeting. Similar to in person meetings, virtual meetings tend to feel the same. There’s usually one person talking and everyone nods along, smiles politely, and might take a few notes. Leaders also feel that they need to fill employee calendars with constant meetings. While meetings can be useful, they are more useful for relaying information where messaging and tone are equally important and to make sure everyone is on the same page. With that being said, it is also okay to give up control to others to lead.
ZOOM DOOM
Out of everything that has come out of the last 18 months, we have found that people are Zoomed out. Having to move to a remote environment and meet virtually over video has been draining. During this time, leaders have all but demanded that everyone have their video on during virtual meetings so they can make sure their employees are engaged. As leaders, it is important to understand that not everyone has a dedicated office space with a curated bookshelf behind them in order to be camera-ready at all times. Some people are still dealing with virtual learning for children, have to work from the dining room table or couch, or just might not want to be on camera all day. As with everything else we mentioned above, it is important for leaders to understand that every employee is different and we should recognize when they start to burn out. We should also trust that our employees are capable of paying attention to important information without visibly seeing if they are focused on a camera.
Improving company culture doesn’t happen overnight. However, as leaders, it is our responsibility to be self-reflective on ways we might be contributing to a positive or toxic culture. Many times, those clues are right in front of us if we just open our eyes to see it.
To help address these topics, and anything related to HR Operations or Organizational Development, feel free to reach out to BlueFire HR by FutureSense. We are adept at helping organizations tailor programs to enable growth and success and offer support and guidance to manage your workforce and also tailor-made compensation and reward consulting can help you enhance employee retention. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help, need assistance with your workforce strategy, strategic planning, or HR operations; or you need an executive coach to talk to, contact us at info@futuresense.com.