Catherine Mattice* says workplace environments can become unhealthy and toxic before anyone realises it. She lists some signs to look out for and what to do about them.
We hear a lot of various words and phrases being thrown around these days — toxic work environment, unhealthy work environment, lacking psychological safety, and more.
In fact, I’m often asked: “What is the definition of a toxic work environment?”
My response is: “Ask your workforce. Let them help you define what unacceptable versus acceptable behaviour is.”
That said, lately I’ve been using the phrase ‘exclusive behaviour’ because it highlights that all behaviour that makes others feel excluded is inappropriate.
It doesn’t have to be toxic or unlawful for it to be addressed by a manager or human resources department.
While I operate in the world of workplace bullying a lot of behaviour can be considered toxic, exclusive or unhealthy — whatever you want to call it.
Someone who frequently interrupts, is constantly negative, acts helpless, is defensive, is chronically late, is unable to read non-verbal cues, likely falls under the category of someone who exhibits unhealthy behaviour.
They are also exclusive, in that interrupting someone excludes them from the conversation.
I tend to find there are four categories of unhealthy behaviour at work.
Downer behaviour
Complaining, critiquing, impossible to please, defensiveness.
Better than behaviour
One-upping, name dropping, constantly comparing to others, showing off, grandstanding, humiliating others.
Passive behaviour
Not providing opinions or suggestions, time sucking, waffling on decisions, helpless, not being direct or talking around sensitive issues.
Aggressive behaviour
Explosive, bossy, controlling, emotional, passive aggressive, stubborn, abrasive
While the behaviour above can be observed when someone is paying attention, it requires your managers to be trained in this skill.
I know from experience that this type of training is fairly non-existent so you may need some additional tools to get a sense of whether your workplace is healthy and inclusive or unhealthy and toxic.
Observe your team — do they tend to operate in isolation, or perhaps one person isolates themselves?
Do they laugh and appear to enjoy each others’ company?
Is their non-verbal behaviour indicative of being open and comfortable with each other or closed off and lacking trust?
Determine if one particular site or team has higher absenteeism or turnover than others, an indication that it could be unhealthy there.
You might also look at productivity, and whether employees are working slower, making more mistakes, or delivering services that are less than quality.
As trainers, we often observe things that indicate a lack of psychological safety, or the presence of unhealthy behaviour, during training sessions.
For example, we may visit Zoom breakout rooms and will witness people gossiping, making fun of a co-worker, or talking poorly about leadership.
We also witness silence, where the lack of participation from the people of colour, for example, indicates they aren’t comfortable speaking up.
The first step in fixing an unhealthy or toxic workplace is to conduct a survey to uncover the problems and gain clarity on what to focus on.
Be sure to do a climate assessment, which seeks to understand your culture; not to be confused with an engagement survey, which seeks only to measure the level of engagement.
We’ve had many clients whose engagement survey scores were great, but when we asked about things like inclusivity, trust in leadership, or effectiveness of communication, the scores pointed to much room for improvement.
Second, hold a few planning meetings to review the data and develop a clear and tangible action plan for change.
The plan should be published to the workers so they can monitor its progress, and participate where they’d like.
Finally, implement the plan, keeping in mind that as culture change happens through organisational change and behaviour change, your plan will have several actions in both areas.
Often, organisational change plans and projects include things like coaching key leaders struggling to adjust their own behaviour to meet with the culture vision and core values
It may also involve revamping the performance management system to gain accountability for the core values and new culture being created.
Or developing career mapping, succession planning programs, and professional growth opportunities for the workers so that they can see their career path.
Behaviour change plans (i.e., training programs) often include topics such as coming to agreement on values and behaviour as a whole organisation.
Adapting values and behaviour across teams; communicating with civility and respect, and diversity, equity and inclusion topics.
Also included in this area is proactively building a positive team culture and bringing it to fruition, as well as work-life balance or minimising stress.
*Catherine Mattice is the President of Civility Partners, which has been successfully providing programs on workplace bullying and building positive workplaces since 2007.
This article first appeared on the Civility Partners website.
