Toxic Work Environment: Understanding How It Happens

19 of December, 2022

It is well known that toxic cultures affect the workforce in a number of ways, including problematic behaviour. Conducts such as bullying or harassment, forcing employees to do unpaid work and breaking the trust between employees and employers.

Fed up with burnout, disrespect, lack of diversity and inclusion and unethical behavior, employees quit or quiet quitting in mass. Toxic work environment is a real problem for many companies nowadays.

Let’s have a look at how this behaviour happens and how to address it right. Keep reading to understand how actions like having good internal communication promote a healthy environment in your organization.

Overview of Toxic Work Environment in the USA

Gallup tells us that “quiet quitters” make up at least 50% of the U.S. workforce—perhaps even more. The engagement levels of American employees dropped significantly in the second quarter of 2022. This explains why the percentage of engaged workers remains at 32%. 

The trend has been thought to be the result of multiple factors such as burnout, poor management, and lack of communication. All this makes up a toxic mix with unhappy consequences and huge demands for HR to do something. Actions have to be taken fast to clean up the toxic spill.

Good news, one of the many unexpected outcomes the new digital workplace has brought into being is that life has become frictionless on the job. Now, HR tasks can be smoothly and effectively handled through the dedicated apps of a smart HR platform. 

It may well be that the toxic workplace is gone along with what we once called the workplace itself. That brings HR professionals up to the C-suite to help make strategic decisions.

Workplace Toxicity and the HR Mandate

There is no lack of knowledge about the dangers of the toxic work environment in HR literature. Of couse, that there is a look of burnout, pain and hostility, low productivity, distrust and disrespect.

There is no lack of red flags fully demonstrating as the “new normal”. It is then that HR hears all about it.

However, it can do little if the aggression is a veiled form, hard to document, yet having all the consequences on productivity. And also retention, that an environment of fear, unease, intimidation, bullying, or discrimination/harassment can create.

Obviously, HR will be asked to account for things and that requires a robust system that can conduct rapid sessions to solve things. HR must also distribute questionnaires and collate information from separate files to provide actionable intelligence in the workplace. 

Toxic Work Environment, HR and the New Workplace

There have been some fascinating statistics of late showing how quickly our workplaces are changing. Among a multitude of surprises, productivity went up and problems of toxic workplaces went significantly down during the lockdown of the lat years.

It makes a huge difference to the future of HR. According to recent research from SHRM, highlighted by Forbes in November 2021, “58% of employees quit a job due to a toxic workplace culture and the annual cost of culture-related turnover is $223 billion.”.

MIT Sloan Management Review noted in a January 2022 article titled “Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation” that a toxic culture “is 10.4 times more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation.”That’s only one side of the story. 

Capterra also found that fully remote businesses benefited the most from the new workplace. They found that 74% of HR leaders at remote businesses have received fewer complaints, compared to 65% of hybrid businesses. 

Across nine toxic behaviors, a majority of HR leaders and employees report seeing either less of the behavior than before they moved to hybrid/remote work or none at all.

The way to fight toxicity in the physical workplace is to go virtual. Which greatly facilitates HR tasks, but only if HR itself digitalizes and conducts its main activities through an online window, as if handling consumers

HR in the New Toxic Free Digitalized Workplace

If there is anything certain about the coming era in HR, it is that we are experiencing change. It’s certain that a new workplace with its own advantages and dangers for which conventional HR systems are ill-prepared.

There needs to be in place a robust platform that easily assembles data and alerts management to how the new workplace must change in all kinds of tolerance for the attitudes and needs of the new workplace. What that may be, we do not know.

That’s why we built Sesame HR software to manage digital complexities by digital means. With our software, you can launch pulse surveys and can have a broad overview of how your team are feeling. This will get you useful data to take the right actions.