Do you love your work but still hate your job?

Motivational quotes tell you that life is too short to waste away doing work that you don’t love. You should follow your passion and choose a profession that you absolutely enjoy.

But what if, you found your passion, spent years studying and mastering it, then ended up at a job where you feel miserable?

It is a shame that the vast majority of people hate their job. They don’t get to explore their full potential because the people who are responsible to help them grow, are the ones who take away their motivation every single day. The smiling angels that welcome you during onboarding, turn into soul-sucking demons, as soon as you start working with them.

If you feel miserable at your job, there is a high chance you are dealing with toxic work culture.

Toxic culture is not just bad for employees, but also bad for organizations. When employees are not taken care of, they peform progressively worse at their job, which results in unsatisfied customers. What business owner (in their right mind) would want that?

By now, you might be thinking, if it is bad for business, bad for employees, and bad in every possible way, why does it still exist in most of the companies? The answer is simple: “fear”. Following is my theory on how fear gives birth to toxic culture and organically grows it by sucking everyone in its bubble.

Fear of losing money

In most businesses (specially the ones which lack a cause and vision), the top management has one primary responsibility — making money. It is not an easy job, especially if you have to answer to people who themselves are not involved in the day to day operations; like shareholders or the Board of Directors.

This pressure of improving the bottom line turns into fear of failure at the slightest sense of trouble. As a consequence, top management is forced to take steps to protect the Company against monetary downfall. As trained professionals in the field of business, economics and management sciences, these managers quickly turn to excel sheets. Graphs are drawn to figure out the problem, and a mathematical solution is formulated. As any logical person would understand by now, the fields of study I mentioned, don’t at all relate to human psychology or social dynamics. Imagine going to a therapist who only has a degree in Economics.

[You: “I’m depressed.”  Psychologist: “If you increase your income by $258.63 and reduce your living cost by $385.14, you’ll find eternal happiness.”]

We tend to forget that without humans, there is no Company. Understanding the needs and wants of humans within a team should be the number one priority for any business.

It is pretty obvious what happens after the mathematical spinning wheel comes to a stop. The solutions suggested by the number-based oracle are then considered as holy commandments which can’t be questioned; because numbers don’t lie, right? Good people are fired to meet the bottom line, costs are cut from workplace expenses, benefits are reduced, in short everything is done to make the numbers align without giving any thought about the human aspect of the equation.

Fear of losing power

How many times do we have to listen to this line before we start acting on it? With great power comes great responsibility.

People fail to understand responsibility in this context. A person in power, is responsible for the people that are under their power (read: authority). Rising to power boosts ego, it makes you feel strong, and as a result, you want to show it off to feel better. People feel shame to be under someone else or fear being wrong, and after rising in ranks, they tend to use pride to compensate for it. What if there was another way to counter the fear of shame?

Pride is not the opposite of shame but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame

Being humble makes you strong and gives you an even more powerful tool than authority. Trust.

Leadership whose foundation is trust, has a higher life expectancy than one built on fear. We need to understand that business is not a finite game; there is no winning or losing. Leading with humility means to listen before speaking, to focus on finding the right thing instead of being right, and to support the growth of others even if it means sacrificing your own limelight.

Fear of success

Yes, you read it right. It is counter-intuitive to even think about success as something to be afraid of. But as specialists climb the ladder of corporate success, they turn into managers who are presented with challenges that they haven’t faced before. These challenges require them to learn, unlearn and relearn skills, behaviors and oftentimes ideologies that helped them in getting there.

This fear of success from managers, trickles down to contribute in the toxicity of a company’s culture. Bold ideas and seemingly obvious paths of problem solving are dismissed without rational explanations. Unsafe thinking and experimentation is discouraged, and people are asked to keep their heads down and follow the safe path.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm

Someone who planted the seed of passion in hopes of turning into a majestic beanstalk, now suffers from a slow decay of interest in the field they once loved. This results in employees dragging their feet to work everyday, treating clients just as a task on their todo list, and living from paycheck to paycheck, until they find a company who truly values novelty and innovation.

What to do?

Here are a few fundamental principles that we follow at Mikaels Labs to avoid toxicity in work culture:

Lead with empathy which lets people be open about their struggles, and then help them overcome the shortcomings.

Communicate as humans instead of asking people to fill survey forms that give no meaningful insight about their well-being.

Focus on commitments and reliability instead of judging people on the time spent in office and their schedule.

Create a safe environment where bold ideas are brought forward and given thoughtful consideration.

Consider mistakes as learning opportunities rather than using them to assign blame and defining people’s future based on their past mistakes.

Encourage people to help each other so that the idea of knowledge sharing creates a crowd-sourced culture of growth.

There are some other insights in the previous article that I wrote about our work culture here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/workplace-designed-humans-does-actually-work-owais-afaq/

What experiences have you had about toxic work culture? Share them in comments. If you have any suggestions to fight toxicity in work culture, feel free to share those as well.