The Other Side of a Toxic Work Culture

I grew up on a staple diet of tales from the Panchatantra and reading Aesop’s fables. In addition to this, we were taught Moral Science in school – a subject that was taken very seriously back then. It is therefore ironic when young children who are told that honesty is the best policy are taught how to navigate organizational politics when they join corporates as adults. It is a given that human beings when they grow up are bound to become selfish, corrupt, judgemental, insensitive, and absolutely ruthless when it comes to running that rat race and winning it. The baton then gets passed on to the next generation and the vicious cycle continues.

In cultures like ours, there is a huge gap between what we are like in our personal lives with our families versus how we are expected to behave in a professional environment. In those few minutes when certain office colleagues have let their guards down during team dinners or outings, I have heard them voice out their biased views against a certain political party, a certain gender, a certain religion, or a certain other colleague. Within the four walls of the corporate castle however, these same individuals carry themselves as holier-than-thou larger-than-life demigods whose birthright it is to judge other peoples’ behaviors based on flimsy half-baked facts and rumors.

In addition to this dichotomous thought process, if a substantial amount of free time is made available to you, there is an exponential increase in destructive water cooler conversations, rumor-mongering, and a whole lot of other activities that you get pulled into which are more often than not, none of your business.

With arguments rife over a 70-hour work week, the other side of keeping yourself gainfully occupied for 12 days a week for 6 days seems to be very promising to me from this perspective. It usually keeps people out of trouble (and mischief ). On a serious note, I have advocated it to young adults who are starting their first jobs in the corporate world – for two reasons. First of all, it is an unforgiving, competitive world out there – and nothing beats working hard. Of course, if you are adding much more value working for half the time, then you don’t even need to work for the normal 8 or 9 hours. I would still recommend keeping yourself occupied for the rest of the time. After all, as I learned in school, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.

I have worked with many leaders with different leadership styles. I have enjoyed working with all of them in spite of the occasional arguments, differences in opinions, or conflicts. There were some who expected me to make radical changes in the team within the first 3 months of my joining the organization, there were others who wanted me to do nothing for the first 3 months and introduce any changes subtly without even slightly rocking the boat. But the one who I most resonated with, had made me work for 12 hours on my first day of joining the organization. This is the person who taught me the value of hard work, smart work, and getting your skin into the game. So much so that, the minute my work does not cover 8 hours a day on any day, I get restless.

And not just in the office, but at home too I like to keep myself occupied with the industriousness of an ant. It is not just therapeutic, but also keeps negative thoughts at bay – a habit that has been inculcated in me by my mother since a very young age. Physical and mental activity keeps you young, agile, healthy, positive, productive, and strong.

With this prologue, the other side of workplace toxicity is the absence of enough productive work to keep people gainfully engaged. With over 20 years of experience as a leader, I have developed a skill that allows me to figure out how much work my teams are engaged in just by glancing across the floor. And if we were to draw a comparative trend of people complaining about a toxic environment against their occupancy, it would be inversely proportional. Work has an innate property of spreading itself across the amount of time we have. So, if you have 8 hours to complete something that ideally takes 4 hours to complete, most people tend to complete it in 8 hours only. The reason why companies need to be cognizant of productivity gains and the right-sizing that needs to be done at the right time in order to reduce this complacency.

Also, workplace toxicity is not the result of a single or a handful of individuals. It’s a team behavior and every person in the team needs to take accountability for it. Instead of letting unaddressed negative feelings fester for each other till they grow into disproportionately large seemingly unsolvable problems that need an external intervention, team members need to be taught how these can be solved between themselves. We are all unique individuals with different temperaments and thought processes. None of us is perfect and therefore prone to differences with each other. We need to start treating this as normal instead of trying to fit everyone into a box of certain tangible attributes that are actually intangible in nature and therefore highly subjective. Give the tools to the team to resolve their own conflicts instead of getting into each and every little argument.

In my experience, the higher the external intervention, the higher the discontent within teams and the higher the tolerance for wrong behavior. I remember a time when my sister was a toddler and my brother and I were well into our teens. Since she was born late, she was the apple of everyone’s eye; so, whenever she got into mischief and one of us scolded her, she had 3 other people (and a dog) that she could go to for a shoulder to cry on. And as expected, at least one of them would comfort her and make her believe that nothing was wrong. Many a time?have I seen situations in the corporate world that are similar to this where some people display exactly this attitude and get away with it. Another behavior that I have observed in kids is that when they know that they have done something wrong, they start crying – this behavior draws attention from the deed that they have done to their need to be comforted. And while my parents were smart enough to see through this deceit and not get carried away, the parents of today are quick to do whatever it takes to stop their child from crying. Do you see what I am trying to get at?

Well, I strongly believe that the term toxic culture has become fashionable for workplaces that are demanding. And it's well within our limits to decide whether to make workplaces toxic for ourselves or not. For starters, if you don’t want to work hard, work smart and devise innovative means to deliver products or services of value. Remember the story of the hare and the tortoise? You can be a tortoise and keep achieving consistent results through your determined hard work and efforts. Or you can be a hare and achieve even better results by being smart and working less. Or you can still lose to the tortoise by being over-smart.

Or you can give way to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and search for alternate career options. Whichever path you choose, just remember one thing – there is no problem in this world that cannot be solved over a cup of coffee and (as God once said to Bruce Almighty) no matter how filthy something gets, you can always clean it right up. And while you are at that coffee or have just reached out for the broom, read the following article on bbc.com that I came across a few weeks ago:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231012-how-every-workplace-became-toxic

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