It takes more than a top-down strategy to transform a toxic work environment

Great company culture pays endless dividends – it attracts top talent, it retains them, and it drives productivity and revenue.  But when the culture is toxic, it acts as the ultimate saboteur, psychologically harming your people and pushing success further out of reach.

SHRM reports that 1 in 5 Americans left a job in the last 5 years because of bad culture.  And this isn’t just the rank and file.  Despite having more power and influence within the organization, high-level leaders are likely to leave, too.  As a result, the constant turnover costs companies an estimated $223 billion, mainly to recruit and onboard replacements at all levels.  

However, high turnover isn’t the only effect of a toxic work environment.  In this climate, employees will likely deliver the bare minimum to keep their jobs; there won’t be any incentive to go above and beyond.  Stressed, overworked employees tend to be sicker, which leads to lower productivity and increased absenteeism.  And perhaps most damning, the company earns a bad reputation, which can be difficult to change.

A healing culture is the antidote to a toxic workplace, but cultivating one isn’t as simple as issuing an employee engagement survey.  True healing requires focus, buy-in from all stakeholders, a detailed strategy, and a desire to change.

Recognizing the signs

It’s impossible to fix a toxic culture if you don’t recognize it.  For higher-ups, who are often removed from the nitty gritty of day-to-day operations, it’s easy to think that everything’s fine.  But if you look closely, there are several signs that indicate your company isn’t a great place to work:

• Lack of understanding about the company values, among employees and managers
• Excessive office gossip
• High turnover rates
• Cutthroat tactics and unnecessary competition between employees
• Tardiness and absenteeism
• Outsize focus on perks instead of growth and development
• Poor work-life balance, e.g., employees skipping lunch and working weekends
• Bad reviews on job sites like Glassdoor
• A focus on “culture fit” during the hiring process, which perpetuates existing problems

Whether it’s one of these symptoms or all them combined, the verdict is the same – your workplace is plagued by distrust and it’s undermining your mission.  Now that you know this, you need to hear directly from your employees.  An employment engagement survey can help at this stage, but it’s simply a diagnostic tool to inform your next steps.  From here, the real work begins.

Rebuild your foundation

To address your cultural deficits, there are three key steps you should take.  These are essential pillars of your new foundation:

1. Reestablish your values: Think critically about what sets your company apart from the competition and what attracted employees to your organization in the first place.  Be clear about what’s important (e.g., collaboration and team results over individual performance), and be detailed.  Also, be open to evolving these values over time based on feedback from team members.
2. Create a plan: Build a strategy to introduce your values to the team, level set expectations, and check for understanding.  Also, think about how you may need to reprioritize certain projects or change policies and procedures to encourage positive behavior that aligns with the new values.
3. Be transparent: Give employees some insight into what has driven these changes and create a framework for regular, open, and honest communication, be it town halls, conference calls, or newsletters.  You need to open up dialogue, share key developments, and field questions.  And of course, each piece of communication is a chance to tie everything back to your new values.

Then, it’s onto the healing.

Strategic healing

Healing is two-fold – you need a strategic approach and a more holistic, emotional approach.  On the strategic side, you need to build a structure that supports positivity.  You can start by thinking critically about your blind spots and revisiting the actions or decisions that sent your workplace in the wrong direction.  You also need to remove the most toxic elements.  So, for example, let’s say you’ve only hired externally to fill the last 10 open roles in the company.  Through a detailed internal review, you find that you looked outward for talent because of huge skills gaps on your existing team.  And consequently, the current employees have become demotivated.  To remedy this, you could institute a policy or procedure that prioritizes internal employees for open positions, and you could institute a cross-training program to ensure everyone gets exposure to the necessary skills to grow their careers.

Additionally, strategic healing requires you to name the company’s issues.  Be specific about your problems, admit fault, and show vulnerability.  This openness will prove that leadership is truly aware of what’s going on.  Be sure to offer ways for employees to regularly offer feedback, whether it’s through one of the transparent communication channels mentioned above or something else, like a digital suggestion box or coffee chats with the CEO.  

Lastly, there should be regular trainings, likely from an objective third party, to address the biggest issues.

With that structure in place, you can turn to the emotional healing.

Emotional healing

It might sound odd to talk about emotional healing in a professional context, a bit like “yogababble”, a term coined by NYU professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway.  But you have to consider that your team has endured a sort of trauma, and changing your values on paper doesn’t immediately erase those impacts.  You need to bring healing-centered engagement into your organization to make your transformation complete. 

Healing-centered engagement requires you to abide by three overarching principles –  address the root causes of harm at the systemic level, focus on restoring trust, hope, and well-being (instead of just cutting back on negativity), and recognize that the whole organization needs healing, not just those who’ve been most affected.

There’s no shortage of ways to put these principles in action:

• Give employees power – Go beyond asking for feedback and create safe spaces for employees to engage with leaders.  You may consider creating employee advocacy groups, where team members can work directly with leadership to effect change.
• Make it personal – Use storytelling to tie the company’s values directly to employees’ contributions.  Connect the dots to help the team understand how each value will impact the company and their experience within it.
• Trust others’ expertise – When employees provide feedback and ideas, listen to what they have to say.  Lean on their insights and expertise, and avoid top-down initiatives.  And when they’ve influenced a policy or decision, be vocal about it and celebrate the moment as an achievement.
• Provide proper support – When change is enacted, make sure everyone involved has the right level of support to make it happen.  This means everything from adequate manpower to correct forms to the buy-in of executive leadership.

While healing might start with strategy and policy, it’s impossible without the necessary psychological work.

Conclusion

Changing a toxic workplace into a healing one can be hard and uncomfortable – it requires an admission of failure, honesty about those failings, and detailed work to remove toxicity and establish new values.  But all of this work is in service of a better workplace, one that will ultimately be more successful.