Ep34: Toxic Workplace Culture: How to Spot it, Stop it, and Create a Healthier Work Environment

No one sets out to build a toxic workplace culture, yet 2 out of 3 employees have experienced toxic workplaces. What’s worse, 44% of employees blame leadership.

As leaders, it’s more important than ever that we know how to spot, and stop, toxic workplace culture, and create healthy work environments in which people and businesses thrive.

To help us unpick this complex topic, we’re joined by three expert guests. 

• Bonnie Low-Kramen is a TedX Speaker, Workplace Advocate and Best-Selling Author of Staff Matters, helping executives and teams work together to create the ultimate workplace.
• Paula Allen is a Global Leader in Research and Client Insights at TELUS Health (formerly LifeWork), and an expert in total well-being strategy for workplaces. 
• Rita Ernst is a Positivity Influencer, Organisational Consultant and best-selling author of Show Up Positive. She is committed to building workplaces where happiness and productivity converge to create positive, committed, high-performing teams.

Join us as we discuss:

• What is a toxic workplace culture?
• What attitudes and behaviours create toxic environments?
• What behaviours can be considered bullying, harassment or discrimination?
• How do we know if culture really is toxic, or if people are being sensitive?
• What are the signs of a toxic culture?
• What can leaders do to prevent (or fix!) toxic workplace cultures

Remember, a lack of reports does not mean a lack of incidents. If you’re a leader who cares about your staff (and business!) this is a must-listen.

Resources

Bonnie Low Kramen

• Follow Bonnie on LinkedIn
• Check out her website www.bonnielowkramen.com
• Follow Bonnie on Twitter
• Check out her podcast Be The Ultimate Assistant
• Best-selling book ‘Staff Matters’ on Amazon

Paula Allen

• Follow Paula on LinkedIn
• Check out LifeWorks

Rita Ernst

• Follow Rita on LinkedIn (where she does weekly LinkedIn lives)
• Check out her website www.igniteextraordinary.com
• Follow Rita on Instagram @igniteextraordinary
• Buy her amazing book Best-selling book ‘Turn Up Positive’ on Amazon

Connect with your hosts

• Connect with Al on LinkedIn 
• Connect with Leanne on LinkedIn
• Join the discussion about this episode on LinkedIn
• Email: podcast@TruthLiesandWork.com
• Follow us on Instagram @truthlieswork
• Chat with us on Twitter @truthlieswork
• YouTube channel for the podcast @TruthLiesWork
• Check us out on TikTok (LOL!!!) @truthlieswork

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The Transcript

⚠️ NOTE: This is an automated transcript, so it might not always be 100% accurate!

Bonnie
and have it be about the work My goodness in this post pandemic workplace. The pressure really feels on and the stakes are very high.

Leanne Elliott
Hello and welcome to the truth lives and workplace culture podcast brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Liam. I’m a Business psychologist there. My name is Al and I’m a business owner and we are here to help you simplify the signs of people and create amazing workplace coaches.

Al Elliott
So welcome back or welcome if you’re new, but also welcome back to everyone else. We’ve seen the stats we know that you’re coming back and you know we’re listening. We’re watching you. And so today we are talking about something cool. We’ll come on to that in a second. Got some

Unknown Speaker
news? We do have some new news. Go on Leanne if you follow us on LinkedIn 3000 WordPress culture podcast you’ll already know if you don’t feel you because there’s people out there that already know but we are very excited to announce that we are the official podcast at the water cooler event happening this month the 25th 26th of April at the XL in London

Al Elliott
so if you’re in England or London already I suppose Scotland Ireland Wales either man and you’re coming down to to the water cooler event which is like the premiere is the the Oscars for culture, workplace culture UK be coming down then look us up because we’ll be somewhere in the middle. No doubt recording interviews very important people. And I might even have a hoodie on. I don’t wear a hoodie normally.

Leanne Elliott
We are Yeah, we’ve got up we’ve got a pop up studio. We’re going to be recording live from the event. We’ll be bringing you exclusive content on all the speakers, exhibitors, the delegates, everything really. So yeah, it’s cool. We’re excited. And we’ll see that and if you can’t be there, it’s okay because we’re going to be bringing you a whole episode dedicated to everything we got up to at the watercooler.

Al Elliott
But in all seriousness, all joking aside if you are if you are into workplace culture, or into building an amazing place for your people to live then to live to work. Then you you absolutely should be going down to the watercooler because it has got some amazing speakers on there. It’s got some amazing exhibitors, the person who is running it is a really cool guy who’s been our podcast before Hello, Simon. And yeah, it’s just it’s just it’s just the place you need to be if you care about workplace culture. So I think it’s free to get in

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, absolutely is free to get in. So yeah, if you are in or around London or nearby is absolutely worth going. There’s a whole whole sheduled of talks of workshops and a whole exhibition as well. All talking about workplace culture and wellbeing as well. So yeah, not wanting to miss if you can make it so this week we are talking about toxic workplace cultures. A few episodes ago, we talked about toxic superstars. We talked about toxic workers. Now we’re taking that conversation a bit broader and talking about toxic workplaces.

Al Elliott
So we have three incredible guests. We have first of all, Bonnie Lowe Kremen, who is a TEDx speaker. She’s a workplace advocate, Best Selling Author of staff matters, brilliant book reader, if you like those kinds of books that are full of stories like for example, Small Giants and anything by Bo Burling Bo Burlingham. Bo Burnham, then you’ll love that book, that she said over 1500 conversations with assistants, executives, HR professionals, and recruiters from all over the world. And what she does, she tells those stories in her book, and she offers solutions on how executives and teams can work together to create the ultimate workplace. Let’s meet Bonnie.

Paula
Oh my goodness. Well,

Bonnie
I began my career in theatre. I’m from New Jersey. I graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in theatre and English and had a dream for about five minutes of being an actress, but ultimately ended up working in showbusiness working is the personal assistant to Oscar winning actress Olympia Dukakis. And I did that for 25 years in a million years. I never thought it would last for 25 years, but there it is. Olympia, of course won an Oscar for the film Moonstruck and then went on to make many other major films, like Steel Magnolias, etc. In the course of travelling out in 13 countries, the staff of the world, the assistants of the world, the leaders, the recruiters, HR professionals, they were talking to me, they told me their stories. And what was so fascinating is that I started hearing similar stories no matter where I was.

Leanne Elliott
Our next guest is Paula Allen. She is a global leader in research and climate insights at TELUS health, formerly Lightworks. She’s an expert in total wellbeing strategies for workplaces. She also sits on the board of directors at Women’s College Hospital. She’s also an advisor on the national standard for psychological health and safety workplace to see as a group and if you’re not sure What CSA group does, they are on a mission to enhance the lives of Canadians for the Advancement of Standards in the public and private sectors. Let’s hear more about life work

Paula
at its core LifeWorks helps people be at their best. So we do financial wellbeing, work with to mental wellbeing and mental health work. We help employees who are coming back to work after a Disability Leave. So we work with organisations to help their people be at their best and very recently, we were acquired by an organisation called TELUS health, which means we’re going to continue to do everything that we’re doing, but also be available directly to individual cells, somebody who doesn’t work for an organisation would have access to our support as well.

Al Elliott
And our final guest is Rita rzd. Rita is so called she’s a positivity influencer. She’s an organisational consultant, she’s got a company called Ignite your extraordinary. She’s been featured in Forbes on the cover of tapping magazine. And she’s committed to building workplaces where happiness and productivity converge and create positive committed high performing teams, her approach typically translates to about 30% increase in sales revenue, which is pretty amazing. She’s also the best selling author of show up positive, which is a great book. So let’s go meet Rita. And

Rita
the main mission right now my mission right now is to really make people aware of the book and get them involved in the show positive movement, which is really just about using their personal agency and power to take back their workplace and turn it back into the place where they want to go to work because it’s giving them the fulfilment that they really need in their lives.

Al Elliott
So in a second wheeling, go back to our guests, and we’re going to hear a bit more from them. But before that, it’s our favourite time of the week is the news roundup. Gengo. So if you’ve not heard this before, this is this is still in testing phase, maybe it was like ninth week, but we kind of like it. It’s where we sit back, we just get a gin and tonic, we sit by the fire. And we just listen to Leon telling stories from around the world about workplace culture. So Leah, what do we normally start with?

Leanne Elliott
Where are we?

Al Elliott
Where are the weak alert?

Leanne Elliott
I’ll be honest, I had to dig around a bit this week. I couldn’t I couldn’t. I hadn’t stumbled across one. I had to go and find one. And I thought well, why should one go to find out a current wordy phrase the trend these days often dictionary, tick tock, tick tock, of course. So yeah, I went over to tick tock and I found the new word. What is a phrase really, corporate villain era. So basically, it’s building on the attitude of quiet quitting the kind of the ethos of the great resignation, and really just talking about being a corporate villain. To be clear, it’s not about being an actual villain villain or sabotaging your company. It’s more about showing up for yourself setting boundaries, knowing your worth, and being confident. So basically swapping being flight for a bit of independence and standing up for yourself. So awesome.

Al Elliott
Can I just ask you then, so this isn’t like, not describing them as Oh, they are a corporate villain, and therefore they’re bad. This is a good thing.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, so you’ll see the Tick Tock videos are like this is my corporate villain era. And there’ll be like, things like finishing work at five o’clock not working at weekends, all that kind of stuff, that kind of thing. How their villain in inverted commas, but um, but actually, yeah, it’s just a case of, of people standing up for themselves and and setting some healthy boundaries. So yeah, that is the current tick tock trend. And that as our phrase of the week common Villa beylin. Era common know what my saying corporate era,

Al Elliott
so catchy. So what else you got this week? Leah?

Leanne Elliott
Well, you also saw some researchers week on week on how to be clever,

Al Elliott
clever, and that you just add an extra er to make it even more clever.

Leanne Elliott
Exactly. So no, it has to be clever. So this is a study that looked at whether people act as if they are more knowledgeable after sharing articles.

Al Elliott
So if they’re not their own article is someone else’s article.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. So if you’re on you’re on LinkedIn, or you’re on like, Forbes, or whatever else, and you’ll see in the URL, an article that’s gonna make you look clever. They did some research, it is find out in terms of once once a person has shared the article, do they start to act as if they are more knowledgeable? So there’s lots of different different kind of experiments that were done. But in one of them, participants were asked to read an article on investing. And they had a group that were kind of in the sharing group, and their instructors share it on their Facebook page, and then people in the non sharing condition, just just read the article. And then all the participants were given investment advice by an AI advisor and took part in investment planning simulation, in which they chose a level of risk for that investment, before responding to a self report questionnaire. And what the results found was quite interesting actually, that those people in the sharing condition took significantly more risk in the investment planning exercise than those in the non sharing condition, suggesting that even just sharing articles, whether you read it or not, can change our behaviour as well as our feelings about things. So I

Al Elliott
can totally see why someone would feel that. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the people who share those articles are probably the left hand side of the median of clever in the first place. Sorry, if you’re if you’re listening to go and I’ve just shared an article this morning, and you blast it out.

Leanne Elliott
Well, I was might disrupt what my next? My next suggestion was gonna be. But let’s see. So we’re gonna say that, you know, if sharing content makes us feel like we know more about the topic, then then why not share this episode? And you’ll look like you’ll know loads of stuff about toxic workplaces. But given what Alex just said it might be probably don’t want to now, I immediately

Al Elliott
regret my decision to talk before before reading on in the notes of the podcast.

Leanne Elliott
But there you go. So yeah, there you go. Sharing without reading makes us believe we’re more knowledgeable than we are.

Al Elliott
Borrow some of Leon’s amazing knowledge, not mine. I don’t have anything of worth to say. So what else you got? Leah?

Leanne Elliott
So finally, I want to talk about the NHS junior doctor strokes that are happening this week. So for anyone not in the UK, junior doctors across England have we’re going to have begun a four day strike. That’s going to result in an estimated 350,000 appointments being cancelled. So yeah, it’s basically overpay, I saw I saw basically that once you kind of break it down into an hourly rate junior doctors are paid about 14 pounds an hour, which doesn’t seem quite right, junior doctors, and what would we call them? I guess in the in the US, you might call them residents, or so people that finished their initial training and their internship and now they’re the kind of training and residents it’s it’s the longest ingestion action in the health service for a while so. So yeah, and the reason I wanted to bring it up is that yes, Pe is something that the main thing that they’re striking over but also conditions that are working on the workplace is their workplace cultures that are working in suddenly, there was a very high profile story recently about Dr. Vaishnavi Kumar, who did take her own life having worked in Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, her father has talked at length about this and cites the workplace culture she was in she found belittling, demeaning, and described it as a toxic environment. This is obviously a very extreme example of what can happen in terms of employee mental health. But I think if we if we think about the worst case scenario, it really puts into context how important workplace culture is, and how vital it is to eradicate any pockets of toxicity.

Al Elliott
Definitely, I mean, very sad. And unfortunately, I don’t think it’s the first time I’ve heard about these kinds of things. So I mean, that’s the thing if you’re going to spend like a normal as a normal, but someone who’s not a resident will spend like 30 to 40 hours a week in a workplace. And if that’s toxic, that’s not great. But from my understanding of junior doctors in certainly in the UK, they like more like 80 to 90 hours a week in the hospital, plus they sleep between shifts, so they might even be in there for like 120 hours of the week. So it’s not it’s not cool as though

Leanne Elliott
it’s not great now, and I think we saw it as well after the pandemic, lots of professionals in the healthcare sector are experiencing burnout. And yeah, and some of that will be down to the environment that they are in. So that is what we are talking about today. What is a toxic workplace culture, it’s a term that’s thrown around a lot so we’re going to dig into what it actually means. We’re gonna talk about the attitudes and behaviours that create a toxic environment, and what behaviours specifically could be considered bullying or harassment or or discrimination. We’re also then going to talk about some real talk how do we know if a culture really is toxic? Or if people are being maybe a little bit sensitive what is allowed and what isn’t? I love that

Al Elliott
you’ve included this because I think there’s there’s there’s two kinds of schools was three schools of thought those who think that every workplace should be this amazing ambrozy or of like just an amazing place to work then there’s those people the other end spectrum and go oh just can grow up well, you work is tough. And then there’s the people in the middle who I think is probably most of us who go I think just being a bit snow flaky. I don’t know. So Oh, you’re looking at me as if I shouldn’t use that word. I was I was being

Leanne Elliott
decided that snowflake was no longer allowed.

Al Elliott
I was being a character playing a character Cassie I’m seen

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, no, we aren’t. We’re gonna we’re gonna dig into dig into that and, and the main the main arguments around why people might be sensitive and we’ll get our our expert guests view on that. We’ll then be talking about the site means have a toxic culture, and most importantly in a nice chunky part. At the end this episode is what leaders can do to not only prevent toxic workplace cultures, but to fix them.

Al Elliott
Love it. So can we start off with assuming nothing, we just say what is a toxic workplace culture, I’m guessing is not a lab that’s gone wrong?

Leanne Elliott
No joke. So a toxic workplace culture is used to describe a place of work, usually in an office environment. But as we’ve heard, it can also happen in healthcare settings as well. And it’s more by significant conflicts, usually between the people who work there, whether that be infighting, whether it be tension between leaders and employees, and it can significantly harm productivity. And as we’ve seen, mental health as well, there’s actually there’s a lot of research on this that talks about toxic workplace cultures, but we don’t have kind of an agreed definition. And what is is agreed is that it’s reasonable to conclude that an organisation that is considered toxic, is going to be ineffective, as well as destructive to its employees.

Al Elliott
So I guess Rita earns worked extensively with organisations, and she’s her main aim was to address this toxicity in the workplace. So we had to ask her, How do you define a toxic workplace culture? And what impact does that have on employees?

Rita
First of all, because of everything that we’ve gone through since the pandemic, it is not surprising that workplaces have become toxic workplaces. And oh, by the way, nobody sets out to create a toxic workplace. So it often leaves founders and executives at the top of the organisation scratching their head saying, How did things get so bad, right? So a toxic workplace is someplace where basically, people walk away at the end of the day, completely depleted by the experiences that they have had throughout the day. So I think that there are certainly many jobs that people I worked with construction company, for example, during the pandemic, and they are featured in my book. And, of course, those guys are physically tired at the end of the day. However, there was a strength of camaraderie and companionship, and all for one one for all, you know, kind of spirit that had always been a part of their team, until the pandemic. And in the pandemic, as all of the chaos and concern and uncertainty and everything else is washed over them, they became dis more disconnected from one another. Right? So they lost that feeling of camaraderie. And they were just sort of showing up and getting their work done and a little bit of heads down, but not really enjoying anymore, that sense of shared purpose and commitment. And so that’s it’s the mental aspect of that, that’s the other side of it. You said, What’s the opposite of a toxic, it’s a place that fills your cup. It’s a place that helps you know, at the end of the day, you feel good about what you’ve done, you feel purpose in your work, you look forward to go into work, you no matter how physically tired, you might be big you didn’t get a good night’s sleep, maybe the baby kept you up all night, whatever it might be, still, would you show up in that space with your teammates, there’s something that triggers in you

Leanne Elliott
a toxic work environment leads to this, this constant fight or flight response and, and the brain chemistry of that, as I’m sure you know, it means large amounts of cortisol, which is a stress hormone. And that turns into stress. And when we’re stressed, we’re defensive, withdraws socially, it impacts our relationships, and over time, it will substantially affect our mental and physical health. But of course, now, we’re not talking about these, as you said, these perfect workplace environments, even the healthiest of work environments are not stress free. So as leaders, how can we tell the difference between normal and productive levels of stress and signs for toxic workplaces? We asked our expert guest Paula. She’s for a

Paula
gym is really good, right? So when you put stress on a muscle, but you put it on in a way that doesn’t break the muscle, then it actually does get stronger. When you put it when you put stress on a mind on the mind. And you find things that actually are supportive. Once you have good social support. You have skills sort of look at the situation in a way that doesn’t make you feel vulnerable. That makes you feel empowered, because you say, well, x is not going well. I’ll figure out a way to go in a different way. But you know, all of those things like when you have the environment and the approach that helps you manage the stress, you can get stronger.

Al Elliott
So take the taking that analogy of the gym. If someone goes to the gym two or three times a week for half an hour than yes, they’re going to get stronger, they’re gonna get fitter. But if they didn’t like throw, unless you’re the rock, if you didn’t like three hours a day, five days a week in the gym, you’d have been so much stress and pressure on your body, something is going to pop, alas and horrible and like, like a knee or something or, or a boob muscle. muscles, I don’t know what they called. Thanks. That’s the word pecs. That’s what I was thinking of.

Leanne Elliott
Yes, and I think I think that’s the point isn’t it, that it’s it’s some stress is good. prolonged high level stress is bad, which you will remember from our, our burnout episodes, and again, poor than just really emphasising the importance of a relationship. So I think if we’re talking about toxic workplaces, this breakdown in relationships is really going to start to have the impact. So now we’ve defined it What attitudes and behaviours could create a toxic environment, or Donald soil and colleagues analysed 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, that’s quite a lot, they have some time on their hands. And they found that employees describe toxic workplaces in five ways as being disrespectful, non inclusive when ethical, cutthroat or abusive. And the author’s coined this the toxic five, to describe what poisons company culture, it could be argued that these five aspects could be put under a bigger umbrella of workplace bullying, which I think is a term you’re probably a lot more familiar with. And I’d gamble that most leaders and business owners that are listening would very strongly deny the existence of bullying in their workplaces. But, you know, sadly, the data shows is that one in four of us have experienced bullying, or be made to feel left out in the workplace. Our guest, Bonnie believes that respect is the number one of most important workplace value, and that no meaningful exploration of the workplace should be had without addressing disrespect,

Bonnie
or bullying is a form of disrespect. Disrespect is a pretty broad term. But my premise in that comes from my own personal experience, my experience speaking with staff all over the world, and why research. And I did a TEDx talk on the I call it the real reasons people quit. And things that staff wants more than anything, is to feel respected, and that we belong, that after all, every person who’s working at a company was hired, at some point, somebody looked at the resume and said, We want you you’re chosen, you’re the chosen one. So it, it doesn’t make sense then, that the person we spend the money and time hiring, that we permit behaviours like bullying to that same person who, who we hired to do tasks in a company. Bullying is a broad topic as well, it can. It’s many behaviours, including yelling, using profanity, leaving somebody out ostracising them, you know, like, Oh, we’re not going to invite them to lunch, because we don’t like them leading by intimidation, humiliation, you know, being in a meeting, and, you know, calling someone stupid, or the assistant who told the story, and I say it. I have a lot of stories in the book. And I feel like it’s a great way to, to illustrate what I’m talking about. You know, she described how her executive came up behind her and took her by the head and went like this and said, did you leave your brain at home today? Now that happened in a matter of what five seconds. The trauma of it lasts for years, and it lasts forever. You know, the, the bullying behaviours, where we treat people disrespectfully, we call them names we, we sabotage their work. We intentionally don’t give someone the information they need because we’re trying to sabotage them. It’s even disrespectful to not open the door for someone who’s obviously struggling. That’s even disrespectful. So, you know, there’s they’re rude. There’s disrespectful. Where the line gets crossed into bullying out is the repetition. It’s the frequency because everybody has a bad day. Bullying is a huge problem when it’s Rapid, repeat it when it’s continuous. And there’s no apology, or sometimes there is an apology, but then it happens again. And again. And again.

Al Elliott
I think what Barney says there is makes a really, really good point. Because we can all be a little bit dismissive once in a while someone comes up with a great idea. I’m sure I’ve done to be on the hands on it to me, you come up with a great idea. And you go, Oh, well, we’re working on this, aren’t we? So we’ll look at that tomorrow. And that’s just dismissive and can be, and he’s disrespectful. However, if that happens, every time you go and see someone or it continually happens, that’s when it becomes a problem. I think. And I think what Bonnie saying there is, don’t beat yourself up. If you’ve done it once. It’s good that you’ve noticed that you’ve done it once. But when it happens over and over again, you’re probably not even noticing it.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, I agree. I think that is the main the main distinction there, isn’t it? And I think it also demonstrates how quickly these disrespectful behaviours, even if, if somewhat unconsciously, can start to tip into into bullying, which then creates these toxic workplace cultures that business leaders don’t even know how they got there. Because it is this progression it can, it can start settling. So let’s dive a bit more into into the behaviours that can be considered bullying or harassment or discrimination.

Al Elliott
For example, if you’re ghosting someone you just don’t want to see them anymore or you’re deliberately doing a slow response or being the late is another disrespectful blaming others that’s one of my pet pet hates is the people who blame others for things that go wrong often and take the credit themselves for things that go right and that gets on my tips. I will not lie to you. So gossiping, skipping over feelings, unfair policies, and then there’s just the just the nevermind workplace just general life disrespect. Not saying please Oh, thank you. Do you know how to hate that when you go into a coffee shop and someone goes, I’ll have a I’ll have a tool if there hadn’t been a coffee shop in the UK for a long time but a tall white mock a locker with a side of ginge and, and they don’t even say thank you, and they just get back to their phone, I’m like, Oh, hold on, slap that phone out their hands and go give this person this person is a person behind you. They’re gonna make your coffee. And if you’re not careful, they’re gonna spit it anyway. So the question is, are people being oversensitive? Or do we all experience disrespect slightly differently? Barney seems to think the latter

Bonnie
basis for all relationships, in my view, needs to be professionalism, and respect, that if we’re working together, owl, that the very basic things you and we don’t have to be friends, you and I need to treat each other as professionals. And we need to treat each other with respect. And if you know, and then if we were worked together, I would be saying things to you like, Al, I really want to work very well with you. If there’s ever something that I do, inadvertently, that either offends you, or you believe I could be doing better. I really love your commitment that you would tell me, and may I do the same with you, you know, what, I have another chapter called greet expectations, I believe when people start working with each other, and whether it’s in person, or virtually and remotely, that we could do much better setting expectations with each other seems to me that we need new rules for engagement, for working with each other. Because it’s not normal for us to be communicating over webcam. It really isn’t. We’re meant as humans to be in rooms together. So how is it that you and I are going to forge a positive productive working relationship unless I say to you out, tell me what really excites you about this work? And I’m going to tell you the same and like, let’s, let’s come up with a plan about how we can each use our, our strengths, our strengths, to the benefit of the project.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, absolutely reminds me of that research that Dr. Claire Ashley shared with us on the women’s health episode, that actually is not even about being great friends in work, it’s being civil. And actually how just is this civil behaviours, professional behaviour is one of the most positive things we can do in terms of building relationships and supporting our own well being. And I also think that there might be business leaders thinking particularly small businesses, that this sounds a bit over formal to talk about expectations and what I need from people. But that’s exactly what Al and I do. It’s kind of a family business of to where these lines can be blurred in terms of what we need from each other is actually setting that out and having that, that that conversation and sometimes over communication in that way, can be kind of the safeguards, you need to make sure that these behaviours that are unknowingly perhaps disrespectful, continue to happen and could ultimately as we’ve understood, turn into bullying. Yeah, and

Al Elliott
I think if we’re not careful that we’ve got things like Liane often puts together these episodes, which takes about four to six hours, but these opposite episodes together. And so what what she’ll do is highlight certain clips from certain interviews, and so I remember distinctly about four weeks ago we were Blimey, three quarters through an interview and I got really grumpy because in my head, I’m thinking I’m gonna have to edit this. And I have to cut a lot of this stuff down. And so I got really grumpy. I was like, Why did you use so much of this particular person? I won’t name that person. Why do you still watch this particular person? And Leanne quite rightly went, Well, what the hell are you talking about? Oh, I’ve spent four to six hours putting this thing together. It’s only when she explained that to me, I was like, Oh, I now I get it. That was disrespectful. I haven’t repeated it, I hope. But if I had, then yes, there might be some kind of grievance. And it might have to go to our joint HR.

Leanne Elliott
But I think that even in the closest relationships, having this clarity and communication expectations is hugely beneficial. So it makes all the sense to me that we adopt those same rules and boundaries with people that we’re not as familiar with.

Al Elliott
Yet. Now, this is this is the big question I had, again, coming from Gen X. So I’m a little bit older, I’m also male. And so therefore, I’m used to with my friends banter, which usually is awful stuff over WhatsApp when I’ll tell them horrible things. But that’s just banter. So I was like asking Vani where does this banter come into all this? If you’re in a very male led environment, if you ever watch something like on the tools on on YouTube or YouTube channel, you’ll just see that basically, it tradesmen, I say tradesmen, because I do mean all of these videos, all exclusive have men, but tradesmen will play jokes on each other, they will throw things each other, they’ll they’ll intentionally hurt each other. Because that’s the banter. I think so where is there a place for that? Does that fit in? at all in the modern workplace? That’s so funny.

Bonnie
I think we can. There’s, in my book, I quote another book called Modern manhood. And, you know, I had an Chloe, the the woman who wrote that book. And she and I had similar experiences, where some men will say to us, well, you know what, things have gotten so bad with me too. And time’s up, that we can’t even joke around anymore. And the thing is, we can joke around. But it’s about the touching. And, you know, we need to keep our hands to ourselves in the workplace. And we need to err on the side of being respectful. Everybody wants to laugh. Everyone wants to have a good time. I think the operative question is to ask, you know, what are we finding offensive? What’s the culture like at this company, you know, there have been job descriptions that have said things, but you know, bullet pointed, say, must have a thick skin to work here. You know, must enjoy a male environment. Cannot be offended at profanity. And so some companies set, you know, the standards for the culture right out there. And then if people want to come on board and be in that environment, but you know, at least they know, upfront, other companies that want to set a culture of respect, and have it be about the work, my goodness, in this post pandemic workplace, the pressure really feels on and the stakes are very high, as we are trying to create something new. And it I think we will do well, to choose to err on the side of respecting people, and asking them how they’re doing and asking them how they’re feeling. Hi, Emma, emotional intelligence is a real plus, in this post pandemic, workplace. I, you know, I want us to be able to laugh with each other, but not at other people’s expense. You know, we don’t have to make fun of someone in order to laugh together. And it’s useful if leaders can laugh at themselves, and be vulnerable in that way, as opposed to, you know, making someone more junior the brunt of a joke, especially women, it’s tricky.

Leanne Elliott
We’ve talked about gender stereotypes before. And there is a danger here that we’re attributing all of this disrespectful or bullying behaviour to men in the workplace. And that’s not just unfair. It’s not true. Women

Bonnie
bullied to bully women do bully other women and it has a lot to do with how young girls how we’re socialised. When we’re young, and young girls are trained in general, to be competitive with each other and adversarial and to view each other as competitors and in vying for the attention of men. That’s the message that many young girls get. And we carry those messages straight up into, you know, high school and college and adulthood unless Something or someone comes along to break the pattern of that very strongly ingrained messaging that we get when we’re young. And, frankly, when I get in front of rooms of women, I tell them straight out. The only people who benefit from women competing with each other, and demeaning one another, and, and diminishing each other, are men. Because then have been trained differently, typically, and in general, to support each other, and to help promote one another, and to you know, their own sports teams in the military, and we’ve got your back. And, frankly, I believe women need to do more of that. We need to have each other’s back, we need to elevate each other, and break the patterns from childhood. And in, you know, we we’ve heard terms like Catty, and gossipy and bossy bossy is the only word usually referred to as to women, not men. We, my hope is that in staff matters, to raise awareness about those dynamics in the bullying chapter, and also in the chapter called Sex, which is about gender dynamics in the workplace, that we can get on to it. And I can tell you out that when women get on to it, when we see what’s really happening between women, we decide, you know, we need to do it better, just like you and I would work with each other. If I was here with another Leanne or another woman, it’d be the same thing. Like let’s, rather than judge each other, let us pull our strengths and decide how can we both succeed?

Al Elliott
Okay, so I want to play what Leanna called Devil’s avocado here. We really need to go out and see some more people, I think not see other people. Go meet other people. So here’s a question. And I hear this quite a lot. Oh, the gens Ed’s a snowflake before you call Amelia. And this is just someone else in the studio probably in their 70s. So the idea is that, oh, the younger generation, they’re snowflakes, they just can’t deal with this sort of what the workplace is really like, is Paula this?

Paula
Trying to? Okay, let’s see, yeah, I’ll try to convince me that somebody would want to have mental health issues, trying to convince me that, you know, that this is something that people would want, if they’re, if they’re not actually struggling with somehow, you know, want to present themselves as struggling, like we don’t have a society that rewards, you know, people being vulnerable in any way. So somebody is struggling or struggling, if you see some, some some challenges, that is real. So to diminish that isn’t, isn’t logical, it just isn’t logical. And at the end of the day, you know, organisations and we actually have found this in our mental health index organisations, who support the mental health and well being of their people, managers who support the mental health and welfare, but what well being of their people, it’s not just the well being of people that improves, their productivity improves as well. Their ability to collaborate with others improves, as well as their discretionary effort, that little bit extra that they bring to the workplace improves as well. And we’ve also found that that sense of belonging that I mentioned before, is also the antidote to people leave wanting to leave, you know, the great resignation was driven a lot by people just not feeling that sense of belonging for various reasons, which increased over the pandemic. So there’s, again, good business reasons. We can’t ignore what we’re seeing, you know, we do have a society that has a lot of challenges from for many reasons. And, you know, just to slough it off as a passing phase. It completely, you would have a hard time making a logical argument, but that makes sense.

Leanne Elliott
Nice, commercial shaped anti snowflake argument there, Paula. Thank you. Oh, well, she got

Al Elliott
so the sensitive argument number two, what about the argument that because mental health now has less stigma, people are claiming to experience it more can that it’s monkey see monkey do type of thing.

Paula
And again, that’s about time. I like the fact that people are sort of accepting that our mental health our mental well being is really just part of being a human being and that everybody has vulnerability. There isn’t a single human being in this world that doesn’t have a point of vulnerability. If so all of that is great. But I’m very clear that that is not the only thing that is causing the increase in mental health issues that we’re seeing right now. And one way to think about it is that we have seen an increase in hospitalizations, you know, it was particularly amongst younger individuals, you know, people who are having major, major episodes, these are not things that are mitigated, you know, by by the lack of stigma. So, you know, it’s not as if that when we had stigma, or we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t have people going to the hospital, because they’re not able to call that these are things that are an indication that we are under more strain right now. Our society is moving faster than it ever has right now. Some of the social supports that have helped us in terms of managing stress and strain have fallen by the wayside, we are more isolated. And this this trend started well before the pandemic started. And there are even some physical changes that have been happening that are actually creating some vulnerability. So great that we have less stigma, great that people are talking about it more, but do not think that having that the increase in knowledge of how many people are struggling is because there is less stigma. There’s more to it than that.

Leanne Elliott
Another mic drop there anything. I mean, yeah, people might be might be expressing and sharing the challenges that they have. But Paul is use some some data there in terms of hospitalizations. So yeah, what else you got? All right.

Al Elliott
So here’s my argument number three. And I’ve heard this quite a lot. If this whole idea that toxic workplaces are just part of the world of work, like I put up with it. And to be fair, like people, people who are maybe female boomers, in their mid 70s, probably put up with a load of shit that went went down in the 50s 60s and 70s in the workplace. So but the whole idea was that I put up with it. So hope well, Jen said need to learn to live with it. Here’s what Rita things.

Rita
And I think we’re seeing a lot of evidence of this right now. That workplaces that evolve from a place of co creation. And that’s really the guidance I’m giving to my clients. Getting out of this mindset of top down of the leadership of the top needs to know everything needs to own everything needs to drive everything. And really in the woods of agile, I’m thinking the best way to say that it’s it is embracing that’s the word I’m looking for embracing fully this idea that we co create with the people in the workplace, when you invite people into your team into your workplace, you are not inviting them to follow your direction, you are inviting them to help you create and manifest your purpose and your intention. And people want that fullness, they don’t want to just have said tasks to do. And that’s why so many people have side hustle businesses going now. And other things, that’s the place where they get to, to allow that creation. But when you start looking at companies that are winning, and you start rolling back what’s happening inside of that organisation and the culture, it really is this place where there is clear evidence that at every level, people are bought into the idea that they have a very important role to play in creating the success of the organisation, and they are all in to make that happen.

Leanne Elliott
World of Work has fundamentally changed in the last 15 years. And there are no longer these safe, secure jobs. There’s no longer this guarantee if you go to university, and that’s your ticket into a higher paid job. There’s no such thing as a secure pension. There’s no such thing as working with an organisation for life, which means that the power dynamic has shifted, if workers can’t have this security, or those expectations, and what was it no longer going to turn to reality than Yeah, there is going to be some pushback, you’re if I can’t get all these amazing security based things in terms of what it means for my life, I at least want to be happy, at least one experience on purpose. So you can ignore this you can say I went through this. That’s just the way it is put up with it. Gen Zed worm, they will leave and they will find an organisation where things are different. Anything else? So

Al Elliott
those are my three arguments and I think you you and our wonderful guests have just have just demolished them. Can I just say that? I guess the more passionate they get the cooler like I really love listening to people who are passionate about things and particularly Rita back there you can feel a passionate voice, which is why she is Such a great advocate for this kind of thing.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, I agree. And I think what I’m enjoying as well, listening to these advocates of workplace culture is the tone is slightly shifting. And I probably overdid it a bit in terms of my tone shifting. But is that kind of where he’s I think, I feel like we’ve spent the last few years trying to convince employee employers and business leaders that this is the way coach needs to go. And the pandemic has just rewritten all the rules. And Gen Xer during the workforce has rewritten all the rules. I think that Tony shifting from a kind of, oh, you know, you shouldn’t really do this and what that’d be great, you’re a bit more of a, you can believe that things haven’t changed, and you can keep things the same. But good luck to you.

Al Elliott
100% the pandemic is one of those weird things that has just changed, the way we look at everything is Expedia ated, where we would have been, I think, without the pandemic, we probably would have gotten these conversations about 1010 years, 810 years down the line, but having them now, which is cool,

Leanne Elliott
yeah, the genie is out of the bottle. So let’s move on what are the signs of a toxic workplace? And I think really, we need to look at this and in terms of it linking to the impact toxic workplaces have on employees have on businesses. So with that, could the employee behaviour that you’re observing be a sign of a toxic workplace culture? How do employees typically react in these types of toxic environments,

Bonnie
staff is suffering in silence. They don’t know what to do. So they do nothing, they put their head down, they hope and pray that the bullies stays away from them, they try to avoid and certainly in the remote virtual world, it’s a little easier to do that now. But it’s a huge problem. Globally, these toxic work environments, where somehow leaders, some leaders get the message that the way to get things done is to lead by intimidation, rather than treating people with respect and dignity, and an acknowledgement for the work that they were hired to do in the first place. It’s not logical to me that we’re permitting these toxic behaviours to exist in the workplace. And again, so that’s why I felt it was so important to go into great detail in staff matters about what these behaviours look like, and what staff can actually do about them. Besides quitting, we all know about the great resignation that happened. While toxic work environments are a big part of why we had mass numbers of staff quitting,

Leanne Elliott
people quitting high turnover rates are absolutely a red flag and suggest that you may well have a toxic workplace culture. But then we also have to think about quiet quitting the other phenomenon that talks about a lot, your immediate last 12 months, that’s kind of a step before people actually actually quit, they start to withdraw a little bit from their job, you can see drops in productivity, you might see absenteeism due to stress or, or mental health challenges, burnout, either, it’s also likely you’re gonna start to this lack of trust, is gonna maybe result in disagreements between staff, if you’re seeing these conflicts, these arguments happen more frequently, that could be a sign. Also, errors are more likely to occur, but not necessarily be reported. Because that psychological safety isn’t there. So we can expect unhappy customers as well. So all in all, it is pretty impossible for somebody in a toxic work environment to do their best work.

Bonnie
I’ll ask my students and workshop attendees about their stress level on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being the most, what stress level does that behaviour cause you on the average day? And when they start telling me numbers? 6789 20? You know, that’s when I absolutely urge staff to take action about that. And, you know, to say things like, you know, l nobody talks to me like that. We need to, we need to find a different way to speak with each other, you know, when the stress level is off the chart, that’s telling me that there’s high trauma. And, and, I mean, it’s just not logical to think that when you were bullied, and then you’re feeling the feelings, right? You’re feeling anger and sadness and depression, and preoccupation. You know, it’s front of mind. It’s all you can think about using you can you all you want to do is not have it happen again. Now, can anybody do great work when they’re feeling those things? And I would argue and think that most people would say, Absolutely not. You can’t do great work when you’re feeling those things. So it doesn’t serve leaders to permit them to continue.

Leanne Elliott
And all of this on a commercial level is like to look like stay Even worse, a reduction in revenue per head, a drop in profitability. Toxic workplaces aren’t just bad for employee mental health, they’re bad for business. Polar explains more.

Paula
There’s definitely a lot number of levels of impact. If we leave it, then things tend to just get worse. You know, it’s just like any health issue, if it’s a physical health issue, it’s a mental health issue. If there’s nothing that actually stops, the course, of course, often just does get get worse. Many, there are other influences in people’s lives. But why would you take the chance of not being helpful. So that’s one thing. One of the reasons why it also can get worse, even with nothing is that you know, one of the one of the biggest stresses that we have is just feeling alone. And when you have mental health struggle, you’re very likely to feel alone for a number of reasons. You know, you’re you wonder whether people understand you the way you really are, you will feel the stigma, you know, of whether people are actually going to abandon you, or look down on you if they know. And if you step in and make sure that people know that they’re not alone, make sure that you they know that you do value that wraps around the world twice in terms of helpfulness. The other thing is, if we do nothing, and this is nothing on a broader sense, not just stepping in when people are struggling, but providing ongoing support. So people can be their best. creating environments that are healthy, making sure that there are reminded resources, all the things that are important, than from a clear business point of view, your business is not going to do as well,

Unknown Speaker
what I love about what Paul said there, I love all of it. But one thing I particularly love, she says think about the kinds of economies that we have now we have people powered economies, particularly if you’re in a service based business where your people are essentially your product, they are providing a service to your customers, even even if we just remove all the all the people humanistic side from it, and we just talked about really coldly, if people are your product, and you’re not investing time to make sure that your product is working brilliantly and has everything it needs and and all the different. What am I trying to say I like all the different components needs to make up itself to be effective job channels. So,

Al Elliott
so have you if you had a printing press and you are printing flyers, for example. And it was there was six machines that printed these flyers, and you ran them 24/7. And never once and never once did any maintenance, oil them strokes them spoke nicely to them at night, tuck them in, if you just didn’t look after them, then they’re going to break down. Of course, you’re not gonna do that because you’re not an idiot, know

Leanne Elliott
what you’re talking about. They’re perfectly thank you I was losing that. But there is is kind of this, there’s prevention, you’re doing maintenance, to prevent a problem happening. Similarly, if that if that printing press broke, what you can do throw out just buy a brand new one, or actually invest time in timeout repairing, and recover the machine you’ve already invested in, in terms of in terms of money in terms of, I don’t know how its configured, maybe that takes time. Let’s stretch

Al Elliott
this analogy as far as it’ll go. Because if your printing press does break down, the first thing you look at is probably good working out what is the single point of failure in that in that machine? And you go right, well, that’s clearly what’s been under a lot of stress. So therefore we fix that. And so it’s like same with with all of your people, you people you push to put too much pressure on them, they’re going to break, but you can probably nail that down to like one single point that you’ve put too much pressure on them. And that’s what broke them is the fact that Brian from accounting came in and said, you’re slightly, you put your expense form in the wrong intro, and therefore we’re not paying it. So start it again. We’ll pay next week. Fuck off, Brian,

Leanne Elliott
it’s not helpful, Brian, it’s not helpful. Perfect. Again, let’s let’s just push this analogy a little bit more. What you’re talking about there? I’m thinking like you take a car into like into it. What I don’t know, I don’t know, cars. But if he’s got a problem and you plug something in it tells you where the error is. Yeah. What’s the diagnosis in terms of workplace culture, insight and engagement survey, a well being survey. It’s not sexy, but it’s a diagnosis. And you can spend infinite amounts of money trying to fix your car, if you don’t know what the problem is. Or you can invest a little bit of money to have an expert telling you this is the problem and then spend your total investment actually fixing that problem. If we’re going to push this even more i think i One more push. We’re talking about toxic workplace environments. And we talked about this in our in our burnout episode, you know that often burnout is attributed to the individual, being weak, not being resilient enough not been able to cope. And I think it was I think it was Sally Clark. He said something like if all the fish in the lake dies, you don’t blame the individual fish you start to Look at the chemical formulation of the lake. So use the printing press idea if your printing press breaks down, you’re good. Don’t go, oh, there must be something wrong with the roof. So yeah, anyway, I think I think we’ve taken this analogy as far as we can.

Al Elliott
So I think what we need to look at really is like we’ve looked at all of the basics we’ve looked, we’ve asked loads of questions, we need to say, what actually what practical things can leaders do to prevent a toxic workplace culture. So I think you’ve put together 10 ways in which we can actually prevent or fix these toxic workplace cultures.

Leanne Elliott
I have 1010 recommendations for you. So before we dive into each one, so I’ll just go through the list, then that’ll be good. Yeah, so the first one is, stay curious be open to having a problem. Two is understand secrets, including your own. Number three, is create trust and empathy with staff so that they feel safe enough to share their secrets. Number four, respect people’s feelings and preferences, especially when it comes to physical contact. Number five, collect insights. Number six, employee voice. Number seven, ensure your remote or hybrid model is respectful. Number eight, take it to coaching, take it to your leadership coach, or use some self coaching questions. Number nine, invest in managers. And number 10, hire an expert.

Al Elliott
Lovely, so it’d be logical start number one, would the first one Stay curious be open to having a problem? What does this mean? So I think

Leanne Elliott
it’s like you know, when you can talk about addiction, like the first step of curing addiction is to understand you have an addiction. The first step of curing a toxic workplace culture is being open to the fact that you might have a problem in the absence of reports of, of harassment or bullying or disrespectful behaviour. The lack of those reports does not mean that there is an absence of incidents, bullying, harassment or unethical behaviours, they are big, scary claims, and it might feel better not to poke the bear or to keep your head in the sand or you know, ignorance is bliss. But yeah, surprisingly, this is not an effective long term strategy. As Barney explains,

Bonnie
all of that adds up, out to a lot of silence. That’s why I say the book says the quiet part out loud bullying, and sexual harassment, these are secrets. These are embarrassing demoralising secrets that staff are living with on a day in day out basis, and they are trying hard to survive them. If staff does not feel safe to go to HR. And staff does not feel safe to go to leaders. That means that those people simply do not know. And staff tell me that sometimes they feel like their leaders don’t want to know, or that they are oblivious to what’s really happening in the departments. And I think that’s dangerous, especially in this post pandemic environment, where decisions are happening on a daily basis that have monetary impact. They’re impacting people. And I My concern is my fear is that leaders do not have complete information, because their staff, in large part are too frightened to tell them what’s really happening. Now, one big indicator, if leaders are very curious about, you know, if bullying is problem in the, in their company, one metric that is a very strong indicator is the employee retention rates. People don’t leave companies where they feel respected and valued. They do leave. But as you know, Marcus Buckingham, his thought leadership expert, who coined that phrase, and that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers, Marcus Buckingham had coined that and it, you know, really hits you in the gut, people leave people.

Al Elliott
So number one is staying curious. But there’s something which Bonnie alluded to there, which was secrets. It’s a whole chapter in a book. And the secret is the idea that we all have kind of stuff that we don’t want other people to necessarily know about, but will influence the way that we look at the world in the workplace. So I asked Bonnie, to explain a bit more about what she meant by this idea of secrets

Paula
in

Bonnie
my experience, and, you know, I would challenge you and and whoever might, we all have secrets inside us. I believe that the people in our lives, our families, our friends, our colleagues, that it’s human nature to put people in boxes, and call them metaphoric boxes. You know, where we size people up than we, we kind of know their story, we know enough of their story that we feel like we have a handle on what makes them tick. What I have found, though, is that most people have at least an equal amount of facts about them, things about themselves, that are secret, that that are none of our business, none of other people’s business that we probably will never know. And that we shouldn’t know. And those pieces, I call them secrets, those things sometimes manifest themselves in everyday life.

Al Elliott
So what I understood from a buddy was saying was that there is stuff that goes on in your personal life or has gone in your personal life, that can be triggered quite easily at work that you would have no idea about as a, as a colleague, as a manager or as a leader.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, this is actually one thing that that I got taught when I trained in coaching was that there’s there’s always this feeling that we need to know what the information is, like if someone said, I had a really bad experience, I don’t want to talk about the experience. I want to talk about how it made me feel people get fixated on what happened was you do this and you don’t need that information. And I think that’s the same if you know you have a secret, I’m going to share one of my secrets I think we actually already shared on the podcast, but we were involved in it and attempted carjacking a few years ago, it was late at night. It was in the car I was driving, it was all very, very scary. And that did lead to some anxiety that experienced later down the road. But he’s also things like incongruence like it because that situation didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand why there was a current little the word I didn’t understand why there’s a man getting out of the baseball. But if I’m now in situations where I can’t grasp what’s going on, I start to feel that kind of low level of anxiety. And I guess it’s like if I worked for an organisation like, Oh, we’re going out for a client dinner, you okay to drive home, I was driving home at night. If I said, You know what, I’m actually not comfortable driving home, if there’s a leader, my leaders and going well, why not? We really need you to do this blower, I’m going to have to share my secret, rather than you having the faith in me the trust in me that if I say I can’t do something, there’ll be a reason for that. Yeah, I think

Al Elliott
that’s a really, really good point, that if someone said if if, if you’ve got a good relationship with someone, they say, Look, I just really don’t want to do that, then you should be able to say, Okay, we’re gonna do something else. And that makes perfect sense. Mine isn’t a secret either. But I was bankrupt in 2007, for about 103 grand. And so now I’ve got this thing about money, where, and it’s kind of like the opposite. It’s like when people slag off rich people and go, Oh, look at them that filthy rich, and I’m just like, hang on a minute. Some of those people not saying all, but some of those people have worked bloody hard for what they’ve got. And it just really, really gets on my nerves when they go, you’d say, oh, that should pay 70% taxes like Well, wait a minute, where’s the incentive for them to go off and make more money? So so that annoys me? And then when when I never say I can’t afford something, which is probably to my detriment, because then I go and buy stuff that probably I don’t have the funds for at the time. So you know, it’s I didn’t say can’t afford at that point. Because I just hate the idea of not having money we grew up with didn’t have a lot of money. So I heard we can’t afford it a lot. So that’s one of my sort of secrets. So if I was in a meeting with an investor, and the investor said, look, at this point, we can’t afford to do this. My my hackles would be up. And I’d be like, oh, we need to find a way to do this, which is good, but also not great. Anyway. So the pandemic is a massively traumatic experience. And we definitely, I’m not saying all but most of us share the secret of the pandemic, really affecting the way that we will live. So we asked Paul, about this. And we asked her what the impact of the pandemic had on mental health.

Paula
We know what the pandemic did for mental health at Lifeworks. We have a mental health index. And we’ve been collecting data since 2017. And, and started doing so and publishing monthly in 2020, April 2020. And we have measures of the mental health of the working population before and after. And there’s a tremendous difference, there’s been a tremendous decline. And that decline, although we’ve improved somewhat, really is nowhere near where it was in 2019. And before and when you think about it, what did the pandemic bring into our lives from a mental health point of view, it brought change, it brought uncertainty, it brought a sense that you didn’t have full control over things, it brought risk. It brought increased isolation. Those are the big triggers. The human mind doesn’t like any of those points that I hadn’t had mentioned. They put undue stress on us. And this was going on for months for years. So up and down and left and right and change and uncertainty and things. And what happens is that that you know when we sort of understand that is, you know, we we have a part of our brain that responds to stress like that fight or flight response, there’s a risk, there’s an uncertainty, there’s an unsettling, and that fight or flight was super engaged because it had to be because of our situation. So we’re super engaged in that part of our thinking, and that part of our brain work. And what happens is that actually competes with the part of our brain that is responsible for emotional control that it’s, it’s empathetic. So we have actually gotten used to being in a way that is more sensitive to stress than we were before. So that’s not going to go away. Just because things change, it takes a while it takes intention for for any human being, to get out of the impact of what is really, you know, it meets the definition of long term trauma.

Leanne Elliott
I think there can be a feeling from people in general that the pandemic looking back wasn’t that traumatic, you know, okay, we have to stay at home for a while and, and, you know, we work from home and whatever else, but it’s, you know, it’s poorly said, though, what’s, what’s happening is that stress is, is interfering with our emotional control. So we’re, we’re experiencing that, that stress differently retrospectively and looking back and with less emotion. So I stand by the fact that you don’t need to necessarily know somebody’s secret to support them in the work environment and make sure that they’re not experienced any, any negative behaviours, or experiences due to not sharing the secret. But similarly, if we can create trust and empathy with with staff so that they feel safe enough to share their secrets, then it can help us, I guess, make decisions ahead of time, we only know what we know. And the only way to understand what employees have been through, and how they might respond to the environment they’re in and the stresses are experiencing is if they share their secret. So with me, you would know as my manager, if you knew my carjacking secret, you’d never asked me to drive at night. But to share secrets, our staff need to trust us need to trust us as leaders Needs Trust colleagues, and in return be sharing the compassion and empathy that their experience deserves. As polar explains,

Paula
I think one of the things that is, you know, asking if you’re okay, is a great way to start the conversation that shows that you care. It’s, it’s, it’s a it’s a it’s a conversation starter, you know, but we kind of learn, you know, when we’re going up to have knee jerk responses, like, how are you fine? Okay, I’m good. Like, we have these knee jerk responses. What you can do, you know, as a second point, or even instead of Aru? Oh, okay. It’s the a little bit more specific, like actually trigger a conversation as opposed to sort of a knee jerk response. And if you’re, if you’re, if you’re worried about something, you have seen something. So think about what you’ve seen. So, Joe, I noticed that, you know, you’re more short with people, you’re more angry with people than you were before. You know, I’m just wondering, you know, Is anything going on? Can I help? You know, are you okay? That’s a preamble to it. It doesn’t just allow for that knee jerk reaction. You know, I’ve noticed that, you know, you’ve always been on time in terms of all your reports, all your work. And I’ve noticed over the last while that you seem to be struggling, are you okay? Like, it allows people to feel seen, which is important. But it also gives people an opportunity to really think very practically, about the fact that something might be different.

Leanne Elliott
These types of relationships take intention, and time and patience, and practice, people trust at different speeds, particularly if they’ve experienced a toxic workplace or a toxic leader in the past. And as a manager, this might sound like a lot of work. But the benefits of these relationships do actually work both ways. Positive relationships are as important for a manager in terms of resilience and fulfilment and performance. And they remove the unpredictability and ambiguity, the workplace. A good manager is rarely surprised by an employee decision. They see it coming. Here’s Paula,

Paula
part of the work that we do is to support people who are on long term leave because of health issues. And to come work with them a little while ago, but we did two pieces of work. One is we were asking people, you know, when they when they were asking managers, when they first saw that something was not right, you know, when they thought that there might be you know, your employee might be going going on leave or I go on leave. So employee was already on leave and we asked them to think back and on average, it was 18 months that they started to pick up Nothing was afraid, at once. But most of the time, they didn’t know what to do, they didn’t know how to step in. On the other side, very often when people do call us proactively for support in our EAP sometimes it is the fact that someone at work, notice something different, you know, you might be feeling a little bit off your, your family might say something and you ignore your family. But when you can no longer quote unquote, hide, and it’s showing up at work. Often that is the trigger for people getting help. And getting help is a good pay.

Leanne Elliott
It can be easy to flippantly say to somebody, how are you? Oh, yeah, fine, good. And we talked about that a lot in our bonus episodes didn’t wait. But yeah, as Paul said, you know, if you if you notice something different, he noticed these changes in behaviours. And your job as a manager should be checking in and seeing that person is okay. And you don’t need to say, Oh, you look like shit, everything. All right? He just gave us a bit like I’ve noticed something’s different. You know, what’s going on? Is there anything I can I can help you with? And just having those conversations. And yeah, the you know, the longer you’ve had that, that trust in your relationship, that empathy in your relationship, the easier it’s going to be for, for people to come come to you.

Al Elliott
And I think moving on from that, because slides nicely into number four, which is respecting people’s feelings and preferences when it comes to physical contact. When I was a manager, when I had my first business, we had about 2530 staff. And I think I was I was only like 24 at the time. And I think I was quite tactile with the people. Because I saw them as just like friends. They were my peer group. And so I’d go along and I put my hand on someone’s shoulder go, Hey, you get on today, when they’re on the phone, you know, how you get on today? Have you sold much beer because that’s what we sold, we delivered beer. And I think the that might have been okay back then. But it probably wasn’t we should probably err on the side of no physical contact, and particularly with the new generations because there is some research that that Gen Zed, millennials, Boomers and Gen X all just react to physical contact in different way. Here’s Barney.

Bonnie
Well, I was just going to say, remember, during the pandemic, we had to ask permission, Can I shake your hand? Right? Because we were all about washing her hands. And it really is about can I help you? Let’s not skip the step. You know, I’d love to give you a hug right now, would that be okay? And you know, because some environments, you know, I’ve heard had many staff men and women say I’m very huggy. That’s just the way I am. Well, in your personal life, that’s one thing in the workplace. It’s another and in the workplace. It’s not that hugging is forbidden. It just is up to getting permission to do so that’s that really just wanted to bed? Can I give you a hug? I’d love to give you a hug.

Leanne Elliott
I’m hugging. And that way I had stuff that you know, I used to I used to give a hug a friend and see them for for a while. Would I do that now? Probably not. Or I guess it’s whether you have that that permission again, isn’t it I liked that we learn I’d like that about the pandemic. physical space is important. And permission is important. Consent is important. So our fifth recommendation is to collect insights. I’ll I worry, I sound like a broken record at this point sucking into this one.

Al Elliott
Yeah, I think when it comes to insights, if we’re running any kind of marketing campaign, then we’re going to use Google Analytics to find out how well each advert is doing or we’ll use our own Fathom or whatever we’re going to use for our analytics. If we are investing in something, then we have a spreadsheet telling us how much we’ve spent and what our return on investment is. It doesn’t seem like we’re collecting the same information for our workplace, workplace Insights is one of the most important things you can actually measure. Because you can see when there’s going to be potential problems coming up, you can also see what’s going well, and of course it to a certain point has to be anonymized. But then that’s the same as Google Analytics, you can’t see exactly what Jeff from Iowa is doing. But you can see that a number of people are leaving your sales for your marketing funnel on page four. So I think we need to be paying attention to the metrics, return agrees.

Rita
So there, there are three key components that really you need to be paying attention to, in your business, in as much as you are paying attention to the financials. Right. So in your financials, you’re you’re paying attention to your income stream, you’re paying attention to your expenses, right, your fixed your variable, you have certain key indicators, right? The same thing needs to happen in your culture. And I’m going to give you those three things that you always wanted to be paying attention to. And if you want more about this, we’re going to link you into my LinkedIn profile, I believe and I’ve been doing a series on LinkedIn about this very thing. So the first thing is belonging. Do people have a clear connection with one another? Do they have shared experience together? or shared relationship. And then the next thing that happens, once we feel like we have belonging is that we can focus on our contribution. Now we can show our competence, we can allow our full selves to show up in the workplace. And this is what we all want as business owners and leaders, right, we want people to have their full potential on full display in our business at all times. That’s how we’re going to get maximum optimal contribution. That’s how we’re going to achieve high performance as a team, but belonging is the first thing that has to happen. So we have belonging, then we allow people to unleash their contribution into the workplace. And once I have, I know I belong here, I feel competent and confident in my ability to add value into this workplace. Now I have affiliation. Now I have alliances now I have shared purpose, I have shared meaning, I have shared intention, I am now connected to the organisation. So belonging is more at the person to person level. And this affiliation is more at the organisational level, you think people join an organisation and they feel automatically they feel connection to the organisation. But that’s not true. We have to build that we

Al Elliott
100% agree with Rita, which is why we have created something called the RX seven, you probably heard us talking about it before. Essentially, it is a workplace Insights tool. It measures things like well, what does it measure the end?

Leanne Elliott
Well, the measures things like belonging and things like loyalty and organisational commitment, but it also measures the the foundations of workplace culture that leaders can control to support these positive feelings in behaviours and attitudes. For work, so yeah, so we measure the engagement factor, but we also measure the culture factor.

Al Elliott
Exactly. It’s called the RX seven, by the way, because there are seven things seven foundations to an amazing workplace. And they all begin with arm, which is kind of handy. kind of handy, isn’t it? So on to number six, which is employee voice, Lian, what do we need to know about employee voice,

Leanne Elliott
we know from previous conversations that we’ve had that employee voice is one of the most effective ways to build psychological safety. And that is basically asking your employees for their ideas, their concerns, or opinions, and hearing them with openness and empathy and no judgement, or fear of negative consequences. So that could be gathering insights. As you work through the arc seven, it could be having listening events, it could be having feedback channels, there’s lots of different ways to implement employee voice. Bonnie also sees employee voice as an excellent way to ensure that even the most difficult of leadership decisions are made with respect. It

Bonnie
is what I’ve seen, is, even if the decision being made by leaders is not the preferable one by staff, that it is respectful to ask chapter four in the book is called ask first. Leaders would do well to ask their staff about decisions that are about to be made, and get it and that feels respectful, to just be, you know, queried about what do you think about that? Do you have an opinion? Is there a better way? And, and I, what I see is that in the rush to make decisions, sometimes that step is being skipped over. And so why would be urging leaders to take a fresh look at who it is they’ve got on their team

Leanne Elliott
reads it also uses employee voice to create positive workplace coaches, and does clarify that it’s not about giving people what they want. It’s more about facilitating their understanding of the leadership choices and decisions that have been made. And that might sound familiar. Yeah, we’re back to transparency. Here’s Rita. Go,

Rita
the so I’ll give it I’ll give the example that I share in in my book show positive there is one company that I worked with, during the pandemic. And and I conclude each chapter in part one of the book, unveiling part of the story and the story relates to the chapter. So you get to follow one company throughout the heartland of the book by just reading the story at the end of the chapter. And so this was a small family owned construction business. A lot of family members actively involved working day to day inside of the business. Like so many when the pandemic shutdown occurred, they sort of closed up the doors, everybody went home, then they received word that they were an essential business and that they could return to work. But it was you know, it was a very difficult time the owner didn’t know how much work there would be and had to think about payroll and sustaining the business and all of those things. So he He went to the to his employees. And he said, I can’t bring all of you back. Right now I just don’t know that I have the work for that. I understand you might have to make other decisions. You may not want to wait for me I’m I understand this could be my loss. But I’ve got to make what I think it’s the right decision.

Al Elliott
Certainly I’ve got this question leaders going to ask where ease of the line? So where’s the line between being transparent and oversharing? How can I be honest with her telling them, that about stuff that they don’t need to know without putting unnecessary stress on their teams, I asked Rita about this,

Rita
I think there is a difference between, I gotta use this visual, that one of my clients is one time. And he’s like, you just don’t jump up on the conference table and drop a load. And, you know, you can’t do that to people. That’s not what it’s about. I think you can say that if you say, and 21 days, and we have to end. So I need all of your best thinking with me about how we are going to turn around this crisis in the next 21 days. And I have some thoughts about some of the essential things that we need to do. But I really need your input about how we go about doing those in ways that you can support. And that, you know, I’m not trying to transfer the burden to you, but the house is on fire. We got to put the fire out, I need your help to do that.

Leanne Elliott
Does that answer your question? Now?

Al Elliott
Definitely don’t get don’t get on the on the don’t take a crap on the boardroom table is what I tell.

Leanne Elliott
It’s our seventh recommendation comes back to remote in and hybrid working models and making sure that they are respectful. And you might be thinking, how could they be disrespectful? Well, if we think about even the hybrid model, now being a thing, it’s because people have different preferences, probably based on their home circumstances, if I have children at home, then it might be better for me to in terms of my childcare to work from home on certain days, it might be much better for me to be in the office, if I’ve got deep thinking work to do. I think the point is, it’s individualistic. And this is why kind of mandating people to be in the office on certain days can become problematic. Bonnie also thinks that remote and hybrid work is an important consideration when making sure behaviours at work remain respectful.

Bonnie
It really is about not skipping over feelings and understanding. For example, when the pandemic first hit, and we were all on Zoom and stream yard and, and video conferencing, all of a sudden, in five minutes, it felt like staff were creating home offices, right. And some people had to have their cameras on in their bedrooms or in their apartments that were modest, that they weren’t necessarily camera ready. And that, you know, somebody might make fun of, you know, wow, that’s a really tiny place, you have their hell. And it could be a seemingly innocent comment. But it comes across as really disrespectful. We’re on new territory is the thing, these last three years have have created a whole new ballgame. And HR is, you know, struggling to create new rules and have, you know, coming into the office and not and, and are the working mums feeling that they’re having to follow different rules than then folks who are coming into the office say or that they’re being judged harshly because they’re staying home with their children. It’s a tricky, dynamic that the world has run so fast. And the humans are having trouble keeping up. I remember

Leanne Elliott
doing a wellbeing audit for a client. And they couldn’t understand why people were unhappy when they would let them go home early from work, or they had a really great day and they were like, You know what, guys? It’s half past three, go home. And a couple moments. I found this really disrespectful. And when I dug into it, it’s because everyone’s childcare, they’ve paid for childcare, they’ve arranged for somebody gonna pick their kids up at school. So having that spontaneous early finish was disrespectful. You’re disrespecting the things I’ve had to do to be here until half past five today. So this is one of those really, again, an innocent thing. Hang in there might feel like we’re doing the right thing as leaders, that would be nice. But for others, it might come across a little bit differently.

Al Elliott
So think about having just respect for the people you work with.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, and I think I’m being open to the fact that, that what you think is respect might actually be disrespectful, we need to dig down, dig down sometimes. So our eighth recommendation is coaching, if you have a coach, Take this, all of these questions to coaching, if you don’t have a coach, consider getting one. If for whatever reason, you can’t do that right now, self coaching is also a really great way, in terms of reflection in terms of journaling, you know, taking some some of these questions and really spending the time to reflect on it, I’ll always laughs at me, because he’ll ask me a question I’ll go Am I need to think about that. And I’ll literally sit there for like, five minutes and think about it. But that’s what reflection is, you know, we need to work through the possibilities. So we’re not jumping to conclusions or, or making assumptions. So yeah, we need to we need to start all of this coaching starts with self awareness, and checking our own behaviour. As Paula explains,

Paula
I think it’s the number one thing and I mentioned all the all the the characteristics of, of leaders, and I think paying attention to that is sort of important in terms of just you know, checking your own behaviour. And you know, are you doing things that are helpful or not helpful, but the number one thing is to make sure that people feel included, and psychologically safe and valued. You know, maybe that’s not the number one thing that’s like a cluster of three. But it is it is that that feeling of feeling safe and sense of belonging, and they tell you why that’s important. You don’t want to do harm. You know, the number one thing is to do no harm. You know, people might have a lot of stresses in their lives, they and work itself, this is a stress, but it shouldn’t be an engaging stress, you shouldn’t have a challenge. And not after that stress, you shouldn’t be thinking about who’s talking behind your back, or you know, whether you’re going to get a big hammer, or if you just say something as something wrong, you know, you should feel that you are valued, you should feel that you are safe,

Leanne Elliott
cool, makes a really good point there, it can be easy for us to say, you know, to answer the question, What was the last thing you did with the intention of helping your employees feel a sense of belonging? And these are types of coaching questions that can really help this reflection and help you identify if you may have pockets of toxicity. In your culture, Bonnie also offers some really useful coaching questions

Bonnie
of you do, do you yell at people on a regular basis? Another one is, do you have you had people quit? repeatedly over the last six months? Think about the people who’ve left your employment? Another question is, do you ask people why they’re quitting? Do you think it’s funny to make fun of people? Those are the kinds of questions to test to see if you yourself are exhibiting some bullying behaviour. And I do that in order to give them insight away, I also ask them, How would you feel about your son or daughter working for you bridges into an awareness of the kinds of behaviours that they would be subjected to the number

Al Elliott
nine is to invest in your managers. So as Paul, Paul is going to point out, that the manager has a massive impact on the workplace, on the relationships in the workplace, and she just says we need to invest in our managers,

Paula
it’s come on through our research that how manager shows up can have an impact, it has a relationship with the level of well being that their, their staff has. So this is in one of our mental health index reports, we looked at a number of things. One thing was, as you would expect, if the manager is humanistic, if they genuinely care about people, employees had better health scores. The other thing is actually charisma is the manager felt it was inspirational or motivational, that actually helped people as well, that got them engaged more that helped them feel more meaning in terms of their work, was helpful to the mental health in the other thing was just autonomous, you know, managers who were able to make decisions, you know, clear decisions. So people felt that kind of confidence and stability at AOL. That was an important. The other thing was inclusive, you know, making sure that people didn’t feel that there were leaks or there was isolation or anything of that sort. And the other thing, the other factor that we found that was a I thought was important is having a team orientation. So you’re working towards a collective good, you’re all working towards making sure that the team does their work well, that the organisation successes. And it’s not just about the manager looking good, or one or two people looking for that. So those are the factors that actually did make a difference in terms of mental wellbeing of teams.

Leanne Elliott
The list is long when it comes to the benefits of having Do you know what not even great managers, just average managers, people who have some form of management competence in management. Yeah, mental health, wellbeing, engagement, productivity, performance, belonging, reduced turnover, the list, the list goes on, if you do one thing, as a business leader, invest in your managers. And finally, number 10. Our final recommendation, hire an expert. Now, if you’re getting investigated by HMRC, or what you know, the tax man for unethical or illegal behaviour, you’d call an expert. So you know, if you think you have a toxic workplace culture that can very likely include unethical or illegal behaviour, you hire an expert, right, Rita,

Rita
I think that you start with really getting clear about how you want to engage to what and to what end, what am I asking my people to help me to do. And the other thing I will say, and this is gonna sound very self serving, is it it’s not, but you really need to bring in an outside expert like myself, to help you if you’re in the situation, if you’re thinking, I probably need to do that. But I don’t even know where to start, where to start, if it’s getting the right kind of help. And somebody that can help you assess and frame things up and decide where you are, you know, the good thing of bringing in somebody who’s trained like I am and organisational psychology is I’m going to come in. And the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to do a deep assessment, I will not work with you if he won’t give me access at all levels of your organisation. Because I can’t just know what the senior people know, I need you and you need me. But I need to understand where and how communication is flowing to the deepest audit people down at the organisation understanding or not understanding about what people are at the top of the organisation? Where does that disconnect happen? If you’re hiring somebody to come in as a consultant, and help you with your business, and they’re not doing an assessment like that, to begin with, you’ve hired the wrong person,

Leanne Elliott
toxic or not, it’s unlikely, as a business owner or senior business leader, that you are going to have an accurate picture of what your workplace culture is like, if you are not measuring it if you are not doing these deep assessments. And of course, whatever improvements that you want to make in your culture, whether it’s inclusion, whether it’s innovation and creativity, whether it’s growth mindset, how can you make those improvements, if you don’t know where you’re starting from, you know, it comes back down to the most important thing you can do to understand how to get to where you’re going is understand your starting point.

Al Elliott
And also, once you are doing those things, once you’ve implemented some kind of project, you want to save as worked. How are you going to know if you haven’t measured the beginning and haven’t measured at the end? Anyway. So I feel like we have hammered home this idea about workplace metrics. Yeah, we’ve

Leanne Elliott
covered a lot we could a lot them and I think is kind of this one stop guide to understanding and fixing toxic workplace coaches. If you have any questions, get in touch, we will leave all the links to our guests below including Barney and Rita’s really great books. Actually, we read them both. So yeah, let us know if you have a question. If your interest in employee insights, anything at all you can you can get in touch we we get the occasional email, but I still think some of you don’t know about email really isn’t the showrunner.

Al Elliott
To be fair. Sometimes the show notes doesn’t show on every single app. That’s true. But yeah, if you’re interested in get in touch, then just podcast at truth lives and work.com. And if you that we’ll put you in touch with the right person if you want to speak to them. So that has been gone.

Leanne Elliott
chunky episode. I didn’t want

Al Elliott
to say that because I always say and but I think that there’s been a lot of error about toxic workplace cultures. There’s obviously two amazing books that you can go and buy. For to learn a bit more about that. And then the links as Leanne says, are in the show notes. We are going I think, what are we doing next week? Do we know we’re doing next week?

Leanne Elliott
Next week? Yes, we do. We have another great episode next week. Next week. We are talking all about the four day workweek. What is the psychology arguments for it? And importantly, what the commercial arguments for it can you afford as a business owner to put your staff on a four day workweek at full pay?

Al Elliott
We got three amazing guests. One who’s the expert will literally the world An expert if you Google four day workweek he comes up one who is a consultant and one person who’s done it so it’s going to be a great episode so we will see you next time bye for now