How To Tell If Your Workplace Is Toxic
When Susan Fowler a former engineer at Uber posted a blog in 2018 detailing her experiences of sexual harassment at the company it lit a firestorm of employee accusations of inappropriate behavior. This eventually led to an external investigation, which revealed a toxic company culture and resulted in the 2018 departure of Uber Founder and CEO Travis Kalanick.
Sadly, Uber is not an isolated story. Women Who Tech released the State of Women In Tech report this month, which details findings from a survey of 1,003 employees, founders, and investors in the technology industry. The research finds that nearly 50% of women founders and women working in technology have experienced harassment. In terms of the type of harassment, 65% of women founders said they were propositioned for sex and 59% of women experienced unwanted physical contact. Women leave the technology industry because of unsafe workplace practices and toxic cultures created by poor leaders. These workplaces offer almost no opportunities for advancement and create hostile working conditions for the few women who do make it to leadership positions.
Frances Frei, Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business school, and workplace culture expert was instrumental in leading the cultural change efforts at Uber. She says most toxic cultures are born out of poor leadership practices from a small number of managers. “When I went to Uber in June of 2017, it was known as a pretty bad culture and we separated from 20 people. There were more than 10,000 people in the organization and yet the culture was changed within nine months. The vast majority of employees are good people, they've just gotten into bad habits, some of their own doing, but usually more a result of their leaders and managers,” says Frei.
Leaders create culture through the behaviors they choose to ignore, reward, endorse and engage in themselves. If you want to know whether your company’s culture is toxic, Frei says that you need to take a close look at the behaviors leaders engage in. “There were 3000 managers at Uber and none of them had been trained on how to be a manager. They all joined as an individual contributor and got promoted very quickly. I got obsessed with the disproportionate role that leaders were having on the organizational culture,” says Frei.
What keeps toxic workplace cultures in place is denial. When leaders are not aware of how their behavior creates negative experiences for employees or worse, they deny these experiences, it often takes whistleblowers like Susan Fowler to call time out on the gaslighting. Frei argues companies can’t wait for whistleblowers, leaders need to actively monitor their cultures for signs they might be toxic.
“The test I always do is the same. I look to see if there are demographic tendencies associated with who is thriving. If the same people are achieving and are satisfied then we have a culture problem,” she says. Interestingly the test works both ways. If you want to know how healthy your culture is Frei says it’s important to understand the lived experience of underrepresented employees. “When Black women are thriving, just as much as White men, as an example, companies no longer have a culture problem.”
Cultures can easily become eroded or worn out, through habitual behaviors that eat away at the organization’s values, which is why Frei engaged all employees at Uber to help redefine the values. “A culture becomes toxic if an individual starts utilizing the values for personal gain. For example, if a value is trust, and I'm tired and you're questioning me and I don’t like it, then I might say to you, 'We value trust right!' That is how cultural values get weaponized,” she says. In healthy company leaders regularly revisit and update their values, to ensure they represent the behaviors employees are expected to engage in.
It's not just leaders, every employee has an impact on the culture in their workplace, which is why Frei says we need to ditch the golden rule, which is to treat others as you would like to be treated. “That only works when we're around people who are just like us. If you seek out difference, then you want to treat others as they want to be treated.”
