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HBR Explainer: Porter’s Five Forces (that shape strategy)

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HBR Explainer: Porter’s Five Forces (that shape strategy)

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The competitive forces that shape strategy — in under two minutes.

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The Atlantic: The Only Career Advice You’ll Ever Need

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The Atlantic: The Only Career Advice You’ll Ever Need

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The contentment of being true to yourself comes through doing good work, and doing it with love.

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When we are stuck on a hard problem, it usually isn't because we can't find the answer; it's that we don't even know the right question. Imagine that you are trying to figure out how fast food can make you healthier: You are overlooking the right first question-which is whether fast food can do this. That is precisely the problem with agonizing over finding the right job and career.

"What am I supposed to do to find a career that makes me happy?" is not the right first question. The right first question is "Who am I?" Only after we answer that can we understand our needs and desires. And only that understanding can allow us to get on with the serious business of what we are supposed to do with our life.

According to legend, the dictum "Know Thyself" was carved into the stone of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, in ancient Greece. At around the same time, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, "Knowing the self is enlightenment." What these thinkers of the ancient world meant was that all knowledge must start with self-knowledge. Yet, again and again, social scientists find that we don't know ourselves as well as we think we do. Studies based on survey data show that we don't always accurately perceive the impression we make on others, nor does our self-perception consistently match how others see us. And we are not great at assessing our own abilities.

Part of this ignorance of ourselves derives from cognitive biases and a defensive need to place ourselves in the best possible light. So we remember things we did well but forget what we did poorly. We also tend to overestimate our skills-especially when, in fact, we're incompetent-and think we're smarter than we are.

Knowing ourselves demands effort that goes beyond simply observing our behaviors and tastes, or even listening to what others tell us about ourselves. It requires a process of discernment, of looking for deeper meaning. The ancient Greek word for this is sunesis; the Buddhists call it prajna. When turned inward, it is a mystical journey into the nature of the self.

This metaphysical inquiry can lead to unexpected answers. For example, the Buddhist answer to the question of the self is that it is an illusion-not that you don't exist, but that you don't exist in the absence of others. A famous Zen Buddhist koan asks, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" One solution to this riddle is that any sound would be an illusion-it would become real only if you added your other hand to make the clap. It's a metaphor for the self without others. Your individual existence, in isolation, is empty; it is made full only by the presence of other people.

From this proposition naturally follows an answer to the question "What am I supposed to do if I want to be happier?" Love others. This is the only way to experience compassion and harmony with oneself.

My own Catholic tradition goes about answering the self question differently, but it comes to a similar conclusion. A direct response to "Who am I?" occurs in the Book of Genesis: "Then God said, 'Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.'" So who is God? In the New Testament, the Apostle John answers, "God is love." The natural follow-up question is "What is love?"-for which Saint Thomas Aquinas provides the most compelling resolution in his Summa Theologiae: "To love is to will the good of the other."

Tying this all together, you might say that God is pure will to love the other. So what am I created to do? Love others.

Contrary to modern thinking, neither Aquinas nor the Buddhists suggest in any way that love involves feelings. It is a matter of will, which, according to most religions and philosophies, is also a matter of free will. From this, it also follows that although we are created to love others, we don't always live up to this natural design. I fail at this myself, I know, because some people are hard for me to love. That's why love is a commitment, not a feeling.

As you set out to earn your daily bread, what does it mean to exist to love others? Are you supposed to renounce all worldly goods? I don't think so. Consider these words by the early-20th-century Lebanese American writer Kahlil Gibran, from his poem "On Work":

Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, "He who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler than he who ploughs the soil" ...

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

What I take from Gibran is this: You are made to love, and your work-no matter what it is-should be the way you express your love. That might sound as if being ambitious or hardworking doesn't matter so long as we have a heart full of love. But that's not the implication. To love others through our work involves bringing our very best effort every day; to be completely, uncompromisingly dedicated to excellence in what we do. Whether we work in a bank, or put roofs on houses, or take care of our children full-time, true love means not cutting corners.

Excellence is not separate from love, not a modern, free-market addendum to the will of the divine. Back in Genesis, after creating man and woman in his image, what did God say? He said it was very good. Self, love, and excellence-all brought together.

This takes us full circle, to the natural anxiety about finding a job that meets your passion. What should you do? Again, that's the wrong first question. Ask yourself instead how you can go about doing with love and excellence whatever work comes your way. Take opportunities as they arise, recognizing that the job you are in is simply the available means to love and be excellent. And if you cannot achieve excellence in that job or do it with love, then-if you can-leave it quickly.

If finding the perfect job is not important, why does everyone worry about it so much? We can blame our parents, or our culture, or our economy. But the true answer is a short circuit in our reasoning.

We start with a very plausible set of assumptions: When I find my unique sense of purpose in my work, then I will be successful at what I do. And when I am successful, I will be happy. This seems entirely rational, but it commits a crucial error: It assumes that worldly success brings happiness. That is simply not true. Any amount of research shows that pursuing success-whether you count that in money, power, or prestige-usually leads to less happiness, especially when the pursuit crowds out human relationships. It lowers satisfaction by putting you on the hedonic treadmill of never having enough. It makes you a success addict.

This doesn't mean you have to choose between success and happiness; it means you need to have the right goal. What social scientists find is that people who pursue their happiness also become more successful. So shoot for happiness first at work, and success will follow.

How to find happiness at work? It so happens that a very good strategy for finding happiness in work is ... to strive for excellence and love. Excellence at work is sometimes called " earned success," a mixture of effort and accomplishment that in turn enhances your job satisfaction and commitment to a career.

Love here takes the form of serving others, which again underpins the deep fulfillment that work can bring. Whom we serve varies; it might be our customers, our colleagues, or the public. But dedicating your work to the good of others can make what might have been the most imperfect job into a perfect moral mission.

You need only two pieces of navigational equipment on that mission: the love in your heart and the will to be excellent. If you have those, you will find the answer to the question "Who am I?" You will find satisfaction. And you will make our world a better place.
This column is adapted from a commencement speech delivered on May 13, 2023, at The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C.

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The contentment of being true to yourself comes through doing good work, and doing it with love. Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. When we are stuck on a hard problem, it usually isn't because we can't find the answer; it's that we don't even know the right question.

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Why Managers Design Jobs to Be More Boring Than They Need to Be

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HBR: Why Managers Design Jobs to Be More Boring Than They Need to Be

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HBR: Why Managers Design Jobs to Be More Boring Than They Need to Be

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Why Managers Design Jobs to Be More Boring Than They Need to Be

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Researchers believe that the lack of engagement, burnout, and dissatisfaction many employees are experiencing worldwide is a result of poorly designed work. When work is well-designed, workers have interesting tasks, autonomy over those tasks, a meaningful degree of social contact with others, and a…

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TalentCulture: Employee Retention Strategies - 9 Ideas That are Working

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TalentCulture: Employee Retention Strategies - 9 Ideas That are Working

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I am grateful to the team at TalentCulture for letting me share what's working for talent retention in my world, along with some other fabulous strategies from thought leaders in the HR/People space!

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Keeping valued employees onboard is top-of-mind for many organizations these days. But what kind of employee retention strategies are actually working?

To find out, we asked numerous HR and business leaders to tell us which methods are making a difference for their workforce. And they responded with a variety of answers worth considering. Here are 9 of the best ideas we received:

Actively Support Employee Mental Health

Invest in Employee Growth

Invite Family Members to Team Events

Support Employee Sabbaticals

Assign an Employee Partner for Each New Hire

Create a Culture of Trust and Connection

Offer a Generous PTO and Benefits Policy

Build Meaningful Onboarding Connections

Provide Professional Development Opportunities

To learn more about how your organization can make the most of these employee retention strategies, read the full responses below...

9 Effective Employee Retention Strategies

1. Actively Support Employee Mental Health

One of the most powerful ways we have improved our retention rate is by proactively supporting employee mental health. We make workplace wellbeing a priority by encouraging mindfulness and reminding people to take short mental health breaks every day.

To ensure our employees benefit from improved wellbeing, we've also brought in trainers to teach various mindfulness exercises. These simple improvements have been easy to implement. Yet, they've helped our employees become happier and more engaged at work. This, in turn, has led to increased retention.

2. Invest in Employee Growth

To help retain our best talent, we provide ongoing internal and external opportunities for career growth.

For each position in every department, we publish clear, open-source career ladders. And we offer programs that help each employee develop skills and competencies needed to become a subject expert at their current level or qualify for success at the next level.

These opportunities include a robust Skill Enhancement and Employee Development (SEED) program for individual contributors, and a rich Leadership Essentials and Development (LEAD) program for people leaders. These are cohort-based programs we offer twice a quarter. In conjunction with other social learning activities, these programs improved our retention rate by 28% in the second half of 2022.

On the external development front, we offer a Be Your Best Self program that lets employees spend up to $1,500 a year on certifications, conferences and other activities in line with their professional goals. This initiative elevated our retention by 13% in the second half of last year.

3. Invite Family Members to Team Events

Rather than hosting happy hours and team events for "employees only," we invite spouses and children, too.

In addition to helping employees get to know their colleagues better, this is an excellent way for families to become familiar with colleagues their wife, husband, partner, mother or father works with each day. This means family members can put faces to names during future at-home conversations about work.

What's more, these informal family relationships often help employees become much closer. Sometimes, colleagues' family members become friends, as well. All of this leads to a much happier workplace that employees hesitate to leave.

4. Support Employee Sabbaticals

Effective work-life balance isn't just a distant goal to achieve. It's a reality we are all continuously managing and renegotiating. Sometimes, for whatever reason, the life component suddenly takes precedence. That's when an employee must radically rebalance key priorities.

By offering extended time away through sabbatical leave, you provide significant reassurance. Should the worst happen, employees know they can take time away from work without risking their employment status.

Similarly, if a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity arises, such as long-term traveling, studying, or focusing on personal growth, people know a formal mechanism is in place to support them.

Some of our organization's most engaged and loyal employees have taken sabbatical leave multiple times. Even those who haven't exercised their right to a sabbatical think highly of the option. They appreciate the fact that we offer flexibility, should the need arise.

5. Assign an Employee Partner for Each New Hire

Whenever you're expanding your team, think about group dynamics. Sometimes when you hire new staff for positions that are similar to others' roles, members of your team will feel scared. They may assume you're looking to replace them when that's not the case.

To ease any tension or anxiety, ask existing employees to team-up with new people on relevant projects. Give them responsibility for delegating tasks to the new hires, so they feel included and empowered to make onboarding more successful.

This helps existing staff feel more control over the situation. They'll also pick up on the fact that you need more resources to manage a growing workload. By recognizing this is an investment in everyone's success, existing staff should feel more secure in their positions. This also means they'll be less likely to look elsewhere out of fear.

Dennis Consorte, Digital Marketing and Leadership Consultant for Startups, Snackable Solutions

6. Create a Culture of Trust and Connection

We've found that one of the most effective ways to keep employees is to focus on building a culture based on trust and connection. This doesn't happen overnight. But it can make a huge impact over time.

We started by implementing weekly team meetings where people from different departments discuss issues or challenges we're facing. This opens lines of communication among team members. Everyone is welcome to share ideas for improvement. It's also a forum to discuss what has worked in the past or could work in the future. This creates an active dialogue around innovation that encourages employees to grow professionally.

These regular meetings give us a chance to build stronger relationships through group problem solving. They also help us develop mutual understanding, while recognizing everyone's strengths and weaknesses. Plus, we have an opportunity to celebrate individual and collective successes.

7. Offer a Generous PTO and Benefits Policy

Because our entire team works remotely, we have to make sure the work people do is more valuable to them than the work they would otherwise be doing in a more traditional setting. That's why we offer 38 days of PTO (personal time off) each year, as well as private healthcare stipends employees can use to maintain their mental and physical health.

Similar companies typically don't offer any of these benefits. That's why we stand out among competitors. It helps us recruit strong talent, and ultimately it means employees stay with us longer, as well.

8. Build Meaningful Onboarding Connections

Our organization invests in multiple policies and programs to improve employee retention. One stand-out initiative is our structured onboarding plan, which includes intentional workforce integration activities such as team-building exercises and networking events.

We believe strong retention really begins on Day One. So, by introducing every new hire to the company culture, we can help people more quickly feel comfortable in their roles. This has led to increased overall engagement across the organization. It has also helped improve job satisfaction and reduce turnover.

9. Provide Professional Development Opportunities

One of the best ways to keep people engaged in their jobs is to provide opportunities for professional growth. It not only helps employees learn new skills, but also demonstrates that your organization wants to invest in their growth and development.

This could include internal or external training programs, mentorship opportunities, tuition reimbursement programs, or a combination of these options. For example you can provide funding for people to attend relevant conferences or networking events, so they can develop a broader range of professional relationships skills in your industry. This not only helps build a more knowledgeable and competent workforce, but also improves retention.

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Employee Retention Strategies: 9 Ideas That Are Working

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Keeping valued employees onboard is top-of-mind for many organizations these days. But what kind of employee retention strategies are actually working? To find out, we asked numerous HR and business leaders to tell us which methods are making a difference for their workforce. And they responded with a variety of answers worth considering.

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MITSloan: Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture

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MITSloan: Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture

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Measuring Culture Research Highlight

Pinpointing the elements of toxic culture in an organization can help leaders focus on addressing the issues that lead employees to disengage and quit.

More in this series

Toxic culture, as we reported in a recent article, was the single best predictor of attrition during the first six months of the Great Resignation - 10 times more powerful than how employees viewed their compensation in predicting employee turnover. 1 The link between toxicity and attrition is not new: By one estimate, employee turnover triggered by a toxic culture cost U.S. employers nearly $50 billion per year before the Great Resignation began. 2

While most everyone agrees that toxic workplaces are bad news, there is much less consensus on what makes a culture toxic as opposed to merely annoying. Scholars have proposed multiple, sometimes conflicting definitions of toxic culture, and a quick review of blog posts and managerial articles surfaces dozens of warning signals of toxic culture with little overlap across them. 3 In Glassdoor reviews, employees criticize their corporate cultures for hundreds of flaws - including risk aversion, excess bureaucracy, insularity, and an impersonal feel, to mention just a few.

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Employees grumble about a lot of things, but which elements of culture are so awful that they qualify as toxic? You might gripe about an old-school or bureaucratic culture, but is that enough to knot your stomach as you pull into the parking lot in the morning? How can we distinguish between a culture so awful that it qualifies as toxic versus one that's merely irritating?

Pinpointing the elements that make a culture toxic is the first step to improving it. Leaders will dissipate their effort and attention if they try to improve every aspect of corporate culture that some employees find irritating. Instead, they should focus on addressing the core issues that cause employees the most pain and lead them to disengage, bad-mouth their employer, and quit.

To understand what makes a culture toxic, we analyzed the language employees use to describe their organization. When workers write a Glassdoor review, they rate corporate culture on a 5-point scale and also describe their employer's pros and cons. The topics they choose to write about reveal which factors are most relevant to them. By analyzing the relationship between how they describe their employer and how they rate its culture, we were able to shed light on the cultural factors that best predict a toxic culture. We studied more than 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews from U.S. employees of Culture 500 companies, a sample of large organizations from 40 industries.

In an earlier analysis of the Culture 500 data, we focused on the topics that best predict a company's overall culture rating based on the average of all employee reviews in that organization. 4 Measuring company-level culture is an excellent way to identify factors that matter to many employees, such as benefits, perks, and job security. Focusing on company-level averages, however, might miss elements of toxic culture that are highly significant for a small percentage of the workforce. Therefore, for this study, we analyzed culture at the individual level.

To home in on what makes a culture toxic for employees, we focused on their negative comments. We used the text analytics platform developed by CultureX to identify which topics each employee discussed negatively. (We measured 128 topics in total.) We then analyzed which of the topics mentioned had the largest negative impact on how employees rated corporate culture on a 5-point scale. 5

The Toxic Five Culture Attributes

We grouped closely related elements into broader topics and identified what we call the Toxic Five attributes - disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive - that poison corporate culture in the eyes of employees. (See "The Toxic Five.") While organizational culture can disappoint employees in many ways, these five elements have by far the largest negative impact on how employees rate their corporate culture and have contributed most to employee attrition throughout the Great Resignation.

The Toxic Five

Noninclusive

Seven of the 20 most powerful predictors of a negative culture rating relate to how well Culture 500 companies encourage the representation of diverse groups of employees and whether they are treated fairly, made to feel welcome, and included in key decisions. Collectively, this cluster of topics is the most powerful predictor of whether employees view their organization's culture as toxic.

The CultureX platform's assessment of whether organizations provide a fair and inclusive environment for specific demographic groups includes five topics: gender, race, sexual identity and orientation, disability, and age. All of these identity-related topics rank in the top decile of strongest predictors of a toxic culture. If an employee speaks negatively in a review about how members of the LGBTQ community are treated, for example, their culture rating will be 0.65 lower on a 5-point scale on average.

Two other topics capture comments about exclusion that may or may not be linked to an individual's demographics or identity. The topic cronyism includes comments about nepotism and managers playing favorites - for example, by promoting their buddies or graduates from the same college rather than the most qualified candidates. The topic general noninclusive culture includes reviews containing terms like "cliques," "clubby," or "in crowd" that indicate that some employees are being excluded without specifying why.

None of the diversity, equity, and inclusion topics emerged among the top predictors of a company's overall culture in our previous analysis using collective employee ratings. This absence highlights the danger of measuring corporate culture exclusively in aggregate terms. If leaders focus on the average review of corporate culture among employees, they may miss issues that affect a small number of employees in profound ways. Respect, for example, is mentioned 30 times more frequently in employee reviews than LGBTQ equity is, but both topics have the same impact on an employee's view of culture when they are discussed negatively in a review.

Disrespectful

Feeling disrespected at work has the largest negative impact on an employee's overall rating of their corporate culture of any single topic. Surprisingly, mentioning disrespect has a slightly stronger negative impact on the culture rating than when an employee comes right out and describes their culture as toxic (or uses other extremely negative terms, like "dystopian," "dumpster fire," or "soul-crushing").

In our previous research, we found that respect - or the lack thereof - was the single strongest predictor of how employees as a whole rated the corporate culture. This further analysis demonstrates that whether you analyze culture at the level of the individual employee or aggregate to the organization as a whole, respect toward employees rises to the top of the list of cultural elements that matter most.

Unethical

Ethics, like respect, is a fundamental aspect of culture that matters at both the organizational and individual levels. The topic unethical behavior captures general comments about integrity and ethics within an organization. The most common terms in reviews classified under this topic include "ethics," "integrity," "unethical," "shady," and "cheat." Under a related topic - dishonesty - employees described dishonest behavior in dozens of ways, including "lie," "mislead," "deceive," and "make false promises," as well as adjacent terms that suggest shading the truth, such as "smoke and mirrors" and "sugarcoating."

The topic regulatory compliance includes comments in which employees explicitly discussed their employer's failure to comply with applicable regulations. Frequently mentioned regulations include the Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards, which protect workers' safety on the job, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which safeguards sensitive patient information.

Cutthroat

Nearly 10% of employees in our sample made a comment related to teamwork or collaboration in their Glassdoor review. Employees frequently grumbled about uncooperative teammates or the lack of coordination across organizational silos. Comments about friction in coordination, while common, have a very modest impact on how employees rate their corporate culture. These run-of-the-mill frustrations are not clear warning signs of toxic culture.

In contrast, when employees talked about colleagues actively undermining one another, their comments strongly predicted a negative culture score. The 1% of employees who cited a cutthroat culture employed a vivid lexicon to describe their workplace, including "dog-eat-dog" and "Darwinian" and talked about coworkers who "throw one another under the bus," "stab each other in the back," or "sabotage one another."

Abusive

We define abusive management as sustained hostile behavior toward employees, as opposed to a boss who has a bad day and takes it out on team members. 6 The most frequently mentioned hostile behaviors in our sample are bullying, yelling, or shouting at employees, belittling or demeaning subordinates, verbally abusing people, and condescending or talking down to employees.

Nearly one-third of employees said something about management in their review, but just 0.8% described their manager as abusive. When employees did mention abusive managers, however, it depressed their culture rating by an additional 0.50 on average.

When employees join a company, they expect to find a culture that is inclusive, respectful, ethical, collaborative, and free from abuse by those in positions of power. Not only are these baseline elements of a healthy corporate culture, they are also what companies typically promise in their official core values. In an earlier study, we found that "integrity" - mentioned by nearly two-thirds of companies - was the attribute most frequently listed among companies' core values, while collaboration ranked second, respect fourth, and diversity and inclusion ninth. When corporate culture fails to deliver on these fundamental commitments, employees understandably react with something stronger than annoyance or disappointment.

The High Costs of a Toxic Culture

By identifying the core elements of a toxic culture, we can synthesize existing research on closely related topics, including discrimination, abusive managers, unethical organizational behavior, workplace injustice, and incivility. 7 This research allows us to tally the full cost of a toxic culture to individuals and organizations. And the toll, in human suffering and financial expenses, is staggering.

A large body of research shows that working in a toxic atmosphere is associated with elevated levels of stress, burnout, and mental health issues. 8 Toxicity also translates into physical illness. When employees experience injustice in the workplace, their odds of suffering a major disease (including coronary disease, asthma, diabetes, and arthritis) increase by 35% to 55%. 9

In addition to the pain imposed on employees, a toxic culture also imposes costs that flow directly to the organization's bottom line. When a toxic atmosphere makes workers sick, for example, their employer typically foots the bill. Among U.S. workers with health benefits, two-thirds have their health care expenses paid directly by their employer. 10 By one estimate, toxic workplaces added an incremental $16 billion in employee health care costs in 2008. 11 The figure below summarizes some of the costs of a toxic culture for organizations. (See "The Organizational Costs of Toxic Culture.")

The Organizational Costs of Toxic Culture
Employee attrition is higher

A toxic corporate culture was 10 times more predictive of attrition than compensation during the first six months of the Great Resignation.i

Twenty percent of employees have left a job because of its culture.ii

Replacing an employee can cost companies up to twice the employee's annual salary.iii

A poor employer brand makes it harder to attract talent

A toxic culture is the strongest predictor of a negative Glassdoor review.

Seventy-three percent of U.S. job seekers apply to a company only if its corporate culture aligns with their personal values.iv

Employees are disengaged and less productive

Three-quarters of the most disengaged employees are looking for a job; this loss of productivity costs companies up to 18% of the employee's salary each year.v

Nearly half of employees who experienced incivility at work decreased their effort and time spent at work.vi

Higher health care costs hurt the employer's bottom line

Employees who view their workplace as unfair are 35% to 55% more likely to suffer from major disease.vii

Incremental health care costs from toxic workforces were $16 billion in the U.S. in 2008.viii

Risk of reputational damage and legal liability is higher

Eighty-five percent of CEOs and CFOs believe a toxic corporate culture could lead to unethical or illegal behavior.ix

Low corporate integrity is associated with lower financial value.x

According to a study from the Society for Human Resource Management, 1 in 5 employees left a job at some point in their career because of its toxic culture. 12 That survey, conducted before the pandemic, is consistent with our findings that a toxic culture is the best predictor of a company experiencing higher employee attrition than its industry overall during the first six months of the Great Resignation. Gallup estimates that the cost of replacing an employee who quits can total up to two times their annual salary when all direct and indirect expenses are accounted for. 13

Companies with a toxic culture will not only lose employees - they'll also struggle to replace workers who jump ship. Over three-quarters of job seekers research an employer's culture before applying for a job. 14 In an age of online employee reviews, companies cannot keep their culture problems a secret for long, and a toxic culture, as we showed above, is by far the strongest predictor of a low review on Glassdoor. 15 Having a toxic employer brand makes it harder to attract candidates.

Other costs of a toxic culture are harder to quantify but can still add up. Extremely disengaged employees are nearly 20% less productive than their engaged counterparts because they put in less effort and miss more days on the job. 16 Nearly half of employees who felt disrespected at work admitted to decreasing their effort and time spent at work. 17

Then there's the reputational risk. Among U.S. CEOs and CFOs surveyed, 85% agreed that an unhealthy corporate culture could lead to unethical or illegal behavior. 18 For example, after fraudulent sales practices at Wells Fargo were exposed in 2016, the bank paid billions of dollars in fines and lawsuits and saw its corporate reputation suffer the largest single-year drop in Harris Poll history. 19

Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture

You might think that toxic culture is somebody else's problem, limited to a handful of high-profile flameouts like Wells Fargo or The Weinstein Company and not something your organization needs to worry about.

Unfortunately, cultural toxicity is widespread. On average, 10% of American employees in large companies mentioned one or more elements of a toxic culture in their Glassdoor reviews in the five years between 2016 to 2020. 20 This translates into more than 6,000 miserable workers for the average large American company. 21 There is a wide spread around that average: Culture 500 companies ranged from 2% to 22% of employees discussing toxicity in their Glassdoor reviews. When 1 out of every 4 employees mentions toxicity, it's fair to say that the corporate culture as a whole is toxic.

Even at companies with the highest Glassdoor ratings, hundreds or thousands of employees might experience the culture as toxic. Women, underrepresented minorities, or older employees, for example, might have a much more negative view of the culture than other employees. In most large organizations, distinctive microcultures coexist within the same company, often across business units, functions, geographies, or acquired companies. Individual leaders also create subcultures within their extended team. Whatever their origin, microcultures can diverge from the broader corporate culture, which means that even the best cultures can contain pockets of cultural toxicity.

In a forthcoming article, we will lay out concrete steps that leaders can take to detox their corporate culture. The first step, however, is acknowledging that pockets of toxicity exist even in the healthiest corporate cultures. Leaders must dig beneath the rough segmentations (like functions or countries) to assess culture at the level of individual leaders who create - for better or worse - microcultures within the organization as a whole. When measuring corporate culture, averages obscure as much as they illuminate.

Topics

Measuring Culture

This series includes the MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500, an annual index and research project that uses over 1.4 million employee reviews to analyze culture in leading companies, along with new research focused on measuring organizational culture using a scientific approach.

More in this series

About the Authors

Donald Sull (@culturexinsight) is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a cofounder of CultureX. Charles Sull is a cofounder of CultureX. William Cipolli is an assistant professor of mathematics and cofounder of the Data Science Collaboratory (@datascicollab) at Colgate University. Caio Brighenti (@caiobrighenti) is a football information analyst with the Detroit Lions.

References

1. D. Sull, C. Sull, and B. Zweig, " Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation," MIT Sloan Management Review, Jan. 11, 2022, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

2. " The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture: How Culture Impacts the Workforce - and the Bottom Line," PDF file (Alexandria, Virginia: Society for Human Resource Management, September 2019), https://pmq.shrm.org.

3. Academics and management writers have proposed multiple, subjective definitions of what makes a culture or leader toxic. See " Is Your Workplace Tough - or Is It Toxic?" Knowledge@Wharton, Aug. 12, 2015, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu; and M. Taventi, " Managing Toxic Leaders: Dysfunctional Patterns in Organizational Leadership and How to Deal With Them," Human Resource Management 6, no. 83 (June 2011): 127-136.

4. D. Sull and C. Sull, " 10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right," MIT Sloan Management Review, Sept. 16, 2021, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

5. We fit a Bayesian ordinal logistic mixed effects model to predict each review's culture rating on a 5-point scale. We used 128 culture topics and their associated sentiments as predictors, with company as a random intercept. For each review, each of the topics could take one of three values: It could be discussed positively (1), discussed negatively (-1), or not mentioned at all (blank). The model was fit with 10,000 iterations after burn-in for each of four chains. All R-hat values were <1.007, suggesting convergence of the model across chains. The relative impact each topic had on an employee's rating of their employer's culture was measured by the magnitude of the marginal impact a negative topic mention has on an employee's rating of their organization's culture on a 5-point scale, holding all other features constant. If an employee says they feel disrespected in their review, for example, their culture rating will be 0.66 lower on a 5-point scale, all else being equal. For reference, the median marginal impact of a negative topic mention was -0.10. The P values for all listed coefficients are less than 0.0001.

6. In his excellent review and synthesis, Bennett Tepper notes that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of abusive management, which overlaps with research constructs, including petty tyranny, supervisor aggression, and supervisor undermining. See B.J. Tepper, "Abusive Supervision in Work Organizations: Review, Synthesis, and Research Agenda," Journal of Management 33, no. 3 (June 2007): 261-289. There is, however, widespread agreement that abusive management (which Tepper calls "abusive supervision") consists of sustained nonphysical displays of hostility and typically excludes discrimination or harassment based on gender, race, or other demographic attributes. Common examples of hostile behavior include bullying, yelling at subordinates, swearing, belittling people, or displaying extremely aggressive behavior.

7. The empirical research on these topics is massive, but these recent review pieces provide a useful introduction: M. del Carmen Triana, M. Jayasinghe, and J.R. Pieper, " Perceived Workplace Racial Discrimination and Its Correlates: A Meta-Analysis," Journal of Organizational Behavior 36, no. 4 (May 2015): 491-513; Tepper, "Abusive Supervision in Work Organizations," 261-289; R.I. Sutton, "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't" (New York: Business Plus, 2007); J.J. Kish-Gephart, D.A. Harrison, and L.K. Treviño, " Bad Apples, Bad Cases, and Bad Barrels: Meta-Analytic Evidence About Sources of Unethical Decisions at Work," Journal of Applied Psychology 95, no. 1 (January 2010): 1-31; J.M. Robbins, M.T. Ford, and L.E. Tetrick, " Perceived Unfairness and Employee Health: A Meta-Analytic Integration," Journal of Applied Psychology 97, no. 2 (March 2012): 235-272; and L.M. Cortina, D. Kabat-Farr, V.J. Magley, et al., " Researching Rudeness: The Past, Present, and Future of the Science of Incivility," Journal of Organizational Health Psychology 22, no. 3 (July 2017): 299-313. Research on rudeness and incivility is explicitly framed in terms of violations of norms of respect. See LM Andersson and CM Porath, 1999, "Tit for Tat? The Spiraling Effect of Incivility in the Workplace," Academy of Management Review, 24 no. 3 (July 1999): 452-471. Other research has established that the components of toxic culture are correlated with one another. In a recent meta-analysis of 105 articles on incivility, Yao et al. ran a confirmatory factor, analysis based on their meta-analytic correlations, and identified a single latent factor with incivility loading at 0.82, abusive supervision (0.63), sexual harassment (0.51), and undermining (which we call cutthroat at 0.50.) J. Yao, S. Lim, C.Y. Guo, et al., 2022, " Experienced Incivility in the Workplace: A Meta-Analytical Review of Its Construct Validity and Nomological Network," Journal of Applied Psychology, 107 no. 2 (Feb. 2022): 193-220.

8. Robbins, Ford, and Tetrick, "Perceived Unfairness and Employee Health," table 5 for U.S. employees.

9. J. Goh, J. Pfeffer, and S. Zenios, " The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States," Management Science 62, no. 2 (February 2016): 608-628, table 3. Estimate based on odds ratio for self-reported physical illness and physician-diagnosed physical disease for an unfair workplace culture.

10. A.C. Enthoven, " Employer Self-Funded Health Insurance Is Taking Us in the Wrong Direction," Health Affairs, Aug. 13, 2021, www.healthaffairs.org.

11. Goh, Pfeffer, and Zenios, "The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors," table 7.

12. "The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture," Society for Human Resource Management, September 2019.

13. Estimated cost of replacing an individual employee includes direct costs (recruiting, signing bonus, background checks) and indirect costs (time required for a new employee to achieve full productivity, knowledge lost when seasoned employees walk out the door), from V. Gandhi and J. Robison, " The 'Great Resignation' Is Really the 'Great Discontent,' " Gallup, July 22, 2021, www.gallup.com.

14. " Mission & Culture Survey 2019," PDF file (Mill Valley, California: Glassdoor, 2019), www.glassdoor.com. This survey of 2,025 U.S. adults was conducted by The Harris Poll in June 2019.

15. In a separate study, Jason Sockin found that a workplace characterized by disrespect and abuse was the strongest predictor of an employer's overall rating and its culture and values rating on Glassdoor out of 48 features. See J. Sockin, " Show Me the Amenity: Are Higher-Paying Firms Better All Around? " CESifo working paper 9842, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Nov. 5, 2021, table 5.

16. Gallup estimates that actively disengaged employees are looking for another job, and their lower productivity costs their employer 18% of their salary each year. See: Gandhi and Robison, " The 'Great Resignation' Is Really the 'Great Discontent.' "

17. In a survey of 800 managers and employees who experienced incivility in their workplace, nearly half reported that they decreased their work effort and spent less time at work. See C. Porath and C. Pearson, " The Price of Incivility," Harvard Business Review 91, no. 1-2 (January-February 2013): 114-121.

18. J.R. Graham, C.R. Harvey, J. Popadak, et al., " Corporate Culture: Evidence From the Field," working paper 23255, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 2017.

19. E. Flitter, " The Price of Wells Fargo's Fake Account Scandal Grows by $3 Billion," The New York Times, Feb. 21, 2020, www.nytimes.com; and " Harris Poll: Corporate Reputation Politically Polarized as Companies Wrestle With Taking a Stand for Their Values," The Harris Poll, Feb. 9, 2017, https://theharrispoll.com.

20. Both current and former employees write Glassdoor reviews. In our sample, 10.4% of current employees and 16% of former employees mentioned one or more elements of a toxic culture in their reviews. Our findings are in line with other estimates of the prevalence of toxic workplaces in the U.S. A comprehensive study found that 13% of U.S. employees encountered workplace aggression on a weekly basis. See A.C.H. Schat, M.R. Frone, and E.K. Kelloway, " Prevalence of Workplace Aggression in the U.S. Workforce: Findings From a National Study," in "Handbook of Workplace Violence," eds. E.K. Kelloway, J. Barling, and J.J. Hurrell (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2006), 47-89. In a Gallup poll, 6% of U.S. and Canadian employees reported that they had been disrespected in the previous 24-hour period. See " State of the Global Workplace: 2021 Report " (Washington, D.C.: Gallup, 2021), 36. A 2019 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 20% of employees had left a job in the preceding five years. See "The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture," Society for Human Resource Management, September 2019.

21. The average number of employees in the Culture 500 companies is 64,176, which is very close to 60,629, the average number of employees in the Fortune 500 in 2019. See " New American Fortune 500 in 2019: Top American Companies and Their Immigrant Roots," New American Economy, July 22, 2019, https://data.newamericaneconomy.org.

i. Sull, Sull, and Zweig, " Toxic Culture."

ii. "The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture," Society for Human Resource Management, September 2019.

iii. Gandhi and Robison, "The 'Great Resignation' Is Really the 'Great Discontent.'"

iv. "Mission & Culture Survey 2019," Glassdoor.

v. Gandhi and Robison, "The 'Great Resignation.'"

vi. Porath and Pearson, "The Price of Incivility."

vii. Goh, Pfeffer, and Zenios, "The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors," 608-628.

viii. Ibid.

ix. Graham, et al., "Corporate Culture: Evidence From the Field."

x. L. Guiso, P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales, " The Value of Corporate Culture," Journal of Financial Economics 117, no. 1 (July 2015): 60-76.

More Like This

The Toxic Five

The Organizational Costs of Toxic Culture
Employee attrition is higher

A toxic corporate culture was 10 times more predictive of attrition than compensation during the first six months of the Great Resignation.i

Twenty percent of employees have left a job because of its culture.ii

Replacing an employee can cost companies up to twice the employee's annual salary.iii

A poor employer brand makes it harder to attract talent

A toxic culture is the strongest predictor of a negative Glassdoor review.

Seventy-three percent of U.S. job seekers apply to a company only if its corporate culture aligns with their personal values.iv

Employees are disengaged and less productive

Three-quarters of the most disengaged employees are looking for a job; this loss of productivity costs companies up to 18% of the employee's salary each year.v

Nearly half of employees who experienced incivility at work decreased their effort and time spent at work.vi

Higher health care costs hurt the employer's bottom line

Employees who view their workplace as unfair are 35% to 55% more likely to suffer from major disease.vii

Incremental health care costs from toxic workforces were $16 billion in the U.S. in 2008.viii

Risk of reputational damage and legal liability is higher

Eighty-five percent of CEOs and CFOs believe a toxic corporate culture could lead to unethical or illegal behavior.ix

Low corporate integrity is associated with lower financial value.x

According to a study from the Society for Human Resource Management, 1 in 5 employees left a job at some point in their career because of its toxic culture. 12 That survey, conducted before the pandemic, is consistent with our findings that a toxic culture is the best predictor of a company experiencing higher employee attrition than its industry overall during the first six months of the Great Resignation. Gallup estimates that the cost of replacing an employee who quits can total up to two times their annual salary when all direct and indirect expenses are accounted for. 13

Companies with a toxic culture will not only lose employees - they'll also struggle to replace workers who jump ship. Over three-quarters of job seekers research an employer's culture before applying for a job. 14 In an age of online employee reviews, companies cannot keep their culture problems a secret for long, and a toxic culture, as we showed above, is by far the strongest predictor of a low review on Glassdoor. 15 Having a toxic employer brand makes it harder to attract candidates.

Other costs of a toxic culture are harder to quantify but can still add up. Extremely disengaged employees are nearly 20% less productive than their engaged counterparts because they put in less effort and miss more days on the job. 16 Nearly half of employees who felt disrespected at work admitted to decreasing their effort and time spent at work. 17

Then there's the reputational risk. Among U.S. CEOs and CFOs surveyed, 85% agreed that an unhealthy corporate culture could lead to unethical or illegal behavior. 18 For example, after fraudulent sales practices at Wells Fargo were exposed in 2016, the bank paid billions of dollars in fines and lawsuits and saw its corporate reputation suffer the largest single-year drop in Harris Poll history. 19

Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture

You might think that toxic culture is somebody else's problem, limited to a handful of high-profile flameouts like Wells Fargo or The Weinstein Company and not something your organization needs to worry about.

Unfortunately, cultural toxicity is widespread. On average, 10% of American employees in large companies mentioned one or more elements of a toxic culture in their Glassdoor reviews in the five years between 2016 to 2020. 20 This translates into more than 6,000 miserable workers for the average large American company. 21 There is a wide spread around that average: Culture 500 companies ranged from 2% to 22% of employees discussing toxicity in their Glassdoor reviews. When 1 out of every 4 employees mentions toxicity, it's fair to say that the corporate culture as a whole is toxic.

Even at companies with the highest Glassdoor ratings, hundreds or thousands of employees might experience the culture as toxic. Women, underrepresented minorities, or older employees, for example, might have a much more negative view of the culture than other employees. In most large organizations, distinctive microcultures coexist within the same company, often across business units, functions, geographies, or acquired companies. Individual leaders also create subcultures within their extended team. Whatever their origin, microcultures can diverge from the broader corporate culture, which means that even the best cultures can contain pockets of cultural toxicity.

In a forthcoming article, we will lay out concrete steps that leaders can take to detox their corporate culture. The first step, however, is acknowledging that pockets of toxicity exist even in the healthiest corporate cultures. Leaders must dig beneath the rough segmentations (like functions or countries) to assess culture at the level of individual leaders who create - for better or worse - microcultures within the organization as a whole. When measuring corporate culture, averages obscure as much as they illuminate.

Topics

Measuring Culture

This series includes the MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500, an annual index and research project that uses over 1.4 million employee reviews to analyze culture in leading companies, along with new research focused on measuring organizational culture using a scientific approach.

More in this series

About the Authors

Donald Sull (@culturexinsight) is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a cofounder of CultureX. Charles Sull is a cofounder of CultureX. William Cipolli is an assistant professor of mathematics and cofounder of the Data Science Collaboratory (@datascicollab) at Colgate University. Caio Brighenti (@caiobrighenti) is a football information analyst with the Detroit Lions.

References

1. D. Sull, C. Sull, and B. Zweig, " Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation," MIT Sloan Management Review, Jan. 11, 2022, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

2. " The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture: How Culture Impacts the Workforce - and the Bottom Line," PDF file (Alexandria, Virginia: Society for Human Resource Management, September 2019), https://pmq.shrm.org.

3. Academics and management writers have proposed multiple, subjective definitions of what makes a culture or leader toxic. See " Is Your Workplace Tough - or Is It Toxic?" Knowledge@Wharton, Aug. 12, 2015, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu; and M. Taventi, " Managing Toxic Leaders: Dysfunctional Patterns in Organizational Leadership and How to Deal With Them," Human Resource Management 6, no. 83 (June 2011): 127-136.

4. D. Sull and C. Sull, " 10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right," MIT Sloan Management Review, Sept. 16, 2021, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

5. We fit a Bayesian ordinal logistic mixed effects model to predict each review's culture rating on a 5-point scale. We used 128 culture topics and their associated sentiments as predictors, with company as a random intercept. For each review, each of the topics could take one of three values: It could be discussed positively (1), discussed negatively (-1), or not mentioned at all (blank). The model was fit with 10,000 iterations after burn-in for each of four chains. All R-hat values were <1.007, suggesting convergence of the model across chains. The relative impact each topic had on an employee's rating of their employer's culture was measured by the magnitude of the marginal impact a negative topic mention has on an employee's rating of their organization's culture on a 5-point scale, holding all other features constant. If an employee says they feel disrespected in their review, for example, their culture rating will be 0.66 lower on a 5-point scale, all else being equal. For reference, the median marginal impact of a negative topic mention was -0.10. The P values for all listed coefficients are less than 0.0001.

6. In his excellent review and synthesis, Bennett Tepper notes that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of abusive management, which overlaps with research constructs, including petty tyranny, supervisor aggression, and supervisor undermining. See B.J. Tepper, "Abusive Supervision in Work Organizations: Review, Synthesis, and Research Agenda," Journal of Management 33, no. 3 (June 2007): 261-289. There is, however, widespread agreement that abusive management (which Tepper calls "abusive supervision") consists of sustained nonphysical displays of hostility and typically excludes discrimination or harassment based on gender, race, or other demographic attributes. Common examples of hostile behavior include bullying, yelling at subordinates, swearing, belittling people, or displaying extremely aggressive behavior.

7. The empirical research on these topics is massive, but these recent review pieces provide a useful introduction: M. del Carmen Triana, M. Jayasinghe, and J.R. Pieper, " Perceived Workplace Racial Discrimination and Its Correlates: A Meta-Analysis," Journal of Organizational Behavior 36, no. 4 (May 2015): 491-513; Tepper, "Abusive Supervision in Work Organizations," 261-289; R.I. Sutton, "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't" (New York: Business Plus, 2007); J.J. Kish-Gephart, D.A. Harrison, and L.K. Treviño, " Bad Apples, Bad Cases, and Bad Barrels: Meta-Analytic Evidence About Sources of Unethical Decisions at Work," Journal of Applied Psychology 95, no. 1 (January 2010): 1-31; J.M. Robbins, M.T. Ford, and L.E. Tetrick, " Perceived Unfairness and Employee Health: A Meta-Analytic Integration," Journal of Applied Psychology 97, no. 2 (March 2012): 235-272; and L.M. Cortina, D. Kabat-Farr, V.J. Magley, et al., " Researching Rudeness: The Past, Present, and Future of the Science of Incivility," Journal of Organizational Health Psychology 22, no. 3 (July 2017): 299-313. Research on rudeness and incivility is explicitly framed in terms of violations of norms of respect. See LM Andersson and CM Porath, 1999, "Tit for Tat? The Spiraling Effect of Incivility in the Workplace," Academy of Management Review, 24 no. 3 (July 1999): 452-471. Other research has established that the components of toxic culture are correlated with one another. In a recent meta-analysis of 105 articles on incivility, Yao et al. ran a confirmatory factor, analysis based on their meta-analytic correlations, and identified a single latent factor with incivility loading at 0.82, abusive supervision (0.63), sexual harassment (0.51), and undermining (which we call cutthroat at 0.50.) J. Yao, S. Lim, C.Y. Guo, et al., 2022, " Experienced Incivility in the Workplace: A Meta-Analytical Review of Its Construct Validity and Nomological Network," Journal of Applied Psychology, 107 no. 2 (Feb. 2022): 193-220.

8. Robbins, Ford, and Tetrick, "Perceived Unfairness and Employee Health," table 5 for U.S. employees.

9. J. Goh, J. Pfeffer, and S. Zenios, " The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States," Management Science 62, no. 2 (February 2016): 608-628, table 3. Estimate based on odds ratio for self-reported physical illness and physician-diagnosed physical disease for an unfair workplace culture.

10. A.C. Enthoven, " Employer Self-Funded Health Insurance Is Taking Us in the Wrong Direction," Health Affairs, Aug. 13, 2021, www.healthaffairs.org.

11. Goh, Pfeffer, and Zenios, "The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors," table 7.

12. "The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture," Society for Human Resource Management, September 2019.

13. Estimated cost of replacing an individual employee includes direct costs (recruiting, signing bonus, background checks) and indirect costs (time required for a new employee to achieve full productivity, knowledge lost when seasoned employees walk out the door), from V. Gandhi and J. Robison, " The 'Great Resignation' Is Really the 'Great Discontent,' " Gallup, July 22, 2021, www.gallup.com.

14. " Mission & Culture Survey 2019," PDF file (Mill Valley, California: Glassdoor, 2019), www.glassdoor.com. This survey of 2,025 U.S. adults was conducted by The Harris Poll in June 2019.

15. In a separate study, Jason Sockin found that a workplace characterized by disrespect and abuse was the strongest predictor of an employer's overall rating and its culture and values rating on Glassdoor out of 48 features. See J. Sockin, " Show Me the Amenity: Are Higher-Paying Firms Better All Around? " CESifo working paper 9842, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Nov. 5, 2021, table 5.

16. Gallup estimates that actively disengaged employees are looking for another job, and their lower productivity costs their employer 18% of their salary each year. See: Gandhi and Robison, " The 'Great Resignation' Is Really the 'Great Discontent.' "

17. In a survey of 800 managers and employees who experienced incivility in their workplace, nearly half reported that they decreased their work effort and spent less time at work. See C. Porath and C. Pearson, " The Price of Incivility," Harvard Business Review 91, no. 1-2 (January-February 2013): 114-121.

18. J.R. Graham, C.R. Harvey, J. Popadak, et al., " Corporate Culture: Evidence From the Field," working paper 23255, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 2017.

19. E. Flitter, " The Price of Wells Fargo's Fake Account Scandal Grows by $3 Billion," The New York Times, Feb. 21, 2020, www.nytimes.com; and " Harris Poll: Corporate Reputation Politically Polarized as Companies Wrestle With Taking a Stand for Their Values," The Harris Poll, Feb. 9, 2017, https://theharrispoll.com.

20. Both current and former employees write Glassdoor reviews. In our sample, 10.4% of current employees and 16% of former employees mentioned one or more elements of a toxic culture in their reviews. Our findings are in line with other estimates of the prevalence of toxic workplaces in the U.S. A comprehensive study found that 13% of U.S. employees encountered workplace aggression on a weekly basis. See A.C.H. Schat, M.R. Frone, and E.K. Kelloway, " Prevalence of Workplace Aggression in the U.S. Workforce: Findings From a National Study," in "Handbook of Workplace Violence," eds. E.K. Kelloway, J. Barling, and J.J. Hurrell (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2006), 47-89. In a Gallup poll, 6% of U.S. and Canadian employees reported that they had been disrespected in the previous 24-hour period. See " State of the Global Workplace: 2021 Report " (Washington, D.C.: Gallup, 2021), 36. A 2019 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 20% of employees had left a job in the preceding five years. See "The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture," Society for Human Resource Management, September 2019.

21. The average number of employees in the Culture 500 companies is 64,176, which is very close to 60,629, the average number of employees in the Fortune 500 in 2019. See " New American Fortune 500 in 2019: Top American Companies and Their Immigrant Roots," New American Economy, July 22, 2019, https://data.newamericaneconomy.org.

i. Sull, Sull, and Zweig, " Toxic Culture."

ii. "The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture," Society for Human Resource Management, September 2019.

iii. Gandhi and Robison, "The 'Great Resignation' Is Really the 'Great Discontent.'"

iv. "Mission & Culture Survey 2019," Glassdoor.

v. Gandhi and Robison, "The 'Great Resignation.'"

vi. Porath and Pearson, "The Price of Incivility."

vii. Goh, Pfeffer, and Zenios, "The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors," 608-628.

viii. Ibid.

ix. Graham, et al., "Corporate Culture: Evidence From the Field."

x. L. Guiso, P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales, " The Value of Corporate Culture," Journal of Financial Economics 117, no. 1 (July 2015): 60-76.

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Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture

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Awareness of the most common elements of toxic workplace cultures can help employers prevent and address them.

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The Verge: Google's Changing Its Performance Reviews to Waste Less Time

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The Verge: Google's Changing Its Performance Reviews to Waste Less Time

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Google’s changing its performance reviews to waste less time

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It could be good for users and employees alike.

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INC: Toxic Employees Destroy Your Culture (& Your Bottom Line)

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INC: Toxic Employees Destroy Your Culture (& Your Bottom Line)

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Harvard Research Proves Toxic Employees Destroy Your Culture and Your Bottom Line

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Nothing destroys a culture faster than feelings of danger and mistrust. Leaders who wait to contain toxic damage risk losing everything.

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Most of us have known a high performer who is a bully at work or a leader who delivers results but creates a toxic environment. These "toxic rock stars" can ruin the workplace experience for most employees, but they're particularly harmful to women of color. These individuals and the cultures that enable them are key factors driving women of color to leave their workplaces.

Research has shown that toxic cultures cost U.S. companies almost $50 billion per year, and toxic culture was the single biggest predictor of attrition during the first six months of the Great Resignation. In the midst of the fight for talent, at a time when the link between diversity and better business outcomes is finally being understood and when external stakeholders are demanding accountability on diversity metrics, company leaders must look carefully at the wide-ranging impacts of tolerating and rewarding high-performing bullies at the expense of culture, particularly as they impact women of color.

Women of Color Are Saying "Enough Is Enough"

Malia,* whom Deepa interviewed for her recent book, had been a senior leader for 10 years and was one of the only senior women of color at her firm when the executive team asked her to take responsibility for one of the largest accounts in the company's portfolio. She was paired with another account executive at the same level, Frank,* who was white and a decade older.

Things were rocky from the beginning. Within weeks, it became clear to Malia that Frank was a bully. He would yell and berate the staff, make disparaging comments about people of color, and treated Malia as if she was his subordinate, not his equal. Frank made it clear that Malia was "lucky to be working" with him and told her that since he sat on the compensation council, he had the power to determine her next career move and her pay. In fact, Frank often spoke about how he understood the games of office politics and played them better than everyone else around him.

When Malia reached out to other senior women at the company for advice, she learned that Frank had a history of infractions against women and that HR and leadership were well aware of his behavior. Malia couldn't understand why everyone looked the other way, and their advice also shocked her. They told her to keep delivering results and ignore Frank as best she could.

After more than a year of putting up with his behavior and despite being told it would be "career suicide," Malia finally felt she had to report Frank via the formal dispute process - not just for herself, but for the other women and diverse talent around her. It was a hard decision and it took its toll on her mental and physical well-being. After she came forward, the predictions came true. The company's HR team didn't put much effort into reprimanding Frank, but Malia felt the effects anyway. In her performance review, her typically high ratings suffered. She was told she "needed to learn to get along" with others. It was as if she had become the problem for her company, and people seemed to accept how Frank was and gave him a wide berth. For Malia, it was clear she couldn't and wouldn't succeed working at a company that tolerated bullies like Frank. It didn't take long for her to find a new job at a company with a culture that didn't tolerate, much less reward, toxic behavior.

Tragically, Malia's experience is not unique. In the summer and fall of 2021, we conducted research with women of color in professional roles to learn what was working and what wasn't. Through a nationwide survey of more than 1,500 women and a series of intimate salons and interviews, we discussed their lived experiences at work. Again and again, we were told stories of high performers who tarnished the culture and inflicted harm on women. The result? In the vast majority of the cases, the women of color left the company for better opportunities where they knew their talents and skills would be valued. As one woman told us, "My company ignored the bad behavior of the big producer. I got labeled 'noisy' even though he had a lengthy history of complaints on his HR record. What other choice did I have? I left - and good riddance!"

Another woman said, "Our leaders coddle the toxic rock stars and leave the rest of us to suffer the consequences." And another, who had her own "Frank" story, told us, "So many times, the marginalized person who's like, 'Hey, this person is ... racist or sexist' gets dismissed as the one lone wolf and gets labeled as difficult."

Toxic rock star stories aren't unique to women of color, but their impact on them cannot be ignored. Bearing the weight of racism, microaggressions, ignorance, and, in some cases, outright hatred leaves women of color not just burned out, but as many reported to us, traumatized. Our research revealed that women of color are 18% less likely than white women to feel supported by their managers and 19% less likely to feel their skills and experience are valued and leveraged. Seventy percent feel they have to prove themselves over and over again just to be rewarded fairly. Given these challenges, it's no wonder that toxic rock stars are often the last straw for this highly capable, highly desirable talent cohort.

As a senior partner at a global consulting agency said to us after she shared her "Frank" story: "Enough is enough. It's time companies considered the consequences of their actions. Toxic rock stars are a cancer on company culture. Leaving them in a position of power reveals what the company truly values: profits over people."

Why Companies Tolerate Toxic Rock Stars

We help company leaders foster high-performing cultures built on inclusion and belonging where diverse talent, and particularly women of color, want to stay. How to deal with toxic rock stars is a challenge nearly every one of our clients has faced.

At one client company, turnover in the sales division was as high as 48%. The reason? A head of sales who delivered the numbers but who was killing the very culture the new CEO was trying to establish. As the well-meaning CEO explained, "I know he's a problem, but he delivers the results our shareholders want to see. How can I fire him when we have revenue goals we need to meet?"

In an environment where short-term gains are rewarded by Wall Street and investors, CEOs often find themselves challenged by competing demands. Sure, toxic rock stars can and do deliver today. However, the long-term impact of these culture bullies on attrition, employee engagement, productivity, and employer branding can't be ignored.

Part of the challenge stems from the old-school "boys club" mentality, where toxic rock stars are protected at the expense of diverse talent and toxic cultures get reinforced at the expense of the company's reputation and bottom line. But in today's world, leaders are being challenged to change the way they lead, and when they don't - or can't - adapt, they risk their own careers and the success of their companies.

What Leaders Should Do

A recent survey of more than 1,400 global CEOs and board members revealed that the war for talent is a top issue facing companies right now. It's become glaringly clear that losing women of color because you aren't willing to address your toxic rock stars is a recipe for failure in the new world of work. Here are five steps leaders can take to ensure high-performing bullies don't drive away their best employees.

Establish a no-tolerance policy.

No doubt there are behaviors that require immediate dismissal. But too often, employers tolerate toxic rock stars' poor behavior despite repeated reports to management and human resources. If a leader at your company is reported once, investigate. Coaching or extended training may be appropriate if the person simply didn't understand how their actions were harming others. But second, third, and fourth reports with no action send the message to all employees that bad behavior can be trumped by other factors. Companies have to take decisive action and terminate people who create toxic environments.

Look honestly at your culture.

"The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate," as organizational development experts Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker have observed. Leaders must ask themselves what they're tolerating.

Take a good look at your company culture. Do an honest culture survey, conduct focus groups, and have one-on-one conversations with employees at various levels. If you're humble, curious, and empathetic, you'll be surprised at what you'll learn.

Find out what happens when an employee is reported to HR as "toxic." Does HR do a thorough assessment? Or do they dismiss the experiences of the injured party? Do they ignore repeated complaints? And, importantly, do they do this because they believe they're protecting the company? If yes, it's time to start over.

At the very least, get engaged yourself by truly listening to your employees. Conduct a thorough employee experience assessment, engage with your employee resource groups (ERGs), and meet one-on-one with your diverse talent to understand what they need to do their best work. Throughout the process, be humble. It's up to you to set the tone for the kind of culture you want to foster, and it's on you when the culture goes awry.

Establish a better feedback process.

Research conducted by nFormation and Fairygodboss in 2021 found that 60% of women of color feel their companies are not properly prepared to handle racist incidents in the workplace. In our PowHER Redefined research, 97% of respondents said companies must establish better processes to investigate racism and discrimination at work. Debra Soltis, a well-regarded employment attorney in Washington, counsels her clients to always remember that "human resources is not your friend, but is there to protect the company." Reporting inappropriate behavior, whether it's racism, sexism, or even sexual harassment, leaves many women to face the daunting task of having to present claims based on allegations that are undocumented, retaliation that is subtle, and witnesses who are reluctant to speak.

Providing anonymous reporting opportunities using tools such as AllVoices or FaceUp can help employees feel confident they won't be penalized for speaking up. Additionally, offering external HR support and coaching guidance through organizations like HRuprise and Better Up can be an emotional lifeboat for those who are already suffering from a toxic work environment.

Infuse your values into every aspect of your business.

Inclusion and belonging have become core values for numerous companies in the past few years. While this is commendable, if these values aren't reflected in employees' lived experiences, the good intentions become performative and create distrust.

Do a values review to ensure that the core values you tout are embedded into all aspects of the employee lifecycle, from recruiting and hiring to performance management to team interactions to goal setting and more. Conduct an employee survey to understand if the values resonate. Ask the hard questions to understand if leaders and managers are walking the walk. Don't just say what you mean - follow it up with action.

If you see something, say something.

How can leaders - in particular, male leaders - be part of the solution? It starts with courage. Leaders must understand that the bystander effect is strong. People will watch a toxic situation unfold, thinking someone else clearly knows it's wrong or is better equipped to jump in. The result is that a lot of people silently agree that there's a problem but don't actually intervene.

In their book Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace, Professors David Smith and Brad Johnson argue that men play a critical role in disrupting their male colleagues' toxic behavior. They write:

Often there is a reluctance to engage, because men are anxious about what they should be doing, and are afraid to make mistakes. Or they back away because they think it's only a women's issue. But, it's actually a leadership issue, because it affects the whole organization....You have to put some skin in the game. For example, sticking up for a female colleague who has been interrupted in a meeting for the third time, or objecting to a sexist or harassing joke. Men need to be willing to challenge other men. That is the only way we are going to see true change.

The Time Is Now

It's an interesting time to be losing women of color. There's more data than ever that suggests diversity, including in leadership teams, translates into growth and profits. And as the American workforce gets more diverse and we begin to address the changing landscape of the future of work as a result of Covid, there's also growing acceptance that we need new ways of leading. We need leaders who understand core diversity challenges, lead with empathy, and have unique lived experiences.

Women of color can provide this voice and new direction. Don't wait for more trauma to be inflicted on them and more harm to come to your bottom line. It's time to get rid of your toxic rock stars if you want to keep the talent you still have and attract new women of color and other diverse candidates to help you and your company grow and thrive in today's competitive climate.

* Names used in the article have been changed.

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Leaders, Stop Rewarding Toxic Rock Stars

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Research has shown that toxic cultures are extremely costly for companies, and toxic culture was the single biggest predictor of attrition during the first six months of the Great Resignation. "Toxic rock stars," or bullies who evade consequences because they deliver results, can ruin the workplace experience for most employees, but they're particularly harmful to women of color.

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Airbnb let its workers live and work anywhere. Spoiler: They’re loving it

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NPR: AirBnB Let it’s Workers Live & Work Anywhere 

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NPR: AirBnB Let it’s Workers Live & Work Anywhere 

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Airbnb let its workers live and work anywhere. Spoiler: They’re loving it

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Airbnb says its Live and Work Anywhere policy is all about winning the global war for talent. A year in, the company and its workers are reaping all sorts of added benefits.

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FastCompany: If Brands Don’t Stand For Something, They’re Talking to No One

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FastCompany: If Brands Don’t Stand For Something, They’re Talking to No One

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Karla Monterroso on Expectations and Tradeoffs in Inclusive Leadership

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Film Forward: Expectations & Tradeoffs in Inclusive Leadership 

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Film Forward: Expectations & Tradeoffs in Inclusive Leadership 

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Karla Monterroso on Expectations and Tradeoffs in Inclusive Leadership

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Join Karla Monterroso and Emily Best as they discuss managing expectations and tradeoffs in collaborative and inclusive leadership.

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5/17/23 - I am excited to be a guest on the We Got This Podcast discussing Toxic Workplaces.

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5/17/23 - I am excited to be a guest on the We Got This Podcast discussing Toxic Workplaces.

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Welcome to THE company culture and leadership podcast, where I, your host Lech Guzowski, showcase rebellious companies and individuals who lead the way in creating people-focused organisational cultures and tackling the challenges and obstacles that come with shifting the status quo.

In each episode, we dive into the nitty-gritty of how they are making waves by exploring new approaches and best practices for improving company culture, which allow the organisation to realise its potential by realising the potential of its people.

Whether you're a business leader looking to shake things up or just looking for some inspiration, tune in to we got this and let's make people-powered companies the norm, not the exception.

Trailer

Episodes

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we got this: a company culture & leadership podcast - improving organisational culture with Lech Guzowski

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Join host Lech Guzowski on We Got This, the ultimate company culture and leadership podcast. Learn from mavericks leading the way in creating people-focused organisational cultures, and discover new approaches for improving company culture and realizing the potential of your people.

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NYTimes: Looking Another Culture in the Eye

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NYTimes: Looking Another Culture in the Eye

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Looking Another Culture in the Eye (Published 2014)

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How to communicate in a global workplace? It takes skill — and an abundance of flexibility.

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HBR: Were Employees Think Companies' DEIBA Efforts Are Failing

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HBR: Were Employees Think Companies' DEIBA Efforts Are Failing

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Research: Where Employees Think Companies’ DEIB Efforts Are Failing

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Two new surveys from Gallup, each conducted in the spring of 2022, reveal stark differences in how well employees and HR leaders say their organizations are doing when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. While 84% of CHROs say their organizations are increasing investment in DEI…

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Forbes: Why Creating a Culture of Kindness is Key to Effective Leadership

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Forbes: Why Creating a Culture of Kindness is Key to Effective Leadership

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Jennifer Twiner McCarron is an award winning producer, who is the CEO and Chair of Thunderbird Entertainment Group.
Leading with kindness cannot be underscored enough. When the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, announced her resignation, she was asked what she wanted people to remember about her leadership. Her response was simple, poignant: "As someone who always tried to be kind."

As a business leader, I can relate. When I am finished with my career, I want to be remembered for how I made people feel and how I supported them. Leading with kindness influences every action I take as CEO and board chair at Thunderbird Entertainment Group. And guess what? It's good for business, too.

Kindness can help you build a healthier organization.

Make no mistake, kindness is not a weakness. According to the VIA Institute on Character, kindness is identified as a strength within the virtue category of humanity. It requires integrity and encompasses strong principles such as honesty and compassion. As a leader, this can mean having challenging conversations and providing one-on-one direct feedback within a safe environment. Providing people with meaningful feedback and coaching them through their career growth comes part and parcel with demonstrating integrity. In fact, it can even be considered a leadership superpower. Avoiding difficult conversations isn't being kind. You're helping your team to build resilience and self-sufficiency, and that leads to a healthier organization for everyone.

Positive attracts positive.

The law of attraction is based on the belief that positive energy attracts positive energy. While some may believe this is pseudoscience, I like to consider the law of attraction in the context of people management. When we work with people who share our core values-including kindness-we produce the best results.

At Thunderbird, our people-first approach means that we treat people as individuals, not as numbers, because we are nothing without our talent. Since joining the company in 2011, I have seen our team grow to more than 1,300 people across four offices. Even with this growth, it is important to prioritize-and cherish-meeting with different team members, no matter how senior or junior they are. Peer-to-peer learning, mentorship, knowledge sharing-these are all examples of how we can create space and time to build and nurture a workplace culture based on shared values. This becomes all the more relevant in the context of labor shortages. Providing learning opportunities to support career growth is a part of the solution to the challenge of attracting the right individuals and retaining top talent.

Mistakes can lead to magic.

Throughout the course of a company's path to greatness, there will also be times when things go awry. Recognize that these bumps are opportunities that allow you to course correct for future success. It is so important to demonstrate kindness by reassuring others that they should not be afraid to make mistakes, for these are the times that allow the best work to flourish. As Taylor Swift recently said, "You have to give yourself permission to fail."

Empathy can help you to overcome obstacles.

Empathy works as a secret weapon when navigating business challenges. It allows you to cut through the surface and understand another person's perspective. It also allows you to be an architect of change and to advance the issues that are important to your company.

We embrace this approach through the content we create by striving to impact positive change through entertainment. For example, our show Molly of Denali explores themes of kindness and empathy by encouraging young audiences to embrace diversity. Just as with this fictional character, when we remove judgment and emotion in our business interactions, we often realize how much more similar we are than different and how we're stronger together.

Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?

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Council Post: Why Creating A Culture Of Kindness Is Key To Effective Leadership

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Jennifer Twiner McCarron is an award winning producer, who is the CEO and Chair of Thunderbird Entertainment Group . Leading with kindness cannot be underscored enough. When the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, announced her resignation, she was asked what she wanted people to remember about her leadership.

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HBR: Reducing Information Overload in Your Organization

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HBR: Reducing Information Overload in Your Organization

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Despite company efforts to update their information flows with sophisticated new messaging and collaboration platforms, high volumes of information are increasingly the norm for most of the workforce. To understand information overload's costs, causes and potential cures, Gartner surveyed nearly 1000 employees and managers - and found that 38% of employees say they receive an "excessive" volume of communications at their organization. Only 13% say they received less information in 2022 than they did in 2021.

In the same survey, 27% of employees reported that they feel at least somewhat overloaded by information. This means that employees report they are overwhelmed by the number of information sources available at the organization, feel there is no point in keeping track of the information they receive, and spend their day attending so many meetings that they have no energy left for their actual job.

It can be tempting to view this simply as the cost of doing business in a knowledge economy, but feelings of overload come with real productivity costs. For example, the number of employees who understand and are aligned to company strategy drops by more than half when they feel overloaded by information. Further, only 6% of those who feel overloaded by information report they are highly likely to stay with their current company. It is easy to imagine that an overload-induced energy drain could compound pre-existing problems with staff disengagement such as burnout, fatigue, and distrust in leadership.

Burden, Not Volume, Drives Information Overload

Consider a typical day for your average employee. They start with an inbox already brimming with threaded conversations with colleagues, cascaded internal news via large distributions, meeting invitations of all types, solicitations from external vendors, phishing attempts from bad actors, and some stray messages from their intermingled personal life - and then it's all downhill from there.

Periods of concentration and productivity are derailed by interruptions, and time is wasted searching for critical information among the various platforms.

Information volume, as it turns out, is only a partial driver of information overload. Rather, the real culprit is the information itself - and specifically the degree to which the accessing and interpreting of the information imposes extra "work" on its recipient. This is what we call information burden.

Information burden is defined as a set of information that is:

Duplicative: 57% of employees and managers say they often receive multiple communications about the same or similar topics at the same time.

Irrelevant: 47% say that the company communications they receive are unrelated to their day-to-day responsibilities.

Effort Intensive: 38% say they have to do extra work to keep up with the amount of information they receive at their organization.

Inconsistent: 33% say that the company communications they receive are often inconsistent or internally conflicting.

Conservatively, an employee wastes 3 hours and 27 minutes per week dealing with information burden. Executive leaders should regard this as unacceptable, especially because they're impacted too.

Management Is at Greatest Risk of Feeling Overloaded

Complex work situations - like those featuring high levels of change or hybrid work - put employees at a heightened risk of facing information burden. But one population of employees stands out: executive management.

Our research shows that 40% of leaders and 30% of managers report high levels of burden. This is not to be taken lightly: Those that report high burden are 7.4 times more likely to report high decision regret, and 2.6 times more likely to have avoidant or negative responses to change.

The stakes are clearly high: An inability to get control of information at your organization cuts to the heart of your ability to set and deliver on strategy. The current approach to managing information results in many managers being questionably aligned to strategy, avoiding critical business changes, and making bad decisions.

Solving the Problem

Chalk it up to urgent transformation needs or bad habits, but burden is a tragedy of the commons. There are two actions that organizational leadership can take right now that will help alleviate the suffering that all functions are facing.

Step 1: Create a low-burden culture.

Unspoken communication norms prevail in today's workplace, leaving employees unsure of what good behavior looks like. We establish our own habits for communicating in both our personal and professional lives, and these preferences for email vs. text vs. call vs. apps travel with us.

Constant change only compounds confusion about good behavior. Employees that find themselves collaborating with a new team arrive unsure of whether it's protocol to chat with leadership over Teams, during office hours, or only through email. Without a mutual understanding of how information should be shared at the organization, employees tolerate dysfunction and feel disempowered to surface dysfunction - and so the cycle of burden continues.

To some degree, allowing personal preferences to reign has enabled systemic dysfunction. Organizations should instead establish clear expectations for how information flows. Shared norms are beneficial for a variety of reasons - they improve psychological safety on teams and empower employees to surface and address instances of channel abuse.

Your organization already does plenty of norm-setting. (Just think of your latest customer-centricity or safety campaign.) There is now good reason to think that information sharing is a behavior that warrants more than our current "anything goes" approach.

One example of signposting for communication norms comes from Dropbox's Virtual-First Toolkit, which catalogs their recommended use of a mix of synchronous and asynchronous tools and has been featured on their public-facing blog "work in progress."

For each channel, Dropbox establishes clear boundaries for what to use each channel for, and conversely, what each channel is not so great for. The guidance includes why an employee would make the choice of email over Slack (e.g., "Slack can be noisy, so it's easy to miss important things and forget to respond. If something is critically important, try email") as well as which types of activities should be resolved over a meeting.

For an employee who is new, or who moves across teams, understanding the lay of the internal channel land from the start alleviates so many stressors of where to go and what to expect out of their experience.

Step 2: Reinforce accountability from the top.

The phrase "drinking from a fire hose" is a familiar one, but we really should talk more about who's holding the hose.

In the case of information burden, water is coming from everywhere. Disparate announcements on staffing changes, sales wins, and updated forecasts sent by various department leaders create confusion about what information is most critical or relevant. Communications and digital workplace teams are constantly introducing new collaboration and productivity platforms, and the legacy messages continue to surface to the top of internal searches.

Part of the challenge of understanding where the burden is coming from is a lack of visibility - each function is narrowly focused on their own pages, apps, or microsites. The second part is the drudgery of administration.

Effective information management is ongoing, cumbersome and requires commitment from all involved. Establishing shared governance over the employee information experience is a mechanism to address both challenges at the same time. It allows stakeholders to align on a shared vision of information management and collectively maintain a user-friendly system.

Align on a Shared Vision

Establishing shared governance requires getting everyone on the same page about where and how employees receive information in the first place. This can be accomplished through focus groups, surveys or even establishing dummy inboxes to mimic the volume of content employees receive in a day. A shared understanding of what the current experience is actually like is necessary to determine what the experience should look like.

The perfect jumping off point for establishing shared governance is the intranet. The resource is shared - every department has at least one intranet page - and the channel is intended to serve as a self-service portal, which means improvements in functionality will help save employees' time.

One organization, the New South Wales Department of Planning and Energy (NSW DPE), leveraged their shared understanding to act as the building blocks for a recent intranet redesign. NSW DPE created a content council co-led by senior owners of channels and representatives from groups that produce content to set content standards and uphold those content principles for audits. They established two types of audits for the redesigned intranet: a quarterly accuracy review and a biannual experience review to maintain accurate, accessible content and resolve accessibility and functionality issues quickly. As a result, NSW DPE effectively consolidated more than 2,000 intranet pages into fewer than 500, significantly contributing to a low burden culture.

Organizations can start their own shared governance system by bringing together functions that are most responsible for managing channels and employee experience (e.g., HR, Comms, IT). Also important is to include functions whose employees normally face a high volume of information (e.g., customer service, sales) as the consequences of burden on these groups directly impact the organization's touchpoints with customers.

Information overload is the inevitable result of the modern organization's always-on, more-is-better approach to communication. Unfortunately, it is also a driver of employees' disengagement and poor decision making. While we are all, as employees and leaders, affected by this reality, the onus is on the company communicators themselves to craft a low-burden culture. It will require energy, expertise and coordination to architect and reinforce more human-centric communication practices.

Start with the realities of what information is needed and what information is getting in the way in order to nudge your teams toward a series of behaviors where everyone is jointly committed to reducing the information burden they place on their peers and themselves.

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Reducing Information Overload in Your Organization

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Information overload is the inevitable result of the modern organization's always-on, more-is-better approach to communication. Unfortunately, it is also a driver of employees' disengagement and poor decision making. While we are all, as employees and leaders, affected by this reality, the onus is on the company communicators themselves to craft a low-burden culture.

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Forbes: 5 Ways to Instantly Increase Your Leadership Presence

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Forbes: 5 Ways to Instantly Increase Your Leadership Presence

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5 Ways To Instantly Increase Your Leadership Presence

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Leadership presence needs to be rooted in your basic values and based on your authentic best self. But often a single attitudinal or behavioral change can have an instant and powerful effect on how others perceive you.

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Leadership & Workplace topics to discuss weekly. As of 5/1/23 we're on Week 18 of the list

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High Performance Podcast: The Importance of Adaptability

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High Performance Podcast: The Importance of Adaptability

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The importance of adaptability with Neil Fachie

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Listen to this episode from The High Performance Podcast on Spotify. These bitesize episodes focus on the greatest lessons we've learnt from the guests we've had on the podcast.In this episode Jake and Damian reflect back their conversation with Paralympian, Neil Fachie.

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Call In: How to Build & Maintain an Inclusive Workplace

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Call In: How to Build & Maintain an Inclusive Workplace

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Episode 27: How to Build & Maintain an Inclusive Workplace: Mark Mordell, Chairman & CEO, Avidbank

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Listen to this episode from Call In on Spotify. It starts at the top - building a sense of belonging through transparency and openness.

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John Doerr: Why the Secret to Success is  Setting the Right Goals (TED)

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John Doerr: Why the Secret to Success is  Setting the Right Goals (TED)

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Why the secret to success is setting the right goals

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Our leaders and institutions are failing us, but it’s not always because they’re bad or unethical, says venture capitalist John Doerr -- often, it’s simply because they’re leading us toward the wrong objectives. In this practical talk, Doerr shows us how we can get back on track with “Objectives and Key Results,” or OKRs -- a goal-setting system that’s been employed by the likes of Google, Intel and Bono to set and execute on audacious goals. Learn more about how setting the right goals can mean the difference between success and failure -- and how we can use OKRs to hold our leaders and ourselves accountable.

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Amishi Jha: How to Tame Your Wandering Mind (TED)

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Amishi Jha: How to Tame Your Wandering Mind (TED)

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Amishi Jha studies how we pay attention: the process by which our brain decides what’s important out of the constant stream of information it receives. Both external distractions (like stress) and internal ones (like mind-wandering) diminish our attention’s power, Jha says -- but some simple techniques can boost it. “Pay attention to your attention,” Jha says.

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MasterClass:  Elaine Welteroth - Build Your Career Blueprint

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MasterClass:  Elaine Welteroth - Build Your Career Blueprint

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MasterClass: Elaine Welteroth - Uncover Your Zone of Genius

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MasterClass: Elaine Welteroth - Uncover Your Zone of Genius

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MasterClass: Roz Brewer - Spark Innovation by Listening

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MasterClass: Roz Brewer - Spark Innovation by Listening

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Experts say fear keeps us from sharing constructive feedback, but here’s how — and why — you should speak up anyway.

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NYTimes: Your Email Does Not Constitute My Emergency (Adam Grant)

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NYTimes: Your Email Does Not Constitute My Emergency (Adam Grant)

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Opinion | Your Email Does Not Constitute My Emergency

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An immediate response can be a worse outcome for both parties.

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<aside> ❤️‍🔥 Permanent or Fractional Director of Talent Development & Learning | Workplace Experience 🌱 Learning & Development 🌱 Talent Management & Performance Cycle 🌱 Pre- & Onboarding | Retention Strategy 🌱 Virtual & IRL Employee Experience | Engagement 🌱 DEIBA 🌱 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

</aside>

🎯 Performance Cycle

✨Virtual Engagement

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Permanent or Fractional Director of Talent Development & Learning | Workplace Experience 🌱 Learning & Development 🌱 Talent Management & Performance Cycle 🌱 Pre- & Onboarding | Retention Strategy 🌱 Virtual & IRL Employee Experience | Engagement 🌱 DEIBA 🌱 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

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Click the image above to join the TalentLab.Live Slack Community for Learning & Development professionals, Human Resources Partners, Workplace/Employee Experience, or any PeopleOps professionals!

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Did you know that flamingos tend to stay in groups & prefer the company of others? Let's take a cue from these beautiful creatures and build a supportive & robust community!

Learning & Development | Workplace Experience/Culture | PeopleOps | Talent Acquisition | HR professionals | Talent Management Leaders... if you're dedicated to enabling people and sharing ideas & resources, I'd love for you to be a part of this movement!

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Sign Up Here to Join the TalentLab.Live Slack Community!

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Did you know that flamingos tend to stay in groups & prefer the company of others? Let's take a cue from these beautiful creatures and build a supportive & robust community!