How Toxicity Affects Team Performance
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2025 3:54 am
Disrespectful attitude from an employee or boss: sarcastic and derogatory comments. Gossip and negative comments about other employees flourish in the team.
Ignoring personal boundaries: A colleague or boss demands that you be available and perform tasks outside of working hours. When you try to discuss this, outline your working hours, you are accused, shamed, and called upon to be collegial and to have a corporate spirit.
Tensions in the team. The state of the team and the project is not clear, people are silent, do not take the initiative. Or, on the contrary: employees within the company are constantly sorting out relationships.
Micromanagement and excessive control from the outside that stifle initiative and creativity.
Lack of transparency in decision-making. For example, nepotism is rampant in the team: people are hired for the project based on connections, family ties, and not skills. Also, the lack of transparency in work creates a feeling in the team that employees have no voice, their ideas will not be heard.
Working time boundaries are constantly violated. This can belize telegram data include unpaid overtime, calls and messages outside of working hours and on vacation.
Regular staff turnover, emotional burnout among employees.
Coupled with high workloads, this creates an unhealthy environment in the team. This undermines the emotional and physical health of employees and leads to emotional burnout . One of the behavioral scenarios for an employee with burnout is quitting.
In one company, toxicity manifested itself like this: a person is a soulless cog in a machine with an expiration date. If a person's resource is exhausted, they are simply fired and replaced by a new employee. The company had performance metrics with points, the planned value of which should grow by 10-15% every week. Note: only the result of work was digitized into points, and all the preparation and operational work had no value. For example, you prepare a webinar for a month, which means that your metrics are all zeros for a month. And only when the webinar is held, the points will be reflected in your work "balance". In addition, the work week there began on Wednesday and ended on Tuesday, so it was impossible to fully relax. After a year of working in the company, I realized that 13 people left my department. Soon I left the company too.
Svetlana Lenkova,
Chief Marketing Officer at Prospace
Ignoring personal boundaries: A colleague or boss demands that you be available and perform tasks outside of working hours. When you try to discuss this, outline your working hours, you are accused, shamed, and called upon to be collegial and to have a corporate spirit.
Tensions in the team. The state of the team and the project is not clear, people are silent, do not take the initiative. Or, on the contrary: employees within the company are constantly sorting out relationships.
Micromanagement and excessive control from the outside that stifle initiative and creativity.
Lack of transparency in decision-making. For example, nepotism is rampant in the team: people are hired for the project based on connections, family ties, and not skills. Also, the lack of transparency in work creates a feeling in the team that employees have no voice, their ideas will not be heard.
Working time boundaries are constantly violated. This can belize telegram data include unpaid overtime, calls and messages outside of working hours and on vacation.
Regular staff turnover, emotional burnout among employees.
Coupled with high workloads, this creates an unhealthy environment in the team. This undermines the emotional and physical health of employees and leads to emotional burnout . One of the behavioral scenarios for an employee with burnout is quitting.
In one company, toxicity manifested itself like this: a person is a soulless cog in a machine with an expiration date. If a person's resource is exhausted, they are simply fired and replaced by a new employee. The company had performance metrics with points, the planned value of which should grow by 10-15% every week. Note: only the result of work was digitized into points, and all the preparation and operational work had no value. For example, you prepare a webinar for a month, which means that your metrics are all zeros for a month. And only when the webinar is held, the points will be reflected in your work "balance". In addition, the work week there began on Wednesday and ended on Tuesday, so it was impossible to fully relax. After a year of working in the company, I realized that 13 people left my department. Soon I left the company too.
Svetlana Lenkova,
Chief Marketing Officer at Prospace