Toxic employees and how to deal with them

The trials and tribulations of doing your job in a toxic environment

Luiza Moldovan, 07.06.2023, 14:00

I happened
to us all, so many times…On our way to the office, we felt our ankles were
cuffed in manacles and we could barely take on step after the next. Once we got
at the office, we activated a mode of behavior which, more often than not, prompted
us to ask ourselves who we really were, the ones at home or those on the job. Sometimes
we’re scared, some other time we are super-techy, we count down the hours and the
minutes left until it is time for us to leave. After that, we activate a
different behavioral mode, that of decompensation, where we release our
frustrations as we run into our folks at home, or we simply are too hard on
ourselves. We do that only to go back to square one, the following
day. But what happens, actually? In fact, we work in a toxic environment that
takes its toll on our being as a whole. From a purely human point of view, there
is that saying, leave your job worries on the doorstep of your house, but, in
earnest, that doesn’t work at all. We take our job toxicity with us, everywhere
we go.

Andra Pintican is a career counsellor and a HR expert. We sat down and
spoke to Andra about the toxic workplace. So how do we detect toxicity in our
workplace?

Andra Pintican:

Here are some of the toxic environment indicators. We have very authoritarian
managers, who perform some kind of micromanagement, they do not allow freedom
and autonomy to their employees so the latter can meet their set targets and
goals, there is no safe psychological space, we are afraid to express ourselves
because we dead positive that if we tell all what our opinion is, repercussions
are about to follow, we do our job because we have to, even if we are aware a hundred
per cent of them are wrong, so we absolutely stick to what we were told to do
because our opinion in the organization does not matter, we do not have
managers or people who are willing to take responsibility when something goes
wrong, instead, they play the game of whose fault it is, rather than find a solution,
we do not trust anybody. In a toxic environment, in fact, I think that is the
most serious problem, that we do not trust each other and we always have the feeling
that somebody will do us harm and that is the first and the most important aspect
to be taken into account, because, the moment someone has that fear deeply engrained
in his mind, that he is in a place where he is not safe, they will always keep
their defensive systems alert, whereas in a survival fight there will be no
true performance.

These
are trying times we’ve been going through, and we are willing to make huge
compromises if we want to put food on the table for our folks. Taking the heat
of working with a toxic manager has become, these days, the only way of
working, at least in some organizations.

Here is Andra Pinctican once again,
this time telling us how to recognize the toxic boss and how to thwart his
behavior.

The moment you have a toxic relationship with your manager, I want us to despise,
for a little while, of the idea of having a boss, which is totally out of place
in 2023, first of all you need to detect that. You need to realize that
something is wrong there and that is very difficult, as we still think several types
of behavior are normal. So no, no one can yell at you, telling you that you cannot
have your vacation because there is no one to replace you, you have rights
which must be respected, you also have responsibilities and it is your duty to respect
them, that’s for sure. A toxic boss will have an inadequate type of behavior
with you, he will not respect your work standards, he will not respect your
personal space, he will text you when it is totally inappropriate, he will ask
you to ruin your personal life at the expense of the professional one and most
likely he will have you do a lot more things that what is included in your job
description. The moment you have to confront such people, you must learn to set
and make your work standards known, to be familiar with your job description,
you need to know what the things are, for which you are actually responsible,
of course, you need to do your job and fulfil your contract responsibilities,
yet at the same time you need to ask the man who is responsible for you to respect
you all along. Let him know how you want him to address you, tell him, the
moment he yells at you or when he uses inappropriate words, that you do not
accept such a professional cooperation relationship, you also need to speak clearly
about how you want him to work with you, so things can go perfectly fine because,
realistically speaking, people cannot have a supernatural vision about what you want.

The
work standard, Andra Pintican says, is an idea that needs to be reiterated at
the work place all the time. Does my colleague know how toxic he is, for me ?

A manager, a colleague, somebody who is toxic, in 99 percent of the
cases they do not know they’re toxic. And they do not know that because,
generally speaking, we, in terms of culture, do not know what toxicity is. We still
believe it is normal to shout at one another, it is normal to encourage through
discouraging or through terror. Fortunately, these things do not work anymore: unfortunately,
they worked for a good number of years, yet things are changing, as we speak. Part
of the people are beginning to realize what a sound professional relationship
means, what it means to have a working professional relationship, to do your
job in as sound a working environment as possible – I still do not think we ‘ve
been going as far as to have very sound work relationships, but we’re heading in
that direction – and the moment we have people with toxic types of behavior,
they do not know they have that issue, nay, since we do not assertively address
those issues they’re not likely to become aware of that either. Usually, it’s
either us yelling at them there, telling them look what you’re doing to me and
they are on the defensive, and then we wrestle, or it’s us playing the role of
the victim, telling them look what you’re doing to me, you make me suffer, and
that’s what prompts them to maintain their behavior even to a greater extent. If
we want us to snap out of these psychological games, as that’s what really happens
with the work relationships, there are very many psychological games and we are
captive in a place of a professional drama, each and every one of us needs to
work with themselves and balance the way they relate to the others and, which
is a must, we need to set our work standards, making them known constantly. We
need to lay strong emphasis on the work standards, as they are an important step
in the process of improving the work relationships in Romania.

Let
us learn to respect ourselves and we shall witness magic in all the other aspects
of our life, the professional one included.

Andra Pintican once again.

In most of the cases, resignation is not the solution to the problem, as
what we usually do is submit our resignation from a toxic workplace, but, mind
you, the workplace is toxic, and the situation is toxic because we had our own contribution
to that. And we quit a workplace of this kind and we move to another workplace
where, most likely, we will make the same mistakes as we did before and, in two
or three years’ time, maybe less, we will find ourselves in a similar
situation. The thing is that each and every one of us contributes to the
circumstances we found ourselves in. We can say, look, the manager or my
colleague aggress me, but the naked truth is that people do to us what we allow
them to do. And, until we do not learn how to detect, even in ourselves, our
own behavioral patterns that simply nurture the others toxic types of behavior, we
‘re not going to snap out of that game easily, not even if we submit our
resignation.

And
the organization itself may also feel the pinch of its toxic employees.

The long-term effects of a toxic environment are devastating. The moment someone
comes to work in an environment where she or he feels they are at war, they are
in danger, they have no choice other than be on the defensive all the time, first
off, individually, while on the inside a lot of damage occurs, in our own
bodies. That state of being stressed out, which grows into chronic stress,
takes its toll on our lives on multiple levels, physically, mainly, and we
reach the point where we cannot avoid the burnout. That is what happens individually.
At team level, when we have a group of people, a team of people who suffer and
they sometimes cannot clearly say that is what actually happens to them, that
they are in burnout or in functional depression, the moment people suffer on
the inside, the way they interact with one another is bound to be increasingly
toxic. I think it doesn’t make any sense to have a debate on the extent of the ensuing
damage as regards performance, the relationship with the client, innovation…When
people are extremely busy to survive and save their bacon and be in competition
games, proving they are the best, I do not think there is any focus on the client
or the organizational impact any more, but only on survival.