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They bad-mouth you to work colleagues behind your back; they angrily demand the impossible from everyone but themselves; they make unwanted comments about your attire.
At some point in our careers, most of us have come across someone known as a "toxic worker," a colleague or boss whose abrasive style or devious actions can make the workday utterly miserable. Such people hurt morale, stoke conflict in the office, and harm a company's reputation.
But toxic workers aren't just annoying or unpleasant to be around; they cost firms significantly more money than most of them even realize. According to a new Harvard Business School (HBS) paper, toxic workers are so damaging to the bottom line that avoiding them or rooting them out delivers twice the value to a company that hiring a superstar performer does.
While a top 1 percent worker might return $5,303 in cost savings to a company through increased output, avoiding a toxic hire will net an estimated $12,489, the study said. That figure does not include savings from sidestepping litigation, regulatory penalties, or decreased productivity as a result of low morale.
On the other hand, toxic co-workers are useful as foils come bonus time: "Hey, at least I'm not as bad as that guy..."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @06:30PM
No shit, a piss drop ruins the whole bottle of whiskey. This is authoritative - how? I am the toxic worker, asshole.
"Paper" from HBS? Those fucking einsteins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 03 2015, @06:39PM
If all we did was rely on common sense, well, the earth really does look flat...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @06:48PM
I know it's slightly pedantic, but Earth does look slightly round if you view the horizon of a large body of water...
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday December 03 2015, @06:57PM
I think circular is more accurate here as "round" can refer to either spherical or circular.
So for a watery horizon with nothing but water, that would look circular. A watery horizon where ships come and go over the horizon, that would imply spherical, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull-down [wikipedia.org] .
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @08:45AM
That's not evidence for a spherical earth, that's just a sign of the light falling down, just as everything else does. The light coming from the lower parts of the ship has fallen into the water before it reaches your eye. ;-)
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday December 03 2015, @09:04PM
I have had the fortune of visiting this place: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%81%E3%82%AD%E3%82%A6%E5%B2%AC [wikipedia.org]
From there, the view quite clearly indicates that the Earth is spherical.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @06:48PM
Rely on the authoritative voice - me. You should have listened when they told you reading is fundamental.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:07PM
Keep up the good work Ethanol. Those Navy men need more assholes like you.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:53PM
The AC you're addressing can't be Ethanol: he invoked 'einstein' without a jew slur...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Friday December 04 2015, @12:15AM
Certainly it's an obvious thing on the face of it. What is not so obvious is how much hiring a toxic worker could actually cost a company. FTFA:
The results of the paper show that it seems to require at least three top 1% workers to make up for the cost to the company of a single toxic worker on average, which is a bit startling. That might convince management that it'll be worth the effort to be able to weed out such people. The thing is these "toxic workers" can actually seem to be good for the company since they can generally work hard and make a manager think like they're hitting the numbers.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by bootsy on Friday December 04 2015, @10:27AM
I agree with your points but would add that in Europe it can be very difficult to actually fire these people. We don't have at will employment so even if you identify such a person and even if they have had diciplinary action against them it still takes ages to remove them from the company.
They often simply get moved from one team to another and that has issues as they can claim constructive dismissal.
This is one of the reasons why so many UK companies use contractors for IT as they are much, much easier to get rid of and you don't have to provide a justification for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @11:54PM