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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) by Username on Thursday December 03 2015, @07:07PM
I give my coworkers shit every day, and they give it right back. Call me toxic if you want, but I would hate to work in a safe space. It would be boring and high on the anxiety scale.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Thursday December 03 2015, @07:47PM
Word of advice:
Do not give shit to a woman or minority, (especially a new hire) because even though you thought everyone knew you were kidding, it WILL come back to bite you sooner or later. And you will pay dearly.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @08:30AM
because even though you thought everyone knew you were kidding, it WILL come back to bite you sooner or later. And you will pay dearly.
hmm that sounds like a toxic working environment... ;)
(Score: 2) by Nr_9 on Friday December 04 2015, @08:47AM
Also, people that are bullied will often pretend not to take offense. That doesn't mean the bullier isn't being a dick... Women and minorities gets these kind of attitudes thrown at them all the time. Of course they will be more offended than some brogrammer.
I've been in the opposite position right after high school, the only man and a new hire working under a bunch of middle aged women. I quit after a month of swallowing shit and being treated like garbage. Not all of them were bad, but some where. All of them closed ranks on me when I complained, however, because my way of solving problems were completely different from theirs. All because of the social dynamics, where I was on the bottom of the totem pole and a different gender.
What I'm trying to say is that you should try to have some empathy with "women and minorities" when it comes to communicating, especially if you are in a male-dominated work space.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DutchUncle on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:34PM
"Toxic" isn't about having a "very casual" workplace style; it's about being an a**hole. That said, I'll agree with the other respondent: There will always be people who don't take the joke, or even just walk by the door without knowing the "casual" style and report bad behavior, and things will go wrong from there. At my very first job, three of us - all fresh out of school - were working together on a prototype hw/sw system and trash-talking each other as we traced control flow from one layer to another. Staying past dinnertime, we jointly figured out multiple hw & sw issues, made a lot of progress, and left feeling very pleased with ourselves and our cooperative effort. The next day, instead of attaboys, each of us was called in to our respective supervisor's office for a lecture, because a more decorous adult had passed by the lab, mistaken our light-hearted banter for serious anger, and reported that we had been close to a fist-fight.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:36PM
That's robust give and take. It's not like you were such a disaster to work with that an ambitious person turned down a promotion because it would have meant spending more time with you. It's not like you lied on input to someone else's performance review. It's not like you went into a panic rage when someone sped up your code by a factor of 2. It's not like you didn't know the difference between a bit and a byte and shouted down the guy who tried to explain literally the first thing about how the product worked. It's not like you mind-fucked everyone to the point that the entire executive team needed professional counseling. It's not like you had your co-workers throwing up every morning at the thought of going to work. It's not like someone bought a copy of "Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us" and kept shouting in recognition of patterns from your interactions.
(That wasn't all the same person, by the way).
An uninhibited and honest "That sucks!" or "What were you thinking?!" is not toxic. If you think it is, you've never had an actual toxic cow orker. Be grateful for that. Be very grateful, and it still won't be grateful enough.
(Score: 2) by Username on Friday December 04 2015, @03:19AM
Nah, it’s more like me telling someone "you’re fucking useless," getting reported, and having the manager just tell me not to do it again.
There’s a whole group of us highly competitive assholes who get away with everything. We cut each other down and stab each other in the back. We also get all the important projects and work with each other all the time.
I honestly find it all enjoyable. It’s almost like the movie Tin Men, where you do the meanest shit to each other but somehow are friends and coolheaded in the end.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday December 04 2015, @01:59AM
That's not what the article means when it talks about toxic workers. If you talk shit to people who have it coming that doesn't make you toxic. That just makes you overly blunt, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Their actual definition seems to describe much more insidious people. FTFA:
I take it you're not the sort of person described.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.