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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: 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.