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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, Insightful) by Dunbal on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:20PM
Any organization's worst nightmare is a toxic co-worker in one or more protected categories.
Only because there's no such thing as a manager with balls. You ARE allowed to fire people you know. At some point defending yourself from a POSSIBLE lawsuit (which is not all that hard if you have documented evidence that the guy is fucking up business in more ways than one) is cheaper than keeping him on. Lawyers aren't all that expensive, especially if they already work for the company. You can't fire someone for being black or retarded but you certainly CAN fire someone for being an ass, not doing their job, talking shit and being abusive to other employees, etc.