Company Culture to Optimise Productivity: 4 Signs that your Company Has Toxic Culture

March 2, 201811:41 am1608 views

Do you find your company experience a declining productivity that you can barely meet the business goals? Do you think that your employees’ performance keep hampering? If ‘yes’ is the answer, you might want to check your current company culture.

Culture is an important aspect to boost your workforce’s productivity and efficiency. Having a positive and supportive company culture will bring great impact on employee’s well-being and motivation to work. When your employees are enjoying the time they spend at work and passionate in collaborating with their coworkers, this will result in excellent performance and high employee satisfaction.

On the other hand, if employees are demonstrating bad attitudes and engaging in harmful behaviour, this will hurt your office’s stability and even threaten your business’ sustainability in the long run. Jokes that include sexual harassment or involve racist remarks, toxic culture often easily spreads out from trivial misconduct that is left unaddressed or being too tolerated. By the time you realise it, the bad seeds have turned into a habit. If you fail to handle this matter carefully, toxic company culture will affect your reputation as an employer.

Owing to the reason, it is time to evaluate the inside of your company culture. Identify every single aspect of your culture and find out the best way to cleanse the toxins from your organisation. You should be aware if your company culture has these signs:

See also: 4 Mistakes to Avoid When Nurturing Millennials at the Workplace

Poor communication

Most leaders will agree that communication is the key to business success. That being said, having lack of communication can slowly but surely kill your company. Bad communication in the workplace could cause misunderstanding among team-mates and even lead to prolonged issues within the internal organisation that will affect negatively to the employee relations. Among the examples of ineffective communication are lack of transparency about how you give rewards or bonuses to the employees, or poorly-written emails with unclear directions that confuse the readers. This kind of trait could raise issues among workers, and thus lead to declining productivity.

Toxic leadership

As a role model, a leader holds the key in determining the atmosphere of a workplace. When a leader demonstrates idle and sluggish traits at work, this will spread the virus of lethargy among the team members. Additionally, bad temper shown by a leader will also encourage negativity and even hatred because people tend to disrespect those who treat others with arrogance and condescension.

Lack of discipline

As a leader, you need to check the employees’ attendance list on daily basis. If you find too much lateness even absences without prior notification or unclear reasons, then it could be a red signal that your company has a toxic culture. When your employees seem to be spiritless at the idea of attending certain office gathering, there are chances that they have some issues with their coworkers. Another sign can be seen from the employee’s working speed and efficiency. You should be alarmed when your high-performing employees suddenly show strange behaviour such as being late in submitting their tasks.

Internal conflicts

Your company is about to be destroyed by toxic culture when conflicts within internal team are left unresolved. The specific sign of the threat is when team member begins to blame each other for a project failure. It is even an acute sign when the member sabotages or even takes credit of other member’s work because it will create an unfair competition. Aside from the work-related issues, personal-related traits such as gossiping and forming office cliques can be another typical toxic for the company’s culture.

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