The following post showed up on my LinkedIn feed earlier today, it wants companies to put in time, effort & money to train employees on office politics so that they learn to survive and perform in a toxic work environment…
Personally, I would rather that the company spent all the effort to remove the toxicity from their work culture so that people don’t have to deal with it. This is like saying that we know that the water you drink is toxic, but we are not going to fix the root cause but will give you free chemo-therapy to mitigate your cancer.
If you run a company, and are hearing reports about toxic culture in the company then you need to address that immediately and not by giving people training on how to survive it, but rather by removing the toxic elements ruthlessly. Short term you might have to take a hit and might miss milestones or deliverables but long term your other employees who were just doing the bare minimum to get by would start engaging more, new talented folks would be happy to join your team/company because they wouldn’t get emails from friends telling them that it is a bad idea to join company X because of the toxic work environment.
What do you think?
– Suramya