Naiman Labs Newsletter #16. Toxic culture recipe

Hi friends and welcome to the new issue of Naiman Labs newsletter.

This week I am making an experiment using different mailing engine and platform. Hope you’ll find it better and I hope you will be even more glad that you subscribed to my Naiman Labs newsletter.

In one of the previous issues I shared an article from MIT Sloan Management Review about toxic culture and why it is important.

Today I want to uncover this topic a little bit more 🔬

There’s a great study conducted by Revelio Labs and Culture 500, published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. It shows various predictors of employees' resignation. The researchers analyzed 34 million online employee profiles to identify U.S. workers who left their employer for any reason (including quitting, retiring, or being laid off) between April and September 2021. In addition, they analyzed the free text comments of more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, using the Natural Employee Language Understanding platform developed by CultureX.

The goal of the research was to identify the main predictors of employees desire to leave their companies.

They proved that toxicity is one of the strongest predictors of employees attrition. And not only this. Compared to other factors and the most biased one (pay) toxic culture is 10-times stronger predictor compared to compensation topic when it comes to employees attrition.

Toxic culture is a major topic, and while there is actually a common understanding that toxic culture is bad, there's no common understanding of what makes culture toxic. The same research team analyzed 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews across various industries and defined the so-called "Toxic 5" – key attributes employees mention as toxicity.

So here’s the recipe of toxic work culture:

1️⃣ Create disrespectful environment. Lack of consideration, courtesy, and dignity for others. Don’t encourage, don’t reward, don’t recognise, humiliate.

2️⃣ Prioritise someone and be non-inclusive. Inequality of different employee groups and communities (age, gender, race), including such things as nepotism and cronyism.

3️⃣ Forget about work ethics. Be non-compliant with labor regulations, take advantage of your employees.

4️⃣ Make a nice cutthroat environment. The culture of backstabbing and setting each other up to get what you want.

5️⃣ Encourage your managers and employees to be abusive: Bullying, harassment, and hostility.

Why is toxic culture such a strong predictor? Unfortunately, toxicity is quite widespread. According to Glassdoor reviews, 10% of American employers exhibit some toxic culture attributes. And there’s even more. Before all the “Great resignation” waves, SHRM conducted a research and they discovered that 1 out of 5 employees left an employer because of toxic culture traits.

There are many conversations around culture, however when it comes to practice people don’t actually think about the culture. Leaders often don’t set the culture (or don’t set examples) and it is being created organically, not pro-actively.

🙌 People management article of the week

Last week we had a session at work regarding remote work culture. I asked our team 2 questions: what we should stop doing and what we should start doing in regards with our approach to remote work and communication. The goal is to make a remote work “manifesto” or “code of conduct”. We love brainstorms and it turned out to be extremely useful and fruitful for me. I think I’ll share our findings one day with you here.

For today I am sharing a nice short article from WSJ on how to deal with meetings.

💼 Career tip of the week

When it comes to discussing your weaknesses in a job interview, it's important to strike a balance. And please, please, please don’t say “I don’t have any weakness”.

You don't want to come across as too arrogant, but you also don't want to sell yourself short. A good approach is to choose a trait that you genuinely want to improve upon, such as attention to detail or teamwork.

Then, provide examples of how you have been working to improve in that area.

For example, creating a checklist to follow before submitting work can help you become more attentive to detail. By demonstrating that you are actively working on improving yourself, you show that you are committed to learning and growing in your role.

⚙️Productivity tip of the week

I have a hard time thinking about my future self sometimes. It's tough to figure out what I want to do, who I want to be, and what skills I want to develop. But I've found a way to make things a little easier. Just a little, just for a while, but it’s already something.

Every year, I have a tradition of creating a visual board with different areas of my life:

• Career and finance

• Health and fitness

• Social and family

• Development and skills

I rate each area on a scale of 1 to 10 to see how happy I am with my life in each of those areas. Then, based on my ratings, I set goals for myself. This has helped me understand where I'm at in life and what I need to do to improve.

If you're struggling to figure out your own goals and aspirations, I highly recommend trying this exercise. It's a great way to get to know yourself better and start working towards the life you want.