Surviving the toxic workplace (1)

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Happy Workers’ Day to all employees all over the world. Thank you for the value that you bring to the sustainability of our lives and our environments. As my contribution to the dynamics of the workplace, I would like to examine an issue that is of concern to many workers all over the world, the challenge of working in a toxic workplace.

According to the MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopaedia, “Toxins are substances created by plants and animals that are poisonous (toxic) to humans. Toxins may also include some medicines that are helpful in small doses, but poisonous in large amounts. Most toxins that cause problems in humans come from germs such as bacteria.”

Some toxins are fatal on ingestion as their poison acts immediately to deactivate and put to death the entire body system. Others are slow but progressive in the damage that they cause once ingested. In His ultimate wisdom, God has designed our bodies to self-cleanse and get rid of toxins through our functional excretory systems. However, there are times when the level of toxins can overwhelm our system and predispose us to all kinds of imbalances that can be damaging to our health. Toxins’ damage to our enzymes could mean diminished production of haemoglobin in the blood, thus accelerating the ageing process. It also can lead to the failure of energy production and lower our protection against oxidated stress.

Toxicity can present itself in several ways like poor circulation, stress, migraines, anxiety, depression, constipation, skin problems, inflammation, insomnia, respiratory disorders, unexplained fatigue, allergies, puffy eyes, inability to concentrate, memory loss. The list goes on. Sometimes, these reactions are the effect of the immune system trying to fight off the invader. Unchecked, a toxic system could put the immune system on overdrive and set it on a collision course with the body it was designed to defend. This is the primary reason for what is known as auto-immune responses which sometimes attack things that could be beneficial to the body. The food or medication, rather than being treated as an ally, is treated as an enemy!

What does this have to do with the workplace? Plenty. A toxic work environment – and I don’t mean an environment where people work with toxic chemicals – is inimical to mental and physical well-being. Prolonged exposure to such environments can actually cut short an individual’s life expectancy.

When you wake up to get ready for work every morning, you love to do so with a sense of fulfilment that comes from knowing that you are not only going to earn a living, but you are also going to make a significant contribution to the human enterprise by supplying labour that makes other people’s lives better. You go to work with the wish that the environment where these two complementary activities happen is conducive to optimum function in a way that makes you return home at the end of work, satisfied, even if tired. What happens if the opposite is the case?

Prolonged exposure to a toxic work environment will produce one of three consequences. The first possible consequence is that you develop a resistance to it because your internal defense system can overcome it and so it does not really bother you. The second possible scenario is that you are emotionally and physically exhausted, such that going to work every day feels like a trip to Golgotha to be crucified. The only happy moments of your life are when you are away from work. Every weekend looks like one year away! The third possible scenario is that you absorb the toxicity to a level where you become a carrier and contagious distributor of the toxins!

Let us examine the face of toxicity in the workspace. However, let me say upfront that the toxins do not come from the job or the milieu. They come from the people. Wherever any one or more of these characteristics is found in the workplace, the environment is toxic.

Have you found yourself expressing unnecessary and sometimes inexplicable outrage towards people who have done nothing wrong to you, especially when you have just returned from work and are mentally stressed or smarting from an encounter with a boss or colleague that seems to enjoy making your life miserable? Have you ever felt that apart from the fact that it helps to put food on your table, your current job is a gift from hell, with your boss being the supervising demon and many of your colleagues the minion demons employed to stoke the furnace? Do you constantly dread going to work and hate staying a minute longer than the closing hour? Do you always feel like you were more of a slave than an employee? Have you ever found yourself struggling to remember things because you literally have a brain fog? You may be suffering from the effects of a toxic workplace.

Using the word “toxin” as an acronym, the first characteristic of a toxic workplace is that it is mentally tormenting. The issue of the mental health of employees is beginning to come to the fore in recent times. Workplace toxicity has produced a significant population of depressed people who have not been mentally equipped to handle the challenges and the pressure they face in such environments. Any environment where the employer ‘productifies’ people instead of prioritising them, will only produce angry workers who see themselves as robots. The frustration comes from knowing that they have capacity to do more than they are doing but they are operating in an environment that deliberately frowns on initiative by constantly micromanaging and breathing down the necks of staff with institutional controls and performance goads that make them feel no better than soulless machines programmed by control buttons.

The toxic workplace is oppressive. In such a space, human development is seen as a waste of resources and time. Individual progress is always secondary to, if not totally subsumed under institutional process development. The thinking of the oppressive workplace is that there is no need to train staff, unless on a technical skill they need to function, because after you have invested in their development, another organisation could poach them. To the leaders of the toxic workspace, there is no reason why anyone should be as intellectually developed as them. Furthermore, the oppressive workplace places rules above relationships. People are seen as tools who simply must be used to follow an agenda and certain stipulated rules. Any deviation, no matter how well-intentioned, is visited with heavy sanctions that send the message through the whole organisation that the owners “ain’t here to play with no one!” Here, initiative is anathema. I once had a boss who told me that he was not paying me to think! According to him, he had been in business before I entered College, so I had nothing to teach him. I quit to preserve my mental balance. Less than five years later, the initially promising company went into receivership for the same reasons I tried to point out to him!

One counsel I never fail to give my clients is, “If you don’t train them, don’t blame them!”… continued.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!

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