Why fighting toxicity in digital communities at work matters
“It was a toxic work environment.”
The other day, my friend quit her job. My brilliant, hard working friend, with deep skills and expertise in her field, with strong opinions, weakly held — confident, humble, eager to grow and learn. She would be a catch for any company. But she decided to leave her company, because of the culture. Questionable morals. Backstabbing colleagues. Gossip and drama in the hallways. A fight to get the good assignments. Micromanagement. Lack of trust. Once or twice, a comment that shouldn’t be tolerated anymore, not after #metoo — right?
Either we’ve heard it from a friend, or we’ve experienced it ourselves — the fact is, toxic places to work exist. How do we know they’re toxic? And why does it matter?
It matters because toxicity reinforces inequality, and inequality is bad for business (in addition to being one of the world’s top evils). The good news is, there’s something we can do about it.
Toxicity in the workplace is behaviour that creates a culture of discomfort, unhappiness, and inequality.
Toxicity, in its mildest forms, can manifest as apathy, cynicism, or what might seem like harmless gossip. Sometimes it can look like people who are overworked or burnt out, and that turns into a culture of competitiveness and “me against everyone else.” At its worst, it’s misogyny, racism and abuse. This can be subtle or overt.
Sometimes, the people who suffer from these types of identity attacks question their own sanity because the behaviour is so outrageous, it doesn’t seem possible that it could happen at work. This stuff just happens in the darkest corners of social media, right? Not in our professional inboxes? Our public Slack channel? In the comments during our company-wide livestreams?
Work, more than ever, is digital. That comes with the benefits, and the problems, of digital communities. Work can be more flexible, collaborative and creative. But the toxicity that is increasingly present in our personal online communities is creeping into our workplace channels.
Toxicity reinforces inequality — and that’s why we have to fight it
Diversity, inclusion and belonging at work have never been more relevant. For a long time, groups that have historically been marginalized — women, BIPOC, sexual minorities, disabled people — have been living with inequality, in society and at work, in overt forms like pay equity, and more subtle forms like everyday sexism or everyday racism. It is rare to find a gender balanced executive team or corporate board. It’s even more rare to find a woman CEO, or a black CEO. This holds us all back: if everyone got an equal shot, we would make so much more progress, be so much more able to utilize the talent all around us.
Toxicity at its worst often manifests as an attack on someone because of their identity. Marginalized groups are more frequent targets of toxicity, and also experience it differently.
The continuum looks something like this:
Toxicity: inconsiderate, mean, rude, offensive online behaviour
Experiences: marginalized groups negatively impacted in a disproportionate way
Behaviour: marginalized groups even more marginalized, and self-selected out
Culture: toxic work environment, enabling bad behaviour
If you’re a woman and you’re at work, and a senior executive makes a subtle comment on your looks, that’s toxicity. If you experience that, a few things happen: first, you question whether you experienced anything bad at all. Second, you question why you’re there, in your job, in the first place. Were you hired because you know what you’re doing? This comment may have had nothing to do with your abilities — and that’s exactly the point. The discomfort causes insecurity, and diminished confidence. Suddenly, you find yourself looking around for someone to look up to, and you can’t find anyone: you realize, as a woman who’s made it this far in her field, not only will you have to work twice as hard to be noticed, but you’ll have to do the work of breaking ground on top of that. So, why? Why bother? Why put yourself through that? What is happiness, anyway? Wouldn’t you be happier where you are for now, forever? So you self-select out of the leadership pipeline, opting to stay where you are, shift sideways or leave altogether.
And it’s not just direct targets of toxicity who are impacted. This excerpt from a National Democratic Institute report is in the context of women in politics, but applies across the board:
“While acts of violence against women in politics are directed at individual women, they have an intent beyond their specifc target: to frighten other women who are already politically-active, to deter women who might consider engaging in politics, and to communicate to society that women should not participate in public life in any capacity.”
This loop feeds upon itself and spins faster and faster. Toxicity begets more toxicity. But the good news is, this loop can be broken.
The first step is knowing how much toxicity exists. Awareness of the truth is the first step to positive change and progress.
During our work with ParityBOT, we learned that many people simply weren’t aware of the level and seriousness of the problem of online toxicity towards women in politics. As people began to understand that each positive tweet ParityBOT posted meant a woman running in their election was being attacked online — violently attacked — they started to see the sheer volume of online abuse hurled at women, just because they dared to have an opinion online and ask for votes so they could contribute to their community.
Measuring the problem to create awareness is the first step in change of any kind. We see this across business disciplines: marketing, change management, strategy, product development, you name it: the first step in the models, best practices and operational guidelines is awareness of the problem to be solved.
Awareness can kick start the cycle of change. From awareness, you can set your sights on your desired result and fill in the rest. You can outline your strategy and tactics, execute your plans, measure, adjust, repeat, and ultimately, make real progress.
To put this problem into our current context, toxicity is like a virus. The more it spreads, the more it spreads exponentially. Sure, some toxicity in some corners will always exist, and always have, like the seasonal flu.
The problem in our digital age is that those corners can now find each other and connect at the click of a “I’m feeling lucky” button. So we see our digital communities evolve into deeply toxic places more quickly than we thought possible.
What we need is to stop the spread: to get the R-naught below one, and keep it there. To do that for a virus, a vaccine works well. The vaccine equivalent in toxic work environments is intentional values-based intervention.
The second step is intervention in a specific part of the toxicity loop, with the only thing that stops the harmful effects of toxicity: sincere acknowledgement, positivity and encouragement.
With ParityBOT, we chose to post positive, encouraging messages and truthful information about the history and benefits of gender equality in politics. And we chose to intervene not at the toxicity notch, but at the experience notch in the loop. Toxic experiences confronted are toxic experiences neutralized.
Using this type of machine learning technology and automation software is, as always, most effective when paired with humans. With any given workplace, detecting toxicity and automating intervention is effective if it’s values-based. Nothing can automate the human ability to set intentional values that clearly direct desired behaviours.
So if your workplace values are “do the right thing” or “trust and expect the same from others” or “be accountable”, use those as your interventions. It will send two signals: toxicity is detected, and toxicity is not tolerated. Not where you work.
This style of intervention turns individual experiences into collective experiences, and that in turn makes fighting toxicity a collective responsibility. And showing how easy it is to post something positive can activate an entire company of people, encourage positive behaviour and change a culture. It’s like an automated form of active bystander interventions.
This goes without saying, and is a nice bonus of being nice: good cultures are more productive, and higher productivity means better business outcomes. There are endless studies out of the best business schools and best companies that tell us this. It’s a no brainer.
