By Tony Zoellner
Identifying toxic employees is critical to getting your company working efficiently and effectively. They can undermine and sabotage the processes and procedures that make your company hum.
But most importantly, they ruin office culture creating gossip networks that erode morale, increase work stress and foster discontent leading to your best employees leaving your company. Here’s three effective ways to find them:
1. Create a formal feedback mechanism
Your employees want to give you information about their job (good and bad) and often have no way of giving it. There are several ways to create a simple anonymous staff survey that will allow you to ask specific questions about how they feel about the company, their department, and job including difficulties they’re having with co-workers.
There are many websites that can help you create surveys quickly and effectively (SurveyMonkey, SmartSurvey and Google Forms). If the questions are phrased correctly, and your employees trust in the anonymity of the survey, you’ll get great feedback and they WILL identify toxic employees.
The stakes really get high when these poisonous employees are in positions of power; bosses and managers. Amy Morin, a contributing writer to Forbes Magazine writes in the dangers of toxic employees , “Toxic bosses often exhibit narcissistic and psychopathic traits”. They abuse their positions of power and lack empathy for other workers. They use fear and intimidation to maintain control. They act like bullies and often pick on their employees.”
I’ve witnessed and worked at companies with employees like this, and the results can be devastating.
2. Create an informal feedback loop
I’m sure many of you have heard about MBWA (Management by Wandering Around), a management technique made popular by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman that’s been around for decades. In its simplest form, it’s walking around your company and informally asking people how things are going.
Body language is important here. If your arms are crossed with a stern look on your face, the person you’re talking to will be guarded and cautious. Have a smile, be inviting in your posture, and listen well.
You’ll notice that most people are very proud of the work they do and will be quick to show you. If there are people that are hindering their ability to work effectively, they will often share that information but you must ask. If this is practiced consistently you’ll get great feedback but don’t expect immediate results. Be patient.
It’s also important to be aware of the surroundings. In an office full of cubicles, people are aware that sound carries through the paper-thin walls. So if they have some critical information that they want to tell you, they’re probably not going to say anything because others can hear.
Be strategic in picking the right time and location, especially if you’re trying to get sensitive information
3. Pay attention to what they are not saying
As all of us go through our little self-absorbed work lives, it’s important at times to lift our heads out of the sand, look around and listen.
All of us, including your employees, are emotional creatures. Often, they’re walking around with their faces reflecting, for all to see (using non-verbal body language) how things are really going.
If you have toxic employees, other people will be walking away from them with expressions of unhappiness. Have you ever gone into a fast-food restaurant and watched the employees interacting with each other with occasional eye rolls and suspect side glances? You can spot the problem personnel if you look carefully enough.
Take Action. Having a toxic employee situation that is not being addressed can actually be a bad reflection on you. Having them have a free reign of destructive behavior can be interpreted as poor leadership.
Addressing destructive employees can have a leveraged effect on your efforts to keep and maintain a powerful office environment. It not only brings attention to the undesired behavior and improves company morale and productivity, it gets your team behind you as a leader because you’ve proactively identified and corrected the crippling behavior.
Finding a toxic employee is critical to getting your company running on all cylinders and gaining the respect of your employees by displaying your leadership by helping to improve its culture and working effectively again.
Stop losing your best employees to your competitors and download my free Staff Survey Checklist and Development Guide to harness the power of your employees. It is just one piece of my Simple Steps Roadmap I use with my clients. Book a free 30-minute call with me to see if I can help you move from overwhelmed and spinning your wheels to working with focus and intent.
Often times, embracing that your company or department is broken is the essential step to revitalizing it. Progress starts with a vision. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re never going to get there. Is it worth a FREE 30-minute call to discuss?