How to Detox a Toxic Work Culture with Charlie Sull
Charlie Sull - Co-Founder at CultureX and published researcher
Co-Founder of CultureX, along with his father Donald Sull. The two have been responsible for what is probably the most important research around workplace culture in recent years, analysing over 1.3 million anonymous employee reviews of their companies via glassdoor. Their research has converted big data into a comprehensible picture of the leading causes of toxic culture in the workplace, giving us the five key indicators of toxic culture, and actionable insights into how we can detoxify our workplaces.
What is the greatest predictor of employees leaving your company?
Research tells us, toxic culture is TEN times more important than compensation in predicting turnover.
Toxic Culture is something we all know about, perhaps you feel you’ve even worked in one. But how exactly do we diagnose a toxic workplace culture, and what do we do about it?
Charlie Sull and Donald Sull’s research has been published regularly in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, just to name a few.
Charlie and Donald and the team at Culture X are now pioneering cultural measurement in workplaces using AI and big data to give a more accurate and timely understanding of how employees experience culture at work.
This conversation is a must listen for any Leader serious about creating a thriving workplace culture, and ridding toxicity from their workplace. It’s a big one, let’s dive in!
To learn more about Charlie and find his published articles here:
CultureX website
Find Charlie Sull on LinkedIn here.
MIT Sloan Management Review and other leading publication articles:
Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation
Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture
How to Fix a Toxic Culture - MIT Sloan Management Review
For accessible access, view the podcast with closed captions below and access the full conversation transcript.
Episode Transcript:
Spk0 Alexis Zahner Spk1 Sally Clarke Spk2 Charlie Sull
[00:00:09] spk_0: What is the greatest predictor of employees leaving your company? Research tells us toxic culture is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover. Toxic culture is something we all know about. Perhaps you even feel like you've worked in one. But how exactly do we diagnose a toxic workplace culture? And what on earth do we do about it? Welcome to. We are human leaders. I'm Alexis Zahner and together with my co-host Sally Clarke, we're unpacking toxic culture at work with Charlie Sull. Charlie Sol is the co-founder of Culture X along with his father Donald. So the two have been responsible for what is probably the most important research around workplace culture in recent years, analyzing over 1.3 million anonymous employee reviews of their companies via glass. Do their research has converted big data into a comprehensible picture of the leading causes of toxic culture in the workplace. Giving us the five key indicators of toxic culture and actionable insights into how we can detoxify our workplaces. Charlie Sol and Donald Suh's research has been published regularly in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal just to name a few Charlie and Donald and the team of culture X are now pioneering cultural measurement in workplaces using A I and big data to give a more accurate and timely understanding of how employees experience culture at work. This conversation is a must lesson for any leader serious about creating a thriving workplace culture and ridding toxicity from your workplace. It's a big one. Now, let's dive in.
[00:02:10] spk_1: Welcome to the We are Human Leaders podcast, Charlie. It's awesome to have you with us. We'd love to start by getting to know you a bit better and understanding your personal journey that's brought you to the incredible work you're doing today.
[00:02:22] spk_2: Yeah, thanks Sally. So we are kind of in the academic world. That's how we started. So I actually started the company with my dad and even before the company, I was working with him for a number of years. So he teaches at MIT so a management review and we were doing a bunch of work around a lot of different business aspects. A lot of strategy, a lot of execution, agility, what we kept on coming back to was this sort of invisible force that lay at the heart of all the things that we were studying and also a lot of other things which is culture. So we just became increasingly increasingly interested in culture, but we also quite quickly hit a roadblock which was effective measurement and we quickly became of the opinion that if you can't effectively measure culture, it's very difficult to effectively manage it, difficult to really produce any insight if you don't have a firm grasp of what is actually going on. So traditionally, people measure a culture, there are a couple of different like you, for instance, you can do ethnographic studies which are very cool, but it's hard to do at scale and they take a lot of time and they're very resource intensive. The way typically big companies will measure a culture is they originally start off as employee engagement surveys. But now they're culture surveys too. And basically what they do is they ask dozens of these questions on a scale of 1 to 5. What do you think about collaboration on a scale? 1 to 5? What do you think about this and that trying to understand every aspect of the employee experience and the culture? And we found very quickly and we've learned a lot more along the road that this method of measurement simply doesn't work. So we set out to pioneer completely different kind of cultural measurement, which is based on actually understanding the employee voice in natural language. And it turns out if you have this much more natural, just understanding what people are saying and understanding the richness of natural language approach, you can measure the culture much more effectively and you can get really cool insights. So we're still developing it. We've spent about eight years developing this A I platform that allows for this effective cultural measurement. And then this has powered a lot of the research that, that I suspect I'll be talking about today. And it's also powered our work at culture, which is this company that we founded, we spun off with the research and there we work with senior management of a lot of the world's largest companies to measure and improve culture.
[00:04:38] spk_1: Amazing Charlie. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I'm curious, super nerdy zoom in here. But you mentioned that the kind of the traditional employee engagement metrics don't work from a cultural perspective in terms of genuinely measuring culture. Can you explain to us a little bit more why they don't work? What's not working there? Yeah,
[00:04:57] spk_2: happy to, I mean, so there are three fundamental problems with traditional surveys that ask dozens of these questions. In some cases, I've seen more than 100 questions being asked. The shortest survey I've seen of this kind is I think 20 questions even that is too many. And the three big problems are one when any human is faced with dozens of repetitive questions like this, they're gonna face the tendency going on pilot which makes it really hard to extract insight from a survey. So for instance, even on this one survey I was analyzing recently, it only had 20 questions which by the standards of these things is very short. Even on that survey, 90% of respondents answered every question with the average respondent in this survey. It was about 100,000 employees who took this survey answered at least 90% of all questions with the same two answers. So they're basically just throughout the entire survey, they're just going back and forth saying this is five, this is four, this is five, this is four and they're really just barely even paying attention to the question is, is what it looks like. So if the employees aren't even paying attention to the question, it's very hard to extract insight from their answers. So that's called auto pilot. And that's a big problem. The second problem is, so you're asking all these dozens of questions about various aspects of the employee experience by the culture. It's very difficult to understand which of those questions that you're asking actually matters to employees because in a perfect world, they're at least paying attention to the questions. So you can see how the outcomes are doing. But there's no way of knowing which of these, all these dozens of questions which of these are actually important. So if you're trying to do things common use cases like boost employee satisfaction, boost engagement, boost retention. It's you really need to know not only how employees feel about things but also what matters the most to employees. And it's very difficult to do this with these traditional surveys. And then the third major limitation of these surveys is so OK, so say in a perfect world, the employees actually paying attention to the question being asked and somehow you know that this matters to them even then the answer you get is still on a scale of 1 to 5. I think this is a three. You don't get any context, you don't get any idea for how to actually fix this. Whereas with natural language employees will often go into a lot of detail saying here's what's exactly what's going wrong. Here are some suggestions for how to fix it. They give context, they give intervention. That's kind of a basic overview of how traditional cultural management doesn't work too well. And I actually think this is a huge, huge deal because culture is so important. I mean, I can talk cultural measurement all day. I can talk about how important culture is all day, but this is a huge problem that affects billions of employees around the world. Do you know that the average culture score on glass or on glass door? You're asked for the overall rating, but you're also asked for a culture rating on a scale of 1 to 5 across the whole world. Do you know what that score is? I feel like I should. It's not terrible. It's 3.5 out of five. So it's not terrible, terrible, terrible, but that's better than I thought too. But still what if you're looking for a restaurant to eat at on Yelp or on Google reviews. Are you gonna go to a restaurant with 3.5? There's, there's room for improvement and measurement plays such a huge role in improving culture. I mean, I think we're jumping ahead of ourselves maybe, but to improve a culture, I think you fundamentally need two things and the rest are they matter but they're to some extent details and those two things are senior leadership. I am coming from the CEO him or herself and effective measurement. And if you have both of those pieces, you can make tremendous amounts of cultural progress as I see on a routine basis. But if you don't have either of those two pieces, including the effective cultural measurement, it's difficult and the way the vast majority of larger organizations or even small organizations measure a culture right now is with this traditional approach that I just described.
[00:08:37] spk_0: It sounds to me Charlie that if you were an organization that simply wanted to tick the box that your culture was OK, you would ask one of these surveys where you can get everyone, 90% of respondents saying yes, everything's fine here. But it's really interesting this idea that asking employees questions that may or may not matter to them actually isn't reflective of their experience. Now, you touched on this idea of reviewing glass door reviews and we have been very influenced by your research and the articles that yourself and the team at Culture X have put out in the last year around toxic culture and toxic culture seems to be something that affects a lot of employees. And we know that your research looked at reviews of, I guess sentiment and written feedback of organizations after people had left. And we'd love to dive into this more. So we can start exploring, you know what a toxic culture looks like from your research, Charlie that highlighted five toxic culture attributes. Could you help us understand what these are and how these attributes actually contribute to a toxic culture in an organization?
[00:09:48] spk_2: Yeah, definitely, I think just as important as understanding what these attributes actually are is understanding how we develop them because I think a lot of people that they'll think of toxic culture, they'll think it's a million different things. So I wanted to at least share our methodology because we think we had a take on it. So what we did is we analyzed a lot of employee feedback. So on glass store, I think it was 1.3 million employee reviews so big data. And then we use a pretty sophisticated machine learning ability model that actually won the Nobel Prize and what this does a very good job of is determining for any given outcome. So in this case, the outcome is the overall rating on Glass Store, how much any individual feature. So in this case, a feature is a free text topic, we measure hundreds of free text topics, how much of an impact the free text topic has on the outcome. So what you're able to do using this approach is to measure out of the hundreds of different things that employees speak about, see which of them have the most significant impact on employee satisfaction as measured by the glass door overall rating. So what you see when you do this exercise with most topics, for instance, when employees speak about compensation critically, it does have an impact on the overall glass rating. But on average, it's relatively small, it's only about 1/10 of a point. And when you do this across most topics, you see a relatively small effect size. But what separates the toxic five as we call them from just general topics that employees speak about frequently is when these topics are mentioned, they tank the glass store rating so they can take the glasser rating 0.7 0.8 0.9 points just really a huge effect size. And you can also see, I mean, this is expressed numerically, but I've also spent a lot of time just reading through these free text comments just so that the natural language and you can see when employees write about these toxic five, it's a special kind of language. They're using much more emotional language. You can see it kind of affects them on a deep visceral level and that's what you see play out with a math too. So the toxic five big themes that demonstrate this pattern that I just described disrespectful behavior is big one, noninclusive behavior, cutthroat competition, unethical behavior and abusive behavior. It turns out when employees experience any of those in the workplace, they not only talk about negatively that has a huge negative impact on how they assess the uh company overall. Yeah.
[00:12:13] spk_0: Thank you for sharing that Charlie and an interesting point that I noticed in your research as well is that toxic culture was 10 times more powerful than compensation in predicting attrition. So getting a handle on your company culture is actually more important than what you pay your employees in terms of keeping them there and keeping them engaged. Is that right?
[00:12:33] spk_2: Yeah, that's pretty much what we found. So this was a little bit of a different analysis. So what we did here is we again use big data. So we use over a million glass reviews and we use tens of millions of linkedin profiles to see for the big companies. We were studying what are their actual attrition rates. And then we basically compared the cultures of all the companies and looked at across hundreds of different attributes, which one of those had the biggest impact on actual attrition. And basically what that study is saying is this isn't happening at the individual level anymore. This is now happening at the company level. So if you're an extremely toxic company, you're gonna have big big challenges with attrition relative to if you're a very healthy company when it comes to toxicity. And yeah, the I mean, the effect size we found was very strong. Yeah, 10 times as large as compensation.
[00:13:25] spk_1: And if I'm understanding correctly, Charlie, as you described it, these toxic attributes have a lot to do with behavior in companies. So really just to sort of zoom in there a little bit as well, we're looking at sort of how we treat each other, how people are treated, how they feel like others are treating them interpersonal interactions, leadership. So how can we think about how these traits actually look in practice in an organization?
[00:13:49] spk_2: Yeah. Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, most of the toxic five are about treatment of other people. I mean, that's what, you know, I saw of them, you know, abusive behavior, disrespectful behavior, noninclusive behavior. If you're discriminating against someone, the only one that isn't linked to treatment of people is unethical behavior. So that's actually a little bit different. And for the most part, toxicity is around treatment. And in terms of what it actually looks like in practice, it can vary pretty widely. I mean, even within the theme of noninclusive behavior, this could be a gender equity story, it could be a racial equity story. LGBT Q equity story, a favoritism story, just general inclusion. It can take many forms. But when you can measure this effectively, employees will normally go into detail in their free text feedback about the specific behaviors and the specific norms that are being violated. So that's a good way to figure it out. But there's not for toxicity, there isn't one universal pattern that fits everything except perhaps the idea of you're treating people badly in a way that violates their sense of right and wrong. I'm super
[00:14:55] spk_1: curious to ask Charlie, what surprised you sort of looking when you were doing this research and obviously a huge data set that you're working with. What surprised you most about those findings?
[00:15:05] spk_2: Well, to be candid, we were very surprised with the attrition study. I mean, this was a question. We were reading the news just like everyone else, everyone was talking about the great resignation and everyone had kind of a pet theory. So we thought it was perfectly plausible that this was a compensation story or this was a workload story. So when it came out that attrition was the most powerful driver, not just by a little bit, but by a lot or sorry, that toxicity was the most powerful driver of attrition by a lot that was genuinely surprising to us. And I think that it led us to a much deeper exploration of toxic culture. We spent basically the next six months and then the next four articles we wrote exploring the same topic, but going into that research, we had no idea that that toxic culture mattered so much
[00:15:52] spk_0: and Charlie, one of the data points that came out of your research as well is that women are 41% more likely to experience a toxic culture than men. And another fairly crazy statistic that I read was that women in C Suite are 53% more likely to experience toxicity. Are there certain of these toxic five? Are there certain elements that women and perhaps other marginalized groups and organizations are experiencing at a higher rate than men? Did you find that in the research?
[00:16:25] spk_2: Yes, it's basically all of them. So it's interesting actually for all of the toxic five which have to do with treating another person badly or treating them as less men. Those are the topics that women experience at a much higher rate. And the one topic which is less about treatment and more about breaking rules that it's not a victimless crime, but it's more of a victimless crime than say yelling at someone in the face or something. So unethical behavior, their men and women actually experience that form of toxicity at a similar rate. But for all the other kinds of toxicity, this is surprising, right? Because you, you would think it would be mostly driven by gender equity, which is a specific kind of noninclusive behavior. And you certainly find that effect, but you find nearly as strong effects for things like disrespectful behavior. Racial equity breaks down significantly across these lines, even cut throat competition. You find this effect to play out across the board.
[00:17:20] spk_0: It is painful to hear that even as women are reaching C SUITE, the toxicity is actually more prevalent being that you've mentioned, leadership behavior is also an indicator of toxic behavior. So that does pain me to hear. And I'd love to go into it a little bit more Charlie some of the things that we can do as a company as leadership to start, firstly, uncovering these toxic behaviors and going about shifting our culture in a more positive way. Can you start to guide us through some of your research around how leaders can detoxify their organization from the inside out.
[00:17:54] spk_2: Yeah, so effective cultural improvement of any kind, but especially improving toxicity. It has quite a few different moving parts. I mean, you have to think through things like top leaderships, role, distributed leaders, social norms, work design. Those are a few of the big ones and these things are all kind of constantly interplaying with each other and it it can become a little bit complex. But in a nutshell, I think effective culture change depends on two things. One is you need the CEO him or herself to buy into this, you need senior leadership to actually commit to culture change. And the second thing is you need effective cultural measurement. This isn't such a big deal if you're in 100 person company. But if you're dealing with a multinational company or a company of a few 1000 employees. It's very difficult to understand what's going on with the culture because the culture is very complex. It's operating on hundreds of dimensions and there are tons of different offices, tons of different countries and functions and so forth. So, unless you have an effective measurement system, it's gonna be difficult to make much progress because you're not gonna be able to do things. For instance, like say, oh look at North America here, cutthroat competition is two standard deviations higher than normal. Here's where we should focus on for that specific problem. You're just not gonna have the level of granularity and precision that you need to actually make progress on these issues. I hate to put it in quite so much of a nutshell, but I think if you can get two things, right, very important things the the senior leadership in and the effective measurement, then you're in really good shape and things like social norms, which are, you know, very important. You can figure out through the measurement. You can understand what the social norms are, which ones you want to change if they're working, if you're making improvements and even things like distributed leaders across the organization. So another way you can measure the culture is by looking at employee feedback about specific managers. And then you can do things like leadership profiles and you can say, oh look for this leader, his 20 direct reports are saying he's two standard deviations, less supportive than normal. And he's two standard deviations, more aggressive than normal or something. And that's a red flag that here you want to focus on that specific leader because that's actually when you're trying to improve toxicity, specifically, it's very helpful to understand which of your distributed leaders are exhibiting these traits. Because what we normally find in our work with uh clients as well as there's other research to support this, we normally find that about 10% or about 5% of managers, 5 to 10% of managers account for about half of the toxicity in the organization. So if you can identify with effective measurement, who those 5% to 10% of managers are and address that behavior either through coaching or other mechanisms. That's a really high impact way to make a dent on toxicity. That's a
[00:20:41] spk_1: fascinating statistic there, Charlie because I think that really does as a burnout researcher, a lot of the difficulty I think we see is for leaders to understand what steps they can take and where they can have sort of quick wins if they are looking to shift the culture to reduce burnout and improve well-being. And so being able to sort of derive the data to sort of focus in on the specific group of leaders who are really requiring that extra help and that support through coaching or other training, whatever it is to detoxify and clearly have, you know, potentially a very a significant impact act with up to 50% of the toxicity in the organization coming from them. So I think that really for me highlights something that could be something that you could probably see some fairly quick results on, which is something that I think a lot of senior leaders really want to see when they're starting to talk about shifting to detoxifying a culture.
[00:21:31] spk_2: Yeah, I mean, we're still learning about the most effective interventions at a personal level, but there are definitely promising signs that coaching works. There are even promising signs that you don't even need coaching. Sometimes even if you just make the leader aware of how their behavior affects other people, which a lot of the time they're not even aware of, even if you just provide that basic level of education, that's often enough to get pretty good results.
[00:21:55] spk_0: And Charlie just before we move through, you mentioned a few things here, predictors of this toxic behavior. One of them being toxic, social norms or the social norms in an organization in general. Could we just for a moment? Get a little granular around what this means? Because I'm sure there are many leaders listening to this who operate within an organization that has set values, perhaps a culture code, what kind of is distinctive around social norms and what are we actually trying to measure when we talk about social norms within an organization?
[00:22:24] spk_2: Yeah, so the social norm I mean, in terms of examples, there can be 1000 kinds of social norms. A very frequent example, for instance, in an organization, there can be the social norm that you don't start meetings on time. Or if you're the boss, you don't arrive to meetings on time, you arrive 10 minutes late. And this is actually a pretty important way that employees will speak about disrespectful behavior because it's disrespectful at everyone's time. So that's one example. And social norms can exist for any cultural value that you talk about. They don't just exist for toxicity. So for instance, the the social norm around agility, for instance, you only have one person on a meeting unless you really need more people on the meeting, for instance, which is the social norm I see violated all the time in the business world. Yeah,
[00:23:11] spk_0: to me, it's like really diving into, to the way we do things around here. And I just often see a disconnect between how organizations and leaders think they operate based on things like their values and what they're actually doing on a day to day basis. So I just wanted to make that discernment between value set and our ideal way of operating. And then the social norms really being the behaviors that we exhibit on a day to day basis. And often we're not even aware that there's a disconnect there.
[00:23:38] spk_2: Yeah, exactly. I mean, social norms are the intermediary between abstract values and concrete behaviors. And one of the first things we studied was how important our cultural values, just the thing you write on your website, our values are integrity, agility, whatever. And what we found again, analyzing millions of employer views across hundreds of different large household name companies. There's zero correlation between a company's espoused values and a company's actual cultural behavior. So just putting something on your website saying these are the values that does absolutely nothing.
[00:24:13] spk_0: Wow, that is fascinating to hear.
[00:24:16] spk_1: And I think we all know those stories of the big companies that have made major massive sort of reputational errors and had these beautiful values tucked away somewhere on their website at the same
[00:24:26] spk_2: time. Yeah, Wells Fargo is the one we use the most there at the time of that huge scandal. Their values were things like we always do the right thing. We always treat our customer right,
[00:24:36] spk_0: integrity,
[00:24:39] spk_1: gold, good stuff. Now, I'm curious, uh Charlie, you mentioned alongside, you know, really ensuring that you're getting the metrics to be able to track the progression towards a detoxified culture. You also mentioned senior management buy in senior management commitment to this process to really wanting to take these steps. And I'm curious, hopefully it's not too annoying a question but to unpack a little bit what that looks like in practice when you at Culture Act are working with an organization. How do you see that senior management truly are committed to have that b and committed to going through this
[00:25:12] spk_2: process. You can tell just from conversations whether senior leaders are giving up their time to be on certain calls that are relevant for the culture. You can tell through conversations, some leaders genuinely care, other leaders have other priorities. And unfortunately, in a perfect world, one of the big reasons why you do cultural management is because you genuinely care about your employees. You want to make that better. Unfortunately, not all leaders buy into that they have other priorities. But if they don't buy into that, what we recommend doing is presenting a data driven case to them about how this can positively impact the bottom line because now there's pretty recently that this body of evidence emerged, but it's quickly growing, that culture has not only a big impact on whether employees are happy or sad, but also a very large impact on uh on financial value creation.
[00:26:09] spk_1: I'm curious a little bit of a philosophical question to follow up Charlie. Do you feel like at a certain point because I still think there's still quite a lot of resistance, you know, we're starting to see indeed more data and evidence that improving culture actually, you know, has a positive impact on the bottom line too. Do you see that there will be a tipping point or almost the crest of the way of breaking at a certain point where we see companies really starting to get that and momentum growing towards a detoxified culture becoming the norm
[00:26:36] spk_2: I think is that Martin Luther King, I believe, who said that the arc of history swings up and down but it heads in the positive direction. I think that's what's going on here. I think as we learn more and more about how culture works and why it's important over time, things are gradually going to get better. However, the thing that's making it swing one way or the other is the labor cycle. So when you see that employees are really desperately trying to retain employees and the labor cycle is like that, then culture becomes very important. And when it's the other direction where it's difficult for employees to get a job, then culture recedes in importance. So that on a year to year basis, that's the big driver of whether culture matters or not in companies. But I think on the whole, there's also kind of an upward trend underneath all these things as the research body becomes more developed and people begin to think that even if the labor market is a certain way, this is still a good thing for us to try to cultivate.
[00:27:36] spk_1: Amazing. I'm curious to sort of zoom in now on when we're working with companies and looking to detoxify. So there's, you've gathered the data we've identified, perhaps which of the toxic five are most prevalent, which behaviors need to be eradicated. Do you have a standard set or a sort of a maybe the most popular remedies that you use to start to counteract those behaviors or to start to address what that looks like in an organization sort of beyond what we discussed earlier, sort of coaching modalities.
[00:28:05] spk_2: I mean, the thing about culture and toxic culture can take so many different forms that there isn't necessarily a one size fits all solution. I mean, the approach we recommend is really getting as much granularity as possible, both on the specific microculture where the toxic behavior is breaking down. And if you can, if you have this kind of measurement on the specific distributed leader or middle manager who's exhibiting these toxic behaviors, if you can have those two things and then you can have the employee feedback describing what exactly is breaking down with the toxic behavior. So is this favoritism story or a disrespect story or what kind of toxicity is this employees will normally go into quite a bit of detail about what that actually looks like provide context and oftentimes provide ideas for intervention. So if you do measurement, right, a lot of the time, you don't even have to do the hard work, you can just get the ideas for how to improve the culture from the employees themselves who actually know the culture the best. But I would say rather than thinking about it in terms of one size fits all interventions, it's more of a question of pinpointing exactly where this is breaking down and getting context for how exactly it's breaking down.
[00:29:18] spk_0: Thank you for sharing that Charlie and aside of toxic behaviors, what other indicators can we see in an organization that prohibit organizations moving forward with? This is work design, a component of this as well.
[00:29:32] spk_2: Work design, specifically workload or especially work other aspects of work, design matter, workload and toxicity are definitely correlated. It it can be a pretty major driver. However, there are definitely many examples of cases where the workload is very high. But nevertheless, leadership has managed to not make a toxic culture. So none of these things are destiny, but certain things like increased workload, unclear expectations, accountability, breaking down certain things have a negative impact on toxicity, but they're not necessarily, it's not necessarily a destiny.
[00:30:08] spk_0: OK. So that's interesting because to me what I'm hearing is we can actually stretch employees capacity with things like their job design and their workload. However, if there's a supportive culture, perhaps in place that we can maintain a culture positively. However, if people are overworked and overstressed and there's a culture there that behaviorally is sort of reinforcing this. This to me sounds like when the wheels are really falling off the bus in an organization.
[00:30:35] spk_2: Exactly. And that's a very common way for a culture that was kind of on the brink to become downright toxic. Yeah.
[00:30:42] spk_0: And Charlie, I'd love to know in your work with some of the world's leading organizations to sort of overcome some of these culture challenges. Can you give us an example, organization perhaps where they've been able to successfully detoxify a culture and some ideas around how they actually went about that? And what was key to their success in
[00:31:02] spk_2: doing that? I can't go too much into specific client examples. I mean, one example, I do like to use that I I'll just speak about positively because their culture is very, very impressive. Is Heb and without revealing specific client details, if you look just on the glass store data of HEB, which is this large American grocery store compared to other large American grocery stores. It's a very strong culture. So it excels on many cultural dimensions, but the dimension it excels the most on is something called care about employees. So they're off the charts on that. If if you look at most American grocery stores, employees are mentioning this positively about 10% or 20% of the time. The consensus is just my employer does not care about me, but HEB is a radical outlier employees. There mention the company caring about them positively about 80% of the time. So it's just a completely different and this is in a nutshell, I mean HEB culture is complex and HEB does a lot of things very well. But at their heart is this core value of caring for their employees that they actually call heart and they truly you walk the talk on that cultural value. And I think that explains a lot of their cultural success, including why they're nowhere near to being a toxic culture.
[00:32:18] spk_1: What a beautiful example. And I love that you highlighted that it's that sense of being cared for that can make such a profound difference. You spoke also earlier to the kind of emotional responses that people have when they've been hard done by sort of on glass door, sort of expressing these things that have happened. I think when we can then flip that and have a positive emotional experience. And I think understanding also that basic psychological needs don't get left at the door. When we come to work, we have them at work too. So and when imagine when employers and leaders understand that they can actually use that to their advantage as part of an approach to detoxifying the culture. Does that resonate?
[00:32:54] spk_2: Yeah, I think my understanding of that is if you treat employees like people, even when they enter the workplace, that's a really good and important place to start. I mean, I certainly agree with that. I mean, culture is very complex but it's simple in that respect. I mean, the employee experience is largely about just treating. I mean, that's what toxicity is all about disrespect is the opposite of treating people with dignity. No behavior is the opposite of accepting them cut through competition is the opposite of just working with someone collaboratively and being their friend. So, I mean, culture is complex. It's got a lot of moving parts, but at the end of the day, as a leadership team, you're strongly committed to treating people like people and treating them as people you care about. That's an effective way to get to where you want to be.
[00:33:44] spk_1: Amazing. Thank you, Charlie. I'm curious about sort of in terms of remote work and hybrid work, whether that is something that you see a distinctly different approach being needed or if there are differences, even in which of the toxic five, that sort of showing up in companies that are completely remote or hybrid. Is that something that you have data around?
[00:34:05] spk_2: Yeah, that's the subject of an upcoming paper. So we're still cutting the data a little bit. But our preliminary findings is even though employees really like remote work, it tends to have a fairly strong negative impact on a lot of very important aspects of culture, including respect is one of the main ways it breaks down. So it can this data suggests remote work can actually lead to more toxicity. Although those are our preliminary findings, I think those will hold true when we publish the paper. But another interesting thing is when COVID happened, there was something called the COVID bump on glass door where actually for a year period or maybe an 18 month period, employees ratings of their employer increased substantially across the board and you see this across all different industries, across different countries, kind of everywhere. So there was something going on there that we still don't quite understand. And that could have been a remote work story. It could also have been, maybe in times of crisis, employers are more likely to cling to their employees are more likely to cling to their employers, but something was going on there. So I would say when it comes to remote work, we're doing our best to figure it out. It's kind of complex and I think the jury is still out to, to some extent.
[00:35:23] spk_1: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's an interesting and multifaceted story that we also see in a burnout research, sort of that, you know, fully remote work having quite a significant impact on rate of burnout as well. So we're very excited to see your new paper when it is published, Charlie. We have about a million more questions for you. I am going to round it up with one final one if I may for the leaders out there who are listening right now and let's say maybe not senior leadership, but someone who feels really inspired by what they've heard, perhaps recognizing some signs of toxicity around them in their organization. What would you recommend to them as the first couple of steps to take to start to detoxify their work
[00:36:02] spk_2: culture? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, my take on this is maybe a little bit pessimistic. It's kind of if you're a citizen in a country, what can you do to stop capitalism or communism? Like the whole system is built up around you. And it kind of the only people who can really change it or the people who have the most important role of changing it is senior leadership just going back to the point, you know, to improve culture, you need two things, senior leadership by end and effective measurement. So my advice for a middle manager in this position would be to build as a compelling of a data driven case about why culture matters, why there's room for improvement when it comes to toxicity and try to get that in front of the most senior audience that they can. And what we've really found when making this case that senior leadership responds to is numbers, when you can quantify these things, when you can effectively measure them and and translate them into reliable data. That's when senior leadership stops thinking about cultures, abstract thing that everyone kind of knows matters and thinks of culture more as a priority that I can do something about. So my advice would be if possible, try to make a data driven case to senior leadership. Thank
[00:37:14] spk_0: you so much Charlie. We really appreciate you being here with us today and we're super excited to dive into your new research and papers when they're published in the future. So thanks for being with us.
[00:37:25] spk_2: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
[00:37:33] spk_0: We know this conversation covered so much depth and breadth of information on toxic workplace cultures. And we encourage you to check out our show notes at www dot We are human leaders dot com to dive into the research of Charlie Sol and the culture X team. More including all the links to their published papers around toxic culture, detoxifying. Your work. Culture isn't a nice to have the data tells us it's absolutely critical to retain happy, productive and healthy employees. Learn more about how human leaders can support your leadership team in driving a thriving workplace culture at www dot We are human leaders dot com. Thank you for being with us for this episode and we'll see you next time.