It’s time organisations set up WATCH to check workplace abuse
The sudden demise of a senior journalist recently and the reported connection to the repeated abuse he seemed to have suffered from his boss refreshed my memories about the abuses senior leaders suffer and inflict on others.
A VP at a bank had once told me about how he often got shouted at by his CMO. When I asked him why he was still working there, he said his ESOPs were like gold cuffs, and he got a handsome bonus the year before. A year after the chat, he is still there.
EuStress
I am sure you have heard, experienced, or unknowingly supported workplace bullying, abuse, or toxicity.
Some of us deliberately use phrases like “let’s apply pressure and see” on colleagues who aren’t performing.
Austrianborn Endocrinologist and the author of the book The Stress of Life, Hans Selye coined the term “eustress” or good stress. He argued that there could be some benefits due to Eustress until it reaches a certain level when it becomes distress.
For example, we tend to believe sales roles perform better under pressure. A few industries like Consulting, Media and BFSI are known for the duress the employees go through.
Add contexts like month, quarter and yearends and the triggers for negative stress on many roles in revenue and TRPdriven industries get compounded. It’s everywhere. A study of 1,071 Indian IT professionals published in the Indian Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine found that 35% were classified as having poor quality of life in the psychological domain.
Silent spectators
We once called over a manager who was shouted at and asked to leave a team meeting by his boss, who had a reputation for losing his temper frequently. The manager completely denied that such a thing had even happened, whereas two colleagues had reported the same incident the previous day. When we went back to those colleagues about the manager’s denial, they explained the inaction of management in the past and the leader’s top performing track record context. That day I started to believe in Stockholm syndrome wherein victims sympathise with their abusers and even feel they “deserve” it.
Legislation works
Countries with workplace antibullying laws, like Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, and France, have singledigit rates of employees reporting workplace bullying than countries that don’t have laws, like the United States, South Africa, Canada and Russia, which are in the range of 3060%. Would a Workplace Abuse & Toxicity Check (WATCH) legislation help India, which has started to realise a significant proportion of its GDP from the services sectors?
Toxic attributes
Out of 118 Indian unicorns, 94 have a Glassdoor rating of less than 4. If you look at Fortune Great Places to Work Global Best 100, only 49% have a rating of more than 4. If you are a little more curious or desperate, you might dive deep into the leadership or culture comments. MIT Sloan Management Review did exactly that. After studying 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews, it focused on the negative comments, used text analytics to measure 128 topics, and grouped them into five toxic attributes. They stated that being disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive has by far the largest negative impact on how employees rate their company’s culture in Glassdoor reviews.
The manifestation
Language, volume, and meeting participation are three key indicators of a team or organisation’s leadership culture. The WFH world has given us a good glimpse into many enterprises, town halls, and meetings. The higher volume, single voice participation and the cuss words were indicative of the disrespectful, noninclusive, and abusive world of some of the organisations our family and friends work for.
Matter of heart
One of the oldest medical journals, Lancet, published a study by Mika Kivimaki that said a combination of high psychological demands combined with little control of decisionmaking leads to physiological strain. They followed up for a mean of 13·9 years and concluded that job strain increased the risk of mortality.
It’s time organisations introduced WATCH if we want to curb this malaise.
(Kamal Karanth is the cofounder of ◣pheno, a specialist staffing company)