Workplace Culture
Workplace Culture is defined as beliefs and behaviors of how people act and govern in an organization, mainly how employees interact and communicate with one another. This is critically important to the health of the organization as the success and failure of the business depends on this. Employees are the life string and brand ambassadors of an organization.
If an employee feels uncomfortable or unhappy at work more often, chances are you are dealing with poor workplace culture. Nobody want to work in a place with a “toxic” culture. Besides having the company poorly rated by the employees , there would be high staff turnover, increasing staff complaint, high staff absenteeism, poor productivity, complaints of bullying and harassment and in extreme cases, costly legal suits.
A toxic culture is a result of many behaviors resulting from incivility at workplace and this can happen to any business scale. Big companies like Uber, Google and Volkswagen has been mentioned widely for toxic workplace.
Case Study
In Malaysia, the recent outburst in the social media of a giant telecommunication company, Maxis, whereby a Manager who was screaming at her employees for allegedly not hitting their sales target went viral. The words below were delivered by screaming at the two employees (one of the employee is pregnant), standing inches away and pointing finger at them.
- “ You sit down here and send the SMS now”,
- “Look at me, you want to get fired? Why can’t you do when I asked you to do”,
- “You …. what are you good at”.