Toxic workplace culture pissing off employees and pushing away customers? 3 tips to change to a high performance culture.

A toxic work culture can lead to a bad employee experience. A bad employee experience contributes to a bad customer experience. Decreased employee engagement and turnover threatens your ability to deliver quality service to your customers. And a bad employee and customer experience leads to a bad reputation internally and externally, negatively impacting brand and revenue.

If you think a toxic work culture can be ignored or that “bad apples” can just be replaced and that will solve the issue, you are making a costly mistake.

If you’re a leader and your culture is negative, it is negative because you play a role in making it negative. It’s a vicious cycle that will keep repeating itself unless you make changes to promote a more high performance culture. A culture where employees feel safe, valued, heard and appreciated.

A client of mine was plagued by the impacts of a toxic culture. They had experienced their third leadership change in 18 months. The leadership turnover, and changing priorities and processes, led to decreased employee engagement and a miserable employee experience. This led to poor customer service and a miserable customer experience. Poor customer experiences created a bad reputation internally and externally; this bad reputation was shared publicly on social media impacting brand loyalty. However, the organization was not beyond repair. And an enlightened leader was willing to make the tough decisions and changes for positive improvement.

Your organizational culture is likely not beyond repair either. But positive change begins with positive leadership.

So how do you change your toxic workplace culture? You can contact Tolero Solutions to help. You can also try these tips.

Lead by example

Leadership is a driving force behind creating and maintaining a high performance culture. Leaders serve as role models through their actions and behaviors. If you want to repair a toxic culture, start by being a positive role model. Be open to feedback and open to change. High performance organizations have committed leaders who can rally people around a deeper sense of purpose. In most cases, these leaders are also expert communicators. These leaders have the ability to translate ideas into action. These leaders not only know their organization, they know the type of people in their organization, and how those people’s contributions help to achieve the strategic goals. They know when to show people the door and they know when to help them climb the ladder. These leaders are visible, engaged, authentic, transparent, empathetic, and have a genuine interest in creating the best possible experience for their people and their customers.

Communication

To turn a toxic culture into a high performance culture requires frequent, transparent, and authentic communication amongst leadership, employees, stakeholders, and customers. It requires data collection and action. Taking employee and customer feedback, acting on that feedback when appropriate, and communicating back the changes and results to those who provided the feedback. Creating a high performance culture requires timely and transparent communication, at all levels. It requires keeping audiences engaged with your products and services and committed to the strategy, mission, and vision. It requires communicating to audiences what they need to know and why. If you don’t want to perpetuate a toxic culture then don’t withhold information. Don’t leave out details when needed. Don’t hide in the corner office. Communicate. Communicate. Communicate.

Agility

An organization with a toxic culture is often stagnant, afraid of change, and happy with the status quo. A high performance culture is unafraid of change and embraces new innovations and trends in order to remain competitive. That doesn’t mean run for the newest fad. But it does mean staying open to new ideas and creative thinking. Remaining agile and flexible to adapt. Developing the ability of the organization, and people, to embrace change (flexibility, speed, and ability to learn) is imperative to success. High performance organizations enable meaningful change to improve the employee and customer experience to continually add value for employees and customers.

Focusing on these 3 areas will help you prevent or repair a toxic workplace culture. If you think high performance just happens on its own – you’re mistaken.

At Tolero Solutions, our focus is people. Supporting people, and organizations, to implement and navigate changes. We’re also efficiency focused people. And we’re process focused people. Our programs and services help repair toxic workplace culture and create a high performance organization. Want to create or maintain a great employee and customer experience? Let us know how we can help you.

About Scott Span, MSOD, CSM: is CEO at Tolero Solutions. As a people strategist, leadership coach, and change and transformation specialist, his work is focused on people. Through his consulting and training work he supports clients to survive and thrive through change and transition and create people-focused cultures and a great employee experience. Through his coaching work, he supports people willing to dig deeper to identify and overcome what’s holding them back, change behaviors, accelerate performance and achieve their goals.