An article discusses the negative effects on business from toxic employees, and how to handle them.
Harvard Business Review reported that negativity can spread more quickly than positivity, and that although happiness spreads from person to person, negativity does too with more devastating effects. Describing friendships as networks and the knock-on effects of emotions, the article explains that the knock-on effects or chain reactions are caused in the same way, so that a happy person can affect everyone in the network, feeding the feel-good factor, and a negative person can do the same and bring everyone down.
The way this occurs is by de-energising the network, and this is “four to seven times greater” than the energising effect of positivity, and the effect this has on co-workers shows in many ways such as: “less information sharing, plummeting motivation and performance, and a decreased sense of thriving at work”.
This means that employees will spend time “analysing their de-energizing relationship and how best to navigate [around] the person” instead of concentrating on achieving work goals. Overall this will decrease team moral and cause conflict and loss of trust. A study of 135 people in the human resources sector of an international manufacturing company showed that 10 percent of employees who had de-energising interactions secured a ‘thriving score’ of 30 percent less than those of their workmates, and this was the result of having negative relationships at work, which reduce the “sense of belonging”.
The knock-on effect of a de-energising relationship has an effect on the whole workgroup, and can cause “unhappiness and dissatisfaction” as well as “reduce motivation and increase peoples intentions to leave”, and the leavers are far more likely to be the top performers. Once the toxic person is identified they need to be isolated so that they do no further damage, and often the best action is to ask them to leave; however circumstances may not allow that, so the next step is to place them as far away as possible from the rest of the team.
This may mean changing the office layout and reassigning projects, or even “encouraging people to work from home”. This helps reduce contact and removes the negative effects on the rest of the team, but it must be carried out discreetly, and employees need to be able to speak to management about toxic workmates and be given coaching on how to handle them. Management should consider asking the negative employee to work from home.
The article concludes that the health of a business depends on how toxic employees are dealt with, as they are too “costly to ignore”, and negativity is like a virus that can spread throughout the workforce. Once this person has been isolated or has gone, the company and its employees has more chance of thriving, and the talented top performers will stay.