Workplace Culture Evolution: Toxic Work Cultures, Gaslighting and More
In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, workplace culture has emerged as the critical differentiator between organizations that thrive and those that merely survive. Let's dissect the key elements of cultural transformation and why it matters more than ever.
The Toxic Workplace Reality Check
Toxic workplace culture extends far beyond occasional office politics. It manifests through systemic dysfunction, where gaslighting and manipulation become normalized operating procedures. Think less "difficult boss" and more "calculated erosion of professional confidence." When managers consistently deny doing what is right then criticize team members for non-compliance, we're not witnessing simple miscommunication – we're seeing tactical psychological manipulation at work.
The Junior Employee Vulnerability Factor
Here's an uncomfortable truth: junior employees bear the brunt of toxic cultures, creating a problematic talent development pipeline. Why? They're navigating a perfect storm of vulnerabilities:
- Limited workplace navigation experience
- Strong validation needs
- Minimal support networks
- Heightened susceptibility to power dynamics
This combination creates a breeding ground for burnout and career stagnation – exactly what forward-thinking organizations must prevent.
The Leadership Imperative: Why Cultural Change Starts at the Top
Remember the garden analogy: organizational culture grows what leadership plants and tends. When toxic behaviors (weeds) go unchecked, they flourish. C-suite leaders aren't just cultural influencers – they're cultural architects. Their actions, not their words, set the template for organizational behavior.
Practical Steps for Leadership Evolution
For C-suite leaders and managers committed to cultural transformation:
1. Model Transparent Communication
- Share decision rationales openly
- Demonstrate accountability
- Create clear feedback channels
2. Implement Structural Safeguards
- Establish robust anti-harassment policies
- Create anonymous reporting systems
- Provide comprehensive mental health support
3. Develop Leadership Capabilities
- Invest in emotional intelligence
- Build conflict resolution expertise
- Foster inclusive decision-making
The Customer-People Connection: A Strategic Necessity
Here's the business case that gets the CEO’s attention: customer experience will never exceed employee experience. I first learnt of this concept during my time in OCBC when I was part of the pioneer customer experience team. It has inspired my work ever since. The math is straightforward:
- Engaged employees = Delighted customers
- Toxic culture = Compromised customer service
- Healthy culture = Sustainable competitive advantage
Think about it: How can we expect employees operating in toxic environments to deliver exceptional customer experiences? They can't – and that's the bottom-line impact of cultural negligence.
Building Integrated Experience Systems
Modern organizations need frameworks that align employee and customer experiences:
1. Cultural Assessment Metrics
- Track employee experience indicators
- Map customer journey touchpoints
- Measure psychological safety
- Monitor engagement patterns
2. Communication Architecture
- Define clear information flows
- Set response expectations
- Create constructive feedback loops
- Enable cross-functional collaboration
3. Diverse Perspective Integration
- Establish mentorship programs
- Create inclusive dialogue forums with actionable and measurable steps
- Enable cross-cultural learning
- Foster innovation through diversity
The ROI of Cultural Excellence
The investment case is compelling:
- Reduced turnover costs
- Enhanced productivity
- Improved innovation through psychological safety
- Stronger employer brand- Higher customer satisfaction
- Sustainable competitive advantage
Moving Forward: The Integration Imperative
In today's experience economy, treating employee and customer experience as separate domains is a strategic mistake. The most successful organizations recognize these elements as an integrated system requiring holistic management.
Remember: Culture isn't just what you promote – it's what you permit. What's growing in your organizational garden?
The question isn't whether to prioritize culture transformation – it's how quickly you can make it happen before your competitor does.
What's your next move in creating a workplace that drives both employee and customer success?
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Advisor for C-Suites to work with you and your teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
The Case of the Misunderstood MarTech - Concept of “Power Users”
There was once a bakery who was trying to get better at creating more pastries for their increasing customer base at a more efficient manner, including pastries on demand and that can accommodate different dietary preferences. They had a head baker who is also the owner of the bakery, 2 baking assistants, a cashier, 2 servers and 1 marketing person who also oversees pop-ups at designated customer events.
One day, a baking supplier introduced them to this state of the art baking oven that seemed to be everything they have ever wanted; customized settings allowing for tailored dietary needs, self regulating temperature control to avoid burnt pastries, pre-set recipe function so they can just choose any setting easily, pop in the ingredients and get their key pastries all done without having to keep referencing the recipe list each time they bake.
The supplier said the best part of this new oven is that anyone can be a baker and everyone should learn to be a baker using this oven. However, the training comes at an additional cost though they will be accredited as professional xx oven practitioner after that, which apparently is a very prominent accolade to have in the industry.
The head baker was over the moon at this prospect that she can get everyone to chip in and bake even more pastries in a shorter time that way since they can just use the preset functions moving forward. She insisted that everyone needs to be trained, pass the test and get certified, else they will get penalized in their performance review.
However, many of them soon realized that it wasn’t that easy to be certified as it does require some baking knowledge, experience and even appreciation. This resulted in a few of them having to take up certain baking modules that were added as part of the entire “package” sold to the baker by the vendor. That’s not all, if they fail the test, they need to pay and retake the test again. The entire training, test preparation and certification took each of them 4 to 6 months at varying speed, depending on their appetite and aptitude to really learn all the modules and be able to pass the test.
During this time, things started to fall into pieces.
The head baker managed to pass the certification herself. So did her baking assistants. The cashier, servers and marketing person however struggled to cope while trying to do their current jobs as efficiently as possible.
As the baking assistants became very good with using the oven to churn out pastries, they also ran out of ingredients faster than usual but as they were so obsessed with using this new technology, they then asked the head baker to help with getting the ingredients faster so they can be loaded into the oven. Initially the head baker thought why not but soon she realizes it’s not practical as she, herself can also use the oven and she wants to be the chief designer to design new baking recipes to fully maximize the oven. Thus, she then delegated this task to the cashier, servers and marketing person to help instead, adding to their level of stress in trying to cope with yet another additional ask.
Eventually, it led to chaos as everyone was in the kitchen trying to prepare ingredients, use the oven and essentially be a baker, which was the vision sold by the supplier; no one was serving, taking orders, getting payment or promoting the bakery. Customers started complaining about this lack of attention as queues started forming not for pastries to be ready as they were all piling up in the kitchen but for them to be ready, packaged, displayed, served and to even make payment. Some of the bakes also became quite inconsistent in taste as it depended on the non bakers to prepare the original ingredient list when the assistant bakers were too held up baking. This led to bad reviews of the bakery for its service, poor maintenance of the shop front and inconsistent quality.
Yet, the head baker was still trying to recover the cost of investment on the oven and training modules as well as test modules to be able to hire more people to help. Worse, business became impacted and sales were dipping, which then led to unconsumed ingredients and pastries going bad. Frustrated, the bakery owner blamed the oven and decided to sell it; the supplier agreed but persuaded her to go for another newer model that has an added function of doing ingredient quantity forecasting to solve her problems instead. She was tempted yet again as she thought that was the cause of her problems.
This is not a piece about ovens, the baking industry or even pastries. It essentially is an observation I made while helping companies to review their MarTech stacks and/or implement their MarTech adoption process.
Just as not everyone is a Baker and should be a Baker in that story, not everyone should be required to use the tool in the exact same manner and level. There are job roles and expertise for a reason and a good one. Whoever is designated to maximize the use of it to benefit the rest of the company, should be your power users, your expert users and your most certified users. There should be different levels of users who should then be trained to use the tool differently so they can reap the most benefit out of the tool to in turn, benefit the rest of the company and your customers.
Remember, before you blame the tool, look instead at your original purpose, objectives and what you were trying to solve for with the tool.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally or Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Why Your Employees Can Be Your Best Brand Ambassadors
Today’s post is back to one of my favorites around employer branding, social media profiling and how some companies are still under utilizing it.
In the aspect of social media profiling and using it for brand, I personally find B2B companies slightly more advanced, especially in the LinkedIn space as compared to B2C. B2C brands have been largely posting more entertainment type of content when it comes to employer related branding efforts or lots and lots of corporate social responsibility types of content. Photos of tree planting, employees walking or running or swimming or all three for charity, shaking hands with the local government officials, sharing the limelight on some customer events and then some…
B2B companies do that too of course but they do also often go a step further to empower their employees more to be their brand advocates. This is often done through their own subject matter experts or key opinion leaders aka KOLs in the original context that share their perspectives of company updates, happenings around their industry or sometimes, around the world.
They also empower their employees with content that they have produced as part of their content strategy, enabling them to share through social media advocacy tools. LinkedIn used to have a function that enables that called “LinkedIn Elevate” that I have helped companies implement previously. They retired it in 2020 but integrated a similar function onto LinkedIn’s “My Company” tab and allows for admins of the page to recommend organic posts and curate content for other employees to share. Other social media content management platforms like Hootsuite and, SproutSocial have the same functions.
Usually, the folks who hold the golden key to social guardrails and policies for employees are marketing and communications, corporate communications or sometimes even human resource. While there is no right or wrong, I personally think all parties need to hold joint ownership of the policy and enablement of their employees in the right way.
Most companies are still way too cautious about employee advocacy or rigid on policies around what their employees can share, some going as far as wanting to clear every single post, dictate every single post or simply only allowing selected employees of certain seniority to post on their social pages. They often are also ignorant (maybe too blissfully) that not all senior level employees have either time, actual interest, interesting views or sufficient “social clout” versus some other employees who might have one or all of the above.
My personal belief is that every employee has the potential to be your next brand ambassador on social and should be encouraged, empowered and enabled in the right way to share posts on activities your company has participated in publicly, views related to their professional field and/or the industry your company is specializing in. This can be done with varying levels of review and control instead of just clamping down with a hard “no” out of fear.
If this is new to your company, you can start small with curated key messages and posts they can use, though that to me is becoming almost too infancy in nature and looking like boring corporate spiel. Classic examples are when you see employees all copying and pasting the exact same message and photos and posting on their own LinkedIn/other social accounts without even bothering to add their own one or two liners. It’s almost like robots have taken over the control of their accounts and helping to spam the social platform with the exact same thing - next!
It’s not rocket science actually to come up with your own thoughts, even if you are not as good in writing, at least it comes from your head and heart. It’s about sincerity and being authentic when it comes to content and social content.
Some guiding principles for employees and companies to consider are:
Is this sharing something that will be helpful for your network and their network to know?
Will it cause unnecessary pain, conflict or worse, tensions in race, religion, creed and culture?
Is it harmful to someone’s reputation if you share it? If so, do you have facts to back it and how is it helpful for others to know about this?
Will it inspire others to learn and benefit from the learning in a positive way?
Imagine if your parents, siblings, partner or best friend or someone you profoundly respect and care about were to read it; would it be something they would be proud or supportive of?
Think about it the next time your splurge thousands on some KOLs; look within your employee network to see if there isn’t already some who can be your true brand ambassador and KOL. Afterall, if they work for you, they should genuinely like, support and believe in what you offer as a value proposition, correct?
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and Fractional CMO for other C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.