How to Identify and Repair a Toxic Workplace Culture

With this 1-day workshop on toxic workplace cultures, you will learn how to identify a toxic workplace culture and you will learn how to repair it by imposing cultural changes on the organisation. Many are only looking at toxic behaviour and propose ways to deal with that. It is however Gugin’s experience that sustainable change has to start with changing the culture. Toxic behaviour only exists because it is accepted in the current culture.

So in this workshop, we bring all our expertise and experience to the table to help you identify and repair a toxic workplace culture. But first, you need to ask yourself some questions:

• Why do we accept a toxic workplace culture in our organisations?
• How did that culture develop?
• What consequences does this toxic work environment have on the people, company performance, customers, etc?

When you have answered these questions you can start moving forward by changing the culture of your organisation. Initially you change a culture by rewarding a certain behaviour and – if necessary – punishing other types of behaviour. You will also learn about cultural nudging as a tool to change the culture

After this workshop

1. You will know how to identify toxic patterns in workplace cultures
2. You will know how to start the process of changing a toxic workplace culture
3. You will know how to communicate the issues in a way so that your peers understand the need for a cultural change

This workshop is suitable both as an in-house course for experienced managers and leaders from the same company or as an open course, where participants with certain seniority and experience from several companies and organisations are participating. This workshop is designed to be very interactive with participants sharing their own experiences so that we together can develop solutions that are both timely, relevant and effective.

When we facilitate this workshop with participants from several companies, we will do it in such a way no one will be encouraged to share confidential or sensitive information about their own organisation.

The first part of the workshop is about behaviour is linked to culture. A behaviour – good or bad, is always accepted in the subculture in which it takes place. So our first subject is to develop an understanding of the relationship between norms and values on one side and the behaviour on the other. 

We then move on to looking at the different kinds of toxicity in an organisation. It is not always the leadership who is exercising or promoting the toxic work environment but it is always the leadership who has the responsibility to repair a toxic work environment. We will also look at how you assess the magnitude of the toxic workplace culture. Does everybody feel the culture bad or is it just certain groups or individuals?

When you have assessed the situation correctly we can move on to starting the cultural repair process.

We will introduce you to tools you can use to start the cultural change process towards repairing the toxic workplace culture.

Throughout the workshop we will provide you with a lot of anonymised examples from organisations we have worked with and the solutions they have found to minimise or even eliminate the toxic work environment.