Toxic Work Environment | Bad Boss Part 4

We’re back with another bad boss story. In this one, Matt reads a submission from the article Some Bosses Really, Really, REALLY Don’t Deserve Their Title, And Here Are 15 Stories To Prove It by BuzzFeed.

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

Video Transcript: 

Alright so, this is the story of basically I guess bad management. Let’s see what it says, 

“I work for a veterinary hospital for three years and it didn’t matter how sick someone was you had to go in. If someone called out sick the rest of the employees would just bad mouth them. I work Sundays from 8 to 1 and we would just open for emergencies. I was the only receptionist on Sundays and I had to go in once with severe vertigo because I knew I’d never hear the end of it if I didn’t show up. I was never late and never took a sick day. I was also the only one who covered for others when they couldn’t work. One day my boss has called me into the office to tell me they were taking my 8-hour Monday shift and giving it to a receptionist who had been there a long time because she needs the extra money. I quit on the spot. they were so nasty and mean for no reason at all.”

Well unfortunately there’s a lot of work environments that work the same way. The requirements the unspoken rules I guess are much stricter and unrealistic for the way people should be treated. If someone is sick the last thing I want them to do is come in the office, get the rest of us sick, be unproductive, take longer to get better. And if you don’t feel well go home and take care of yourself and come back to work when you’re ready to come back to work and we’ll figure out how to work around you’re not being here. But if people feel like they have to come into work even when they’re sick, it creates a negative culture in the whole work environment, which is the problem here, right? If employees are bad-mouthing someone who doesn’t come in when they’re sick then that’s really the management’s responsibility to shut that down. “Hey you know if so and so’s sick and can’t come in, we should you know hope they get better and just work around the fact they’re not here.” Not spend time putting them down and creating a culture of you know negativity. And that’s it seems so obvious to me but I mean a lot of people don’t run their businesses that way. And usually, it’s because that’s how they are as people, right? People who are kind of jerks in person, if they happen to run a business they tend to treat the employees like jerks. And then a lot of times they end up with jerk employees because the nice people quit and the nice people don’t wanna work there anymore. And so you end up with a pool of jerks. And sometimes someone unknowingly gets hired into that environment but pretty quickly figures out it’s pretty toxic. And the only people who last there are other toxic people and you know they end up quitting. So it really comes from the top down. Whether it’s a small business or a big business. And if you don’t want your environment, your work environment to be that kind of toxic negative place then you as the owner have to make sure that that’s not how you’re treating people, and that’s not the behavior you’re encouraging or even just allowing to happen to the people who work for you. And then if everybody’s on the same page, everybody’s a team player, helpful, friendly, optimistic, nice, and those are the kind of people you hire you have a much better work environment. And realistically if you’re the owner and you’re active in the business you’re spending 40 or 50 hours a week there, why would you wanna work around a bunch of toxic jerks? Doesn’t make sense to me that you’d wanna spend your time there unless you are that person. And then you probably don’t realize it and you’re not watching this video anyway. Ao that’s it. Don’t be a jerk at work.