How to Spot Toxic Employees in the Workplace
Can one bad apple really spoil the whole bunch? As it turns out, in the workplace, it can. Toxic employees can be the reason relatively good employees leave the company, slack on their work, and endure more stress and burnout.
Interestingly enough, a study conducted by CornerStone concluded:
- Good employees are 54 percent more likely to quit when they work with a toxic employee if the proportion of toxic employees on their team grows by as little as one on a team of 20.
- As toxic employees make their co-workers significantly more likely to leave, replacement costs rise greatly; hiring a single toxic employee into a team of 20 workers costs approximately $12,800, whereas hiring a non-toxic employee costs an employer an average of $4,000.
Toxic employees can create a huge mess within the workplace not to mention take a toll on the company’s overall well-being in more ways than one. This is why it is important to understand how to spot a toxic employee and mitigate the effects of their toxicity before it gets worse.
To spot a toxic employee, you must be able to gauge the following:
- The likelihood of a team member being dismissed for toxic behavior.
- The likelihood of a team member leaving voluntarily.
- The workplace performance of team members.
Based on these three figures, 3-5% of all your employees will meet the criteria for being termed as “TOXIC.”
Now begins the difficult but necessary task of filtering out the bad apples so the good ones can thrive.
To begin, you must factor in employee performance to segregate the toxic employees from the non-toxic employees.
To do this, calculate these measures of employee performance:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): This score indicates how satisfied customers are with the service they receive.
- Average Transaction Time (ATT): This is the average time an employee spends on a given customer transaction.
These two performance indicators are used to understand how the relationship between the quality and quantity of an employees’ work was impacted by the presence of toxic coworkers.
Employees who are self-proclaimed “rule followers” as well as those who struggle to show up to work on time, have a low level of reliability and are not inclined to help others are often markers of a toxic employee.
Employers can set benchmarks according to specific company-wide standards and expectations. Employees that consistently fail to meet such criteria can be considered toxic employees who impact
the workplace. To that end, it is critical to focus attention on avoiding toxic employees and eradicate such behavior before it spreads.
If you want to know more about how to spot toxic employees in the workplace, click the link below for more information.
