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Comment by rkangel | Hacker News Reader

This article does accidentally capture one of the major corporate problems pretty well. The conclude from their data that Toxic Workplace Culture is the biggest cause of resignation, and then they immediately suggest 4 short term things to try that don't relate to culture at all.

If you have a toxic workplace culture, the very first thing you should do is to start fixing your culture. This is very hard and not fast (as they acknowledge to be fair). One thing you can do though is to acknowledge it to your employees - "X, Y and Z is wrong and we're working to fix it". Nothing destroys morale more than employees being unhappy about a set of things and then management standing up and telling you there aren't any problems.

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Most of the posts on here focus on wage/money and yours is one of the few that outright points out the toxic culture in companies.

I think for too long the toxic workplace has been hidden behind laywer drafted agreements when employers leave and the rest of the workforce have been captive because they thought they might not get the same job with better conditions elsewhere.

But a growing population means this is changing, a persons job might not be so unique and rare after all (this is what communication ie the internet is showing), making it possible to get the same type of employment in the same town when 20-40years ago they would have had to have moved to a different town to get the same type of job.

But when I look at (https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/) the theme there is bad management and exploitation. Its like employees are showing management and CEO's up, whilst questioning the wages of management/CEO's by stealth.

The irony with employees demanding higher wages, is they make AI more cost effective for replacing employees!

so when you look at Kellogg's cereals who tried to break a factory strike by setting up a website offering strikers jobs, someone from Reddit setup a bot which auto submitted fake CV's to the company to resource burn them.

Look at the recent problems with John Deere tractor company, they just the other day unveiled an AI driving tractor which needs no farmer in the cab! Now look at how farmers are up in arms about John Deere and the farmers inability to repair the tractors when they break down, the farmer has to get a John Deere tech out and farmers are hating this.

Now in fairness RTK GNSS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic_positionin...) gives centimetre level precision anyway for self driving tractors but I also think military/news outlets have also upped the game by knowing what words to use on social media to get more of a headline effect that can provoke and manipulate people, whilst also using social media & sites like this to harvest information aka intelligence gathering.

The idea that AI would be bad for the economy or society had the appearance of sensibility when we were stuck in secular stagnation with inflation refusing to get off the ground. It was possible to argue that demand just wasn't going to catch up fast enough.

Now, though, we have inflation. It's back: the bad news is inflation sucks, the good news is that the standard theory has something to say about this situation, and it's the Parable of the Broken Window. As long as demand keeps up, we can expect an increase in supply efficiency (automation) to improve wealth (roughly) across the board.

For me its always come down to managers expecting loyalty from me while giving little to none in return. Loyalty means different things to different people but I'm an employee. I'm not my bosses friend and they are not mine.

Hopefully we have a good working relationship but at the end of the day they pay me for a service. If I'm unable to provide that service they will get rid of me. If someone else will pay me more for that service or make my life easier while I provide that service then I will go do it for them.

I've always laughed at how managers/companies expect loyalty but then when you leave they treat you terribly or like you never existed. If you were actually loyal to me the individual you would want to be involved in my life or at least treat me well after I stopped providing a service for you. But they don't. If you treat work as anything more than receiving a paycheck you earn for a service than you are a sucker.

As P.T. Barnum would say, there is one born every minute.

I don't think we should look at /r/antiwork as an example of thoughtful understanding of what the problem there is. The average age there is probably 20, and the half the posters are likely in Moscow.

Companies should pay more attention to which leaders are roundly hated since they can be the biggest contributor to toxic culture. At my company, we had a CIO who was hated by every member of the IT team. Attrition rates as well as glass door reviews reflected it. Yet they kept him there for years.

Yeah poor leaders are probably the most expensive cost for the company. The way leaders are recruited is just not effective at all.

People, even as infants, understand right and wrong.

Giving rank and privilege to people who don't deserve it will be noticed by workers.

The skilled workers will see the incompetence of impostors. And if the impostors are also unpleasant or dictatorial, workers will escape.

Everyone agrees that toxic culture is bad.

Take any room full of people and had them secretly write down what toxic culture means. Then reveal. Even though post-reveal some people will try to form consensus, I bet none of the answers are the same.

What I don't like is bad. And the root of corporate problems everywhere.

I am managing a company with a quite nice culture, performance oriented but with great emphasis on supporting each other. I like it as it is.

The "problem" with culture change is an extra 40% loss of people if the change is fundamental. Most companies have hard time even surviving this and it takes years for every 0 at the end headcount (like 3 years for some thousand people and 5 for hundred thousands). May not make sense on the short run to roll the dice and even might crash the company.

I would not be able to change this into something else without losing a lot of linchpin people.

If you are the CEO of a company that big (mine is small), you sacrifice a lot for this change. If this is not a matter of life or death for the company, you won't change the culture that much, I am sure.

A fish rots from the head down. The people in charge with the most power to solve workplace toxicity are in all likelihood the cause. If that is the case then the best advice is for people to resign and go elsewhere, just as people are doing according to the article.

People are also human, and as employees we tend to expect management to be perfect.

A side effect of this is most jobs people find will be toxic, because those are the ones people are leaving and the ones with openings. I suppose that is already the case.

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