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Key points
- A negative work environment can persist even when we work remotely.
- A survey showed that a negative office culture is the number one reason employees quit their jobs.
- To manage the negativity set boundaries, avoid gossip, and advocate for yourself.
For more than 20 years, I’ve worked remotely from home.
When lockdowns forced everyone else into the back bedrooms and home offices, I was already there. But working from home doesn't mean I was able to escape the negative world of office politics or downright negative people.
As many newly-remote workers are discovering, working alone, from home, doesn’t guarantee that work is a safe space.
The distance can make it easier to avoid some negativity, but since people perpetuate toxic work environments, they are bringing that behavior back online.
Negative Behavior Online
Sixty-nine percent of people surveyed in a study commissioned by ARRIS Composites say they have worked in a workplace marked by negative behavior, and 20 percent say they are in one now.
A negative workplace often persists when leadership creates a culture characterized by micro-managing, negative attitudes, harassment, verbal abuse, bullying, and more subtle behaviors like gossip, gaslighting, blaming, limited communication, and withholding information needed to perform the job.
Sometimes another co-worker worker—an office bully—might target workers with sarcastic put-downs, gaslighting, and other behaviors used to undermine productivity and confidence.
No matter where it stems from, an adverse environment raises stress for all workers, contributing to mental health issues, lower productivity, innovation, high absenteeism, and other issues. Sixty-eight percent of the people surveyed by Monster.com report feeling burned out even while working remotely.
When the negativity in a workplace is the result of a systemic failure at a management level, it's crucial that we take steps personally to care for our mental and physical health. A negative workplace dynamic can be slow to change, but there are things we can do to make it easier to bear.
Not easy, but possible–even from home.
Set Some Boundaries at Work
Find help and make a plan. Ideally, there’s a trusted manager, an HR exec, or people within the corporation that you can speak with about an abusive boss or sabotaging co-worker. However, if you don’t have that kind of support on the inside, look outside to a close friend or family member. Avoid sharing too much with someone who is dependent on the paycheck. Instead, sit down with a friend who can help you identify your options, talk through the trouble, and develop a plan about how to manage the day-to-day.
If you can leave the job, do it. A recent research analysis in MIT’s Sloan Management Review found that negative work cultures are the biggest driver of people leaving their jobs, especially in the last couple of years when many workers decided not to return to a bleak office space after the lockdowns ended.
But many of us cannot just walk away. After you have some coping strategies in place to deal with the day-to-day, start thinking about your exit strategy.
Set boundaries. Turn off the work email after quitting time. Limit or eliminate one-on-one correspondence with the antagonist, and take your breaks off-screen and out of the office. The great benefit of going remote is you can turn work off. Do it.
Reframe the practice as self-care, a way to build some autonomy, which often helps people feel more productive. Remember, workers who focus on negativity will always be upset about something, so protect your health by using more rigid boundaries to keep them away.
Advocate for yourself. If you are kept out of the loop of important information or interrupted or ignored during online meetings, kindly yet firmly call it out. Some negative behaviors are inadvertent mistakes that nobody has ever recognized. Others are intentional and will persist as long as you allow it.
When that happens, try saying something like, “Hey, I’m sure that was unintentional, but I’m not getting the information I need from you before our meeting. Please add me to the email." Or, “I’m sure you didn’t mean to be distracting, but when you are typing while I’m speaking, it’s difficult to convey these points. Please don’t do that.”
Uncomfortable? Yep, a little bit, but allowing those behaviors to continue is equally uncomfortable and increases stress for everyone.
Avoid gossip. Don’t become part of the problem with little asides in the Zoom chat while the meeting is going on or by piling on with negative comments about others. That can diminish your energy too.
Do something you love outside of work. Working from home means you get to cut the commute, so fill in that time at the start and end of the day with something you love. Something that feels meaningful. Exercise, draw, paint, or create some art. Play an instrument, read, or work in the garden. Hobbies help us diffuse stress and restore. Whatever you love or want to explore, now is the time.
Shift perspective. How we perceive problems at work determines how we experience them. Is someone a bully targeting you directly? Or are they just a jerk that no one wants to work with? That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem, but it can become easier to manage it if we recognize the behavior instead of taking it personally.
