Toxic Behavior In The Worplace: An Industry Benchmarking Report

The Problem

At some point in our professional lives, most of us experience a moment like this: someone’s crying, yelling, or venting in your office—and it’s about something that happened at work.

Whether we are in HR, a manager, or simply a trusted colleague, situations like this leave us wondering what we can do. Often, such moments are provoked by genuine miscommunication, frustration over perceived performance, or some other “comes-with-the-territory” event of professional life, and we can help by listening and offering advice and perspective. But other times, the underlying cause is more sinister and more difficult to tease out of a distressed employee, driven by the insidious effects of the inappropriate, unfair, and disrespectful behavior of another colleague.‍

But other times, the underlying cause is more sinister, driven by the insidious effects of the inappropriate, unfair, and disrespectful behavior of another colleague.‍‍

In moments like this, figuring out what is really going on with the distressed employee and what to do about it can be tough, even for those in HR or managerial roles. Specific information can be in short supply as the employee navigates social norms around ‘not being a whiner’ and a fear of retribution. Much like diagnosing an illness with a vague set of symptoms, it can be easy to simply console in the moment and wait for more information to surface.

But what if, while you’re waiting for more information, people start to quit?

Let’s say in our hypothetical situation, these employees chalk their departures up to “new opportunities” or being “burned out.” But soon, the Glassdoor reviews start to skew negative and rumors begin to spread. The sales department shows a strange downturn in revenue. Legal begins to wonder what’s going on as the threat of a lawsuit looms over the in-house counsel. Before you know it, the C-suite has caught wind of the situation, and they’re on your case.

At first, you may not even connect the spate of turnover with the crying, yelling, or venting that unfolded in your office. HR has recently created an exciting new perks program and spent more on diversity and inclusion than ever. But if that’s the case, why are retention, revenue per employee, and employee Net Promoter Scores on the decline—and absences, gossip, and blame all on the rise?

After a series of difficult conversations, you discover that the recent departures resulted from a series of toxic behaviors from select individuals in the organization. In disbelief, you go online to learn more. At first, you find a few off-color jokes on Twitter. But, as you search, you encounter more public web results and find that these problematic individuals had been making overtly bigoted statements about their coworkers for months.

Taking a deep breath, you bring this information back to the C-suite.

“Why didn’t we check their social media?” they ask.

“Well,” you say, “that’s complicated.”

The Problem, Explained

The insidious and costly nature of toxic behavior

Toxic workplace behavior is a real and growing problem. As headline after headline has shown, sexual harassment, insider threats, and toxic working environments are becoming an epidemic in business. Try as we might to prevent these issues in the pre-hire screening process, the behaviors and individuals that caused them tend to escape us—and while it’s tempting to resort to dealing with the aftermath, the costs of failing to identify toxic employees early on are substantial. Organizations that fail to identify toxic employees before hiring them lose an average of $1.2 million per 1,000 employees each year due to voluntary turnover and absenteeism alone.¹

Because toxic behavior is so insidious and so costly, companies have tried everything from social interviews to scientific assessments in an attempt to determine who will add value to their organization and who might be a drag on performance. However, many of these methods are expensive, hard to implement, and heavily reliant on subjective human reporting. That’s where the internet comes in, where potentially illuminating information on a candidate or current employee is just a few clicks away. In order to minimize the losses and injuries associated with a bad hire, more than 70% of employers today are using social media platforms to research job candidates before bringing them on board.²

Why do employers screen and monitor employees online?

Employers have good reasons to learn more about job candidates and current employees online. For some companies, looking online can help prevent a significant amount of financial and reputational loss. Whether the issue involves a bigoted tweet or overt and recurrent sexism, every person in an organization can now become a source of risk, and the consequences for companies can be disastrous once the behavior is discovered. Look no further than Chipotle and Starbucks, both of which suffered significant brand damage in 2018 at the hands of alleged racial bias.³ In such cases, the press or a customer discovers an offense and shares the story across media channels, turning yesterday’s HR problem into today’s PR and legal nightmare.

‍More than 70% of employers today are using social media platforms to research job candidates before bringing them on board‍

For the majority of companies, the most immediate, frequent, and damaging fallout from toxic behavior in the workplace is its impact on productivity. Long before a company has to deal with negative publicity or the threat of legal action, it loses money because of the multitude of ways that toxic employees negatively impact the people around them. Whether the employee’s problematic online behavior directly impacts co-workers who follow them online or is mirrored in their workplace as bullying or intimidation, online behavior left unchecked can lead organizations to experience dramatic increases in turnover and absenteeism, and substantial losses in overall performance.‍

‍Why don’t more companies look online?‍

If there is so much value in using online information to inform our hiring decisions, why don’t more companies have a formal program for obtaining and leveraging this information?

In part, it’s because most businesses are screening online through manual Google searches that are both logistically burdensome and legally thorny. Said differently, many companies don’t have a policy for online screening because from a compliance perspective, doing this internally is an uphill battle. If you look online, you can take hours to find the most relevant information, and risk seeing protected class information in the process. If you don’t, you risk overlooking crucial information that could keep you from bringing someone toxic into the organization— someone whose actions could take a deep toll on the company’s morale, productivity, and reputation.

There’s another reason why certain companies aren’t looking for toxic behaviors online: most companies have no idea how much they’re suffering from their effects.

Fama has been helping employers bridge this gap by bringing relevant and actionable online information into talent acquisition and workforce management. Since 2015, we’ve helped Fortune 1000 companies gain insight into their new hires and existing employees by identifying job-relevant behaviors that other methods of screening simply won’t. Our automated and legally compliant approach to screening public online content for behaviors such as bigotry, sexism, and even altruism was designed so that no employer has to worry about taking on an expensive and time-consuming screening process, or risking a major compliance violation, to figure out who will further their goals and who will hinder them.

For many employers, removing these legal and operational burdens from the screening process is critical. However, even with their legal and operational needs met, there’s another reason why certain companies aren’t looking for toxic behaviors online: most companies have no idea how much they’re suffering from their effects.

Over the last few years, we have aggregated and anonymized a wealth of data around how much toxic online behavior is manifesting across a variety of industries. Using this protected data, we’ll help you understand the extent of the problem and answer two critical questions around how you manage risk in your workforce. First, why should you consider looking online? Second, how is problematic online behavior impacting your company?

Objectives & Methodology

‍Does your industry pass the 5% test?

Leading research indicates that it only takes a small amount of toxic behavior to impact the bottom line. According to a study by Cornerstone OnDemand⁴ spanning over 25,000 employee observations, it takes just one toxic⁵ individual on a team of 20 people to lower productivity by as much as 30% to 40%, and to make employees on that team 54% more likely to leave. In other words, productivity drops and turnover spikes when just 5% of a workplace is engaging in toxic behavior.

‍Productivity drops by 30-40% and turnover spikes by 54% when just 5% of a workplace is engaging in toxic behavior

To help you evaluate whether your company is at risk, we have represented this effect through what we call the toxic threshold. If the percentage of employees that exhibit toxic behaviors online in your industry is 5% or greater, thereby failing our test, your company is already at risk for a 30 to 40% drop in productivity and a 54% increase in turnover based on online indicators alone. These damages are simply 2 of the over 40 damages that HR thought leaders say toxic behavior can create in an organization.

How We Measured Each Industry

We anonymized and aggregated data from all industries in our system that had a critical mass of reports that would allow us to accurately represent the industry population. By that logic, we anonymized, aggregated, and analyzed reports from 10 industries—hospitality, entertainment, education, finance, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, personal services, and professional services—and looked to see how they stacked up against the toxic threshold of 5%.

Using Fama’s proprietary machine learning algorithms, which are driven by deep learning and enhanced by natural language processing and image recognition, we anonymized, aggregated, and analyzed the public online profiles of tens of thousands of reports across these 10 industries. Within these reports, totaling over 14 million posts and articles, and 2.5 million instances of toxic behavior, we then identified, labeled, and quantified the prevalence of six core behaviors that we deemed likely harbingers of potential workplace toxicity:

Bigotry

Content within a post containing racism, sexism, homophobia, racial slurs, stereotypes, or other forms of intolerance and hate speech

Sexism

Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against (but not limited to) women, on the basis of sex or gender

Sexual Content

Posts, images, or news articles posted by the candidate containing references to or descriptions of sex or nudity

Illicit Drugs

Posts, images, or articles posted by the candidate containing references to illegal drugs or consuming illegal drugs, in accordance with federal law

Violence

Posts, images, or news articles posted by the candidate in some way advocating, supporting, or inciting violence or being violent

Crime

Posts, images, or articles posted by the candidate indicating the candidate was involved in a crime or supports a crime committed by someone else

Our Findings

8 out of 10 industries failed the test

In 8 of the 10 industries we analyzed, more than 5% of employees exhibited at least one of the problematic behaviors we listed above. Given that productivity drops and turnover spikes when just 5% of a workplace is engaging in toxic social behavior, companies in all 8 failing industries should be concerned about the extent to which toxic online behavior is influencing their HR and business outcomes.

Entertainment and tech exceed 5% for almost every behavior

At the top of the list, entertainment and tech are oozing toxic behavior. Entertainment is the most toxic of the 10 industries for every single behavior we tracked, and tech comes in second place for each of the 6 behaviors as well. Why are these industries having such a hard time? And, what is it costing them?

Relevant News

In entertainment, we’ve watched one high-profile incident after another rage to boil and spill over into lost profits and sunk careers. Between a racist tweet leading ABC to lose over $60 million in ad revenue, a professional athlete’s bigoted tweets resulting in major suspensions, and an actor’s newly discovered assault allegations prompting multiple major recasts, it has become clear that the entertainment industry has deeply entrenched issues when it comes to screening and managing stars online.

Relevant News

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In tech, such problematic behavior has simmered more quietly, less squarely in the gaze of camera crews and curious fans. Yet, the industry’s reputation for noxious organizational culture,⁶ lack of diversity,⁷ and reluctance to address the destructive behaviors that transpire under its roof ⁸ have eroded consumer trust and weakened the industry’s brands. Beyond the corporate culture scandals that have erupted at tech giants like Google and Microsoft in the last few years, even Uber’s IPO filing acknowledged that the negative press resulting from its toxic culture in years past will continue to impact their bottom line: “A failure to rehabilitate our brand and reputation will cause our business to suffer.” ⁹

Every service industry we tracked exceeds 5%

The next six industries are all service-based industries. While they’re less problematic than tech and entertainment by quantity of toxic behavior, all six service industries in our study still failed the test, exceeding the threshold of 5%. Illicit drugs aside, which our system flags based on changing state and federal laws, each of these industries are dealing with risky amounts of bigotry, sexism, and sexually explicit content—a dangerous sign in industries where interpersonal relationships are key.

Looking at current events, all of these industries are dealing with lawsuits and bad publicity for these same behaviors, furthering the connection between how we behave online and our offline consequences.

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Transportation and manufacturing are in the clear

The two least toxic industries are both logistics-oriented and, relative to the other industries, have pretty clean online footprints. That being said, it’s important to recognize that this doesn’t rule out the existence of toxic behavior, as both industries have had their share of incidents.

Though its overall rates of toxic online behavior are low, the transportation industry has more bigotry and sexism online compared to the 4 other behaviors, running parallel to a multitude of news stories on sexual harassment in trucking and government contracting facilities. Similarly, in manufacturing, bigotry and sexism have cost industry giants like Ford and General Motors a number of headlines:

Relevant News

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Conclusion

Every industry can benefit from looking online

Nearly every industry in our study has far exceeded the 5% threshold of toxic behavior. While transportation and manufacturing fared well with few individuals exhibiting toxic behaviors online, 6 of the 10 industries we analyzed are sitting between 40% and 80% above threshold. Entertainment, in particular, is dripping in toxic behavior, at nearly 300% above the threshold.

The bottom line is this: toxic behaviors undermine business success in a variety of ways—by creating hostile social climates that damage collaboration and teamwork, by pushing away valuable employees, by creating a burden for HR, legal, and PR departments, and by eroding brand trust. The more toxic your industry as indicated by online data, the more likely your company’s productivity and turnover issues will multiply.

Toxic behaviors undermine business success in a variety of ways. The more toxic your industry as indicated by online data, the more likely your company’s productivity and turnover issues will multiply.

The good news is that we no longer have to rely solely on background checks and references to keep our organizations safe. Today, we not only have better tools for illuminating toxicity, but also far more behavior to evaluate with them, that is, all of the behavior that unfolds on social media and the public web. Whether your company’s rates of toxic behavior are higher or lower than the industry standard, what matters is that you have more insight than ever into the dynamics that any given employee may bring into the workplace. Now, virtually every industry can benefit from the power of publicly available, well-protected online data.

At Fama, we believe that businesses will be more successful when their employees embody their organization’s mission and values, when online and offline behaviors are held to the same standard, and when no employee is negatively impacted because of a coworker’s toxic behavior. By identifying toxic behaviors before they make their way into our organizations, we invest in both our day-to-day productivity and our long term success.