How to Heal a Workplace

CHAPTER 2Why it's really about collective mental health

The ability to maintain a separation between life and work is actually impossible to achieve. As we spend so much of our time engaged with our work (even if we spend less time in the actual physical workplace post-pandemic), the working environment will affect our personal life and vice versa.

I have already outlined how a toxic workplace culture can create challenges for the people who work in it by engendering a level of disengagement. It's important to recognise that each individual member of the team can also be experiencing challenges in their personal lives, and that can also impact how the workplace culture operates.

This is something that many of us will have observed at some point over our working lives — how one person can dramatically affect the working environment. In some cases, this can be a new leader who is trying to stamp their authority on the organisation, or it can be another worker who may start to undermine the cohesiveness of the team. In both cases, we can observe the impact on the culture, in much the same way as how one rotten apple will eventually turn all the apples in a barrel bad.

Toxicity in the workplace

You may have read about workplace sociopaths and how they create toxicity in the workplace. Most people have seen how narcissism can show up in the upper echelons of any organisation. These types of personalities can be incredibly charismatic and engaging in the beginning, and will only ...