Terry Prone: Full employment means staff can readily leave a toxic workplace

You may assume vintage tales of inappropriate workplace behaviour could not happen today — but a quick survey tells me toxicity is alive and well in organisations large and small

Backstairs gossip suggests that the claimed toxicity of ITV as a workplace lay in the top talent such as Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby having little direct contact with juniors. Apart that is from Schofield's unwise affair with one of the most junior staff. File picture: PA/ITV

Funny word, ‘toxic’. It can mean anything from ‘a mother I don’t like that much’ to ‘an intolerable political regime’. 

Or, in the case of ITV, a general accusation of workplace toxicity, which is difficult to prove or disprove.

Toxic is as long as a piece of poisoned string. Last year, while interviewing Primark’s Breege O’Donoghue on stage at an entrepreneurs’ conference, I was impressed — as was everybody else — when she told stories about Penneys, where she worked her way up to becoming a globally powerful executive director, starting in the ’80s.

The employee and the slippers

One of the stories was about her first boss, who shall be nameless because he’s not around to explain himself, on a shared trip, while she was still pretty new to her job. 

Breege O’Donoghue addressing Pendulum 2023 at Dublin's Convention Centre in January this year when she was named Iconic Businesswoman of the Decade. File picture: Conor McCabe

The two of them stayed in some hotel in advance of a breakfast meeting with an important supplier.

Breege, as was the custom of the time, put her shoes outside her bedroom door when she was going to bed so that they could be collected, polished, and returned overnight. In the morning, ready to go to the meeting, she opened the door. No shoes. 

Reception said nobody had picked them up and was she sure she’d left them out. 

Desperate to be on time for her first major meeting, she decided to bite the bullet and wear the shower slippers she found in the wardrobe, shuffling down to the restaurant trying to convey the message that her elegance, down to the ankles, was not negated by the white slippers taking over at foot level.

Her boss greeted her with some amusement. 

She gritted her teeth and dealt with the meeting as if wearing her good shoes, only for him to tell her, when the guest had gone, that he, her boss, had nicked her shoes from outside her door as a way of testing her resilience. 

Breege O'Donoghue of Penneys/Primark at Ibec's annual conference in May 1997 with Eddie Sullivan, Department of Social Welfare, and Paul Harvey of Digital Equipment. File picture

She had passed the test and, almost half a century later, was proud of that. The audience laughed and applauded her.

But if you think about it, it was an extraordinary thing to do to a new employee. Extraordinary and, at best, unpleasant. Toxic? Your guess is as good as mine. Breege clearly wouldn’t have so defined it.

Until I started trawling, this week, among colleagues and customers, I assumed something like that couldn’t happen today, partly because nobody puts shoes out to be polished any more, but also because not many bosses would think it appropriate to ‘test’ a new recruit in such a way. 

Toxicity is alive and well

What I was trawling was “toxic workplaces you have known”. The examples were right up to date and startling.

Take the executive whose department boss operated out of Leeds and whose faith in those reporting to her seems to have been somewhat thin, as evidenced by the way she tested them whenever she had to come to the Dublin office. 

At reception, before she formally announced herself, she would telephone people as if from Leeds and check what they were doing and where they were doing it. Then she would take the lift and walk in on them, loudly commenting on the discrepancies between what had been told to her on the phone and what was happening in front of her.

The gossip mill

Then there was the experience of one who had worked in cosmetics retail. Meaning she glammed up, smiled widely, and sold makeup to customers. 

The difficult bit was the smiling widely, because one boss, over coffee or on the floor, would create a bitchery coven, encouraging whoever was present to reveal all (as long as it was negative) about whoever was off that day. All the girls speedily copped on to what was going on and found it abhorrent. A few went silent, not including the one telling the story.

“Of course I hated it,” she said this week. “But I knew that if I didn’t participate, she would give me lousy times and days on the roster, which would affect what I could earn and my future prospects. 

"That was what was so toxic about it: She made us all complicit.”

Bathroom behaviour

Two people who worked in quite different companies recounted how bathroom behaviour on the part of management had led to them deciding that their workplace was toxic. 

In the first instance, the company had the corporate preferred peeing time built into the lighting system. Employees who dawdled found themselves plunged into a darkness which was memorably total because the bathrooms had no windows. The grapevine passed on the tip: “Take your phone when you go to the loo. You might need the torch on it.”

The unspoken consensus that it was barking to have to remember to take your phone with you when you visited the restroom contributed to the company’s high staff turnover. The surprising thing, to me, was that the company involved was a PR consultancy. 

When I foolishly expressed my surprise out loud, one of those present shrugged and said that, wherever you have a billable hours focus — whether the company is legal, accountancy, or public relations  — management can take a bizarre interest in the toilet because the employee is earning no money while there.

Another person said that, in one previous job, the deal was that if you overstayed the agreed corporate pee time, someone senior to you would come by your desk and ask you if you were OK. Since she was taking more time in the ladies in order to inject herself with fertility drugs, this was interpreted by her as a singularly invasive form of espionage.

It happens in smaller companies too

But the companies don’t have to be sizable for weird management behavior to surface. 

One male executive was new to a small legal firm when Christmas came up, and the firm booked a table in a restaurant where other small companies were having their Yule do. The new recruit was astonished when one of the senior guys initiated a food fight.

“Profiteroles everywhere,” was how he summed it up.

Admittedly, this didn’t happen on a regular basis back in the company’s small HQ, but the fact that it happened at all persuaded him to move on.

Examine how the 'talent' expresses itself...

Backstairs gossip suggests that the claimed toxicity of the ITV workplace lay in the top performers (Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby) having little direct contact with juniors. As in many entertainment settings, the top bods were protected by a phalanx of managers from such grievous intrusion.

Their unwillingness to engage, reportedly, included not learning names, not meeting eyes when passing in corridors, not registering anybody below a certain level as human (except, of course, where Schofield was having an unwise affair with one of the most junior staff).

The great thing about full employment in this country is that, whatever an employee’s definition of ‘toxic workplace’ is, they can leave it, right now, without hassle.

It also means that the oft-talked-about ‘talent management’ requires close and personally unsparing examination of how the talent expresses itself.