Fixing unhealthy workplace cultures requires healing.
Participation in transforming the root causes of any harm caused by an organisation’s unhealthy culture, results in collective healing that fosters wellbeing.
Harm and Unhealthy Cultures in Organisations
Unhealthy workplace cultures with bullying, discrimination, harassment, poor leadership or work design (capacity and capability), obviously cause harm to many employees, and by extension, their family and friends. Toxic cultures can also be defined by customers, communities and the environment being harmed by the organisation’s products and services.
Recognising organisations are communities of people, when unhealthy, unethical or unlawful behaviours and practices are the norm, compliance with the status quo can mean many people are engaged in inflicting harm.
Employees can experience distress:
- when personally impacted by unhealthy behaviours or practices,
- when acting in ways expected by management that harm employees, customers, communities or the environment, and
- when not involved in, but aware of, colleagues, customers, communities or the environment being harmed by their organisation.
Healing Centred Engagement
For communities experiencing distress from historic or recent harm, focusing only on trauma informed care of distressed individuals risks disregarding:
- addressing the root cause of harm, often the result of systemic issues,
- restoring trust, hope and wellbeing for individuals, not just reducing negative emotions and other mental health symptoms, and
- harm suffered by members of a community, is a collective experience for the whole community.
The following is Shawn Ginwright’s description of a healing centred approach.
A holistic view of healing from traumatic experiences and environments.
Involving culture, spirituality, civic action and collective healing that fosters wellbeing.
Ginwright’s four key elements of healing centred engagement are summarised as the following.
“A healing centred approach to addressing trauma requires a different question that moves beyond “what happened to you” to “what’s right with you” and views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being rather than victims of traumatic events.”
Healing Centred Engagement when Fixing Unhealthy Workplace Cultures
1. Healing is found in an awareness and actions that address the conditions that created the trauma in the first place.
Dr. Stephanie Sarkis, a mental health counsellor, says that part of the healing process is employers:
- naming the specific toxicity in the culture,
- sharing the identified root causes, and
- admitting to any knowledge of, and explaining any failure to act, on both the causes and symptoms.
These actions by employers can help rebuild trust with employees,
but to restore employee wellbeing requires giving them a sense of power and control over fixing something that plays an important part in their life, their workplace culture.
Employers need to go beyond just asking for employee feedback on cultural change and address a power imbalance that usually occurs in cultural change. Too often led by those responsible for harmful behaviours occurring and/or being tolerated.
This requires shifting power to employees, encouraging employee advocacy and their participation in cultural change. Acknowledging significant, positive cultural change in any community is achieved by grassroots, social movements. As Sarkis also notes
“one road to healing is restorative justice — involving everyone in the process of determining how this toxic behaviour will not happen again.”
2. The pathway to restoring wellbeing can be found in culture, building a healthy identity, and a sense of belonging.
Any distress and trauma is remembered, and can live on long after the cause no longer exists. For employees:
- whose organisation required them to act in ways contrary to their own values that caused them and others harm,
- were harmed by behaviours enabled by the unhealthy culture,
- distressed by the harm to others caused by their organisation,
employers must facilitate the development of stories in which those employees are held blameless.
Stories that rebuild a healthy collective identity among employees also ignites the journey back to a sense of belonging to their organisation. When memories of the historic harmful behaviours no longer cause distress.
3. Go beyond treating emotional and behavioural symptoms, build on collective strengths and possibilities.
“Victimhood” existing alongside “wellbeing” is a contradictory proposition.
So whilst acknowledging and addressing symptoms of harm, employers must recognise employees are their best assets as part of their culture change strategy, and “are much more than the worst thing that happened to them.” Research has “found that excessive focus within an organisation on dysfunctions or problems for example, can actually cause the situation to become worse or fail to become better.”
This means employees are not only key to defining what they believe cultural change can achieve, but their experience, skills and capabilities are required to make it a reality. Fixing an unhealthy culture built on employee strengths and possibilities also fosters employee wellbeing.
Building on strengths and opportunities, is what engagement approaches like Appreciative Inquiry help create effective organisational development strategies such as culture change.
“Discovery involves speaking to and listening to staff about the challenges and successes that they face from their points of view. In gathering their stories commonalities can be discovered and the organisation can find what is working and what needs to be changed to make it work.
The dreaming phase involves accepting what is going right and using those, as well as the challenges discovered to feed into the design phase. The design phase is where the organisation crafts a response to change and make the areas that aren’t working so well better. The delivery phase is the process of implementation as a test to see what works and what doesn’t.
As the cycle never ceases, it turns into a continuous improvement process from a positive perspective. The point here is that the leadership, managers and employees conduct the appreciative cycle together, rather than its being done to them.”
4. Supports the wellbeing of those practitioners supporting the community healing.
The healthcare sector has identified the negative health impacts practitioners and professionals experience, when supporting the recovery and wellbeing of individuals and organisations that have experienced mental illness, distress or trauma.
Leaders need to recognise the importance of:
- engaging appropriately qualified professionals to facilitate the healing centred engagement of organisations and employees as part of addressing an unhealthy culture,
- recognising that their own ‘People and Culture / Human Resource’ and ‘Ethics / Compliance’ people are employees to be engaged in cultural change, rather than facilitating it, and
- providing appropriate support for any professional involved in the healing of organisations with unhealthy cultures.
