Most Americans spend a great deal of time at their place of employment. Many spend more time at work than anywhere else in their life routine. It makes sense that the environment in our places of work have a significant impact on employees who go home to their families. If they come home stressed, angry and traumatized it makes a huge difference in how they navigate family issues, in how they parent and/or relate to family members.
This reality places a significant level of importance for the culture of our workplaces. Unfortunately, we do not have a great track record in creating healthy workplace environments. The HR service platform iHire recently surveyed 1,721 employees across 57 industries and found some compelling results from these employees. Some of the results are as follows:
3 out of 4 employees have experienced a toxic workplace
When it comes to employee retention – 54% said they have quit a job to escape a toxic workplace – 59% said they would take a job with a lower salary to escape a toxic workplace
60% reported experiencing stress-related health issues due to a toxic workplace
46% stated that they do not trust HR to help them in a toxic workplace
40% reported seeing discrimination in the workplace
In another survey by Workplace Bullying Institute, they found that 48.6 million Americans are bullied at work, with 30% having direct experience and 19% having witnessed it. Also, workplace bullying is a top-down issue with 65% of bullies holding the positions of bosses or managers.
At a financial level our businesses and corporations are spending over a trillion dollars each year dealing with retention issues as employees are leaving their workplace. This creates havoc in companies and requires significant time and expense to train new employees.
Clearly, we are struggling as a culture with the workplaces in America. Our work should be a place of stability, of professionalism, of support and a space where healthy emotional and relational integrity exists. The toxicity is not only destructive to the mental health of our employees but creates work environments that are unstable and untrustworthy. How many of our employees dread the thought every Monday as they go into environments that are toxic?
I am convinced that largely we are not setting the tone in our workplaces that support our employees. As I have stated earlier, sending individuals home from a stress-filled job has impact on our families, our children and our communities.
This is such a significant issue that Lakeside will use the PRESENCE trauma-informed program to reposition itself to create a virtual training program for business environments to train leaders, staff and others. Our desire will be to help them grasp the principles of trauma-informed care to support influencers in company cultures to adopt new skills that will create trust, hope and healthy workplace conditions.
We believe this training and support will help companies become more resonant and sensitive to their culture. It is a program that we hope to have released and available in the next few months. We will hopefully have the same impact in many businesses that we have had in developing trauma-informed environments in other organizations. It is time that we impart this knowledge and skills to our business community that has so many individuals that are subject to the workplace environments in America. Stay tuned as we will soon make some new announcements as to how this program will be available.
Gerry Vassar
President/CEO
