A recent video of an abusive manager at HDFC Bank who is seen humiliating his team members on a conference call went viral. During the entire meeting one can see the manager using abusive language to push his team members to achieve a certain set of business targets. Whether the targets were realistic or not is neither evident nor the point.
The standard statement that follows an expose like this was quickly issued by the bank: “We at HDFC Bank have a zero-tolerance policy for any form of misconduct at the workplace and firmly believe in treating all our employees with dignity and respect,”
This incident should not be viewed as an isolated case of one manic manager gone berserk and forgotten. This is symptomatic of deeper challenges that need to be understood and addressed. And these challenges are not unique to HDFC Bank.
Such incidents are not as rare as one may imagine. At BigBasket we had a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment and had gone to great lengths to communicate and enforce this policy. The company’s reputation for maintaining a healthy and harassment-free workplace was kind of legendary and common industry knowledge.
Decency, Decorum And Workplaces
Yet, what was surprising was that though everyone knew how uncompromising the company was in dealing with such cases, such incidents never completely disappeared. From time to time, although very infrequently, there were one-off complaints around sexual harassment.
There was also a period of time when almost all complaints and escalations relating to toxic work culture emanated predominantly from just one of the eight regions. Something seemed to have gone terribly wrong with that region. The point here is that isolated incidents are not an anomaly even in companies like BigBasket where good intent was backed up by strong preventive and swift investigative mechanisms.
And this is a pattern I've noticed time and again in all the five high growth startups I have been a part of. One of the consequences of high growth is the difficulty in inculcating and enforcing decency and decorum across the length and breadth of the company, especially if the geographic spread of the company is large.
The more unrealistic the growth targets, the more acute the challenge. The situation is compounded multifold if the apex leadership team of the company themselves succumb to the temptation of driving short term outcomes by indulging in, and sometimes even encouraging, a toxic work culture and stop treating those around them with dignity and respect.
If this happens, then the implosion is quite rapid, and there are many examples of this both in the Indian as well as global contexts. Uber went through an upheaval after Susan Fowler exposed the toxic bro-culture prevalent in the company via a blogpost which eventually took down its iconic founder, Travis Kalanick. There have been many similar stories of late in the Indian context as well.
High Growth And Toxicity
High growth results in several important organisational processes being bypassed, especially when it comes to hiring or acting swiftly on deviant behaviour. The pressure to hire and staff open positions, sometimes, is so overpowering that managers and leaders don't take “reference checks” seriously, and even turn a blind eye to early warning signals that are detected at different stages including in the interview process.
At that point of time, it appears that the only thing that matters is getting the required “resources” on board and ticking off one big item in the checklist. Creating a good culture is time consuming but all that’s needed to destroy it is just a few wrong hires.
Elements of toxic culture creep in slowly, especially in regions that are remote and distant from corporate headquarters and can go undetected for a long time unless mechanisms to detect and crack down on such toxicity are active and vibrant. And during phases of high growth, such mechanisms are not sufficiently nurtured and hence become sluggish. Therefore, it often takes a blow-up for leaders to sit up and realise that something is wrong and needs fixing.
High growth expectations in private companies and the quarterly cadence of public companies result in excessive prioritisation of short-term outcomes, and leaders turn a blind eye to behaviours that create long-term damage. The subconscious argument or justification is that the short-term benefits are visible and tangible, whereas the long-term damage is mostly intangible and, in any case, would probably have to be dealt with by someone else.
What’s The Way Out?
The challenges associated with high growth, described above, cannot be wished away. They need to be managed and contained like in the case of BigBasket. If important leaders, both globally and locally, who are culture creators and evangelisers are selected carefully without compromise, a large part of the problem is taken care of because they in turn would send the right signals every day in every part of the company.
When it comes to avoiding toxicity at the workplace, a combination of intent and execution is critical. One might be tempted to believe that good intent is universal, and that the problem is always with the execution. That isn’t true. Good intent isn’t in abundance as one might imagine. It needs character to stay faithful to good intent under pressure.
And to top it, just good intent is not enough. It needs to be backed up by a commitment to taking some tough decisions and hard calls to reinforce the intent. It needs clarity to understand the long-term adverse effects of the shortcuts that one resorts to when the goals are aggressive. Mechanisms to detect and act on toxic elements of culture need to be continually strengthened and nurtured.
TN Hari is Co-founder, Artha School of Entrepreneurship. Twitter: @TNHari. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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