Toxic employee in the workplace? How to tackle the infection before it spreads

Toxic employees can quickly infect the workplace. Their disruptive behaviour, negative attitude and lack of accountability can have widespread impacts on productivity, culture, moral and dynamics, not only of the team they may work in but the business as a whole.

As the consequences of toxic employees are far reaching, allowing them to continue in their negative behaviour is not an option. However, many employees often find it difficult to identify and address toxic employees in the workplace.

What is a Toxic Employee

A toxic employee is an individual who:

• is always involved with conflict with other team members.
• spreads gossip, misinformation or enjoys “spilling the tea”.
• shifts blame and does not accept responsibility.
• cannot take constructive criticism.
• has a persistent negative attitude.
• have traits akin to bullies i.e. humiliating, belittling, or insulting others.

Consequences of a Toxic Employee

Toxic employees pose significant risks to the workforce and the business. Failing to understand the profound impact that a toxic employee will have is careless. Employers should not indulge or tolerate the behaviour of toxic employees. Doing so is destructive to not only your business but to other employees as well. Toxic culture, if allowed to fester, will spread throughout the business and will be a reason as to why many other employees will resign. Ultimately, toxic culture is one of the biggest drivers of the great resignation and can turn the business into a ‘revolving door’.

What should be done?

The first port of call for employers is to call the employee into a meeting for review. During this meeting, the employer should address the behaviour head on and give the employee an opportunity to realign their behaviour and values with that of the business.

If the employee fails to make improvements, employers should look to terminate the toxic employee at earliest opportunity.

Employers need to be mindful, however, of the risk of unfair dismissal and general protection claims.

A general protections claim is brought where an employee is under the belief that they were terminated by exercising a workplace right or discriminated against.

Unfair dismissal claims on the other hand are brought where an employee considers that their employment was terminated on unjust or unreasonable grounds. However, such claims cannot be brought by employees who:

• have been employed for 6 months or less (if you employee 15 or more employees)
• earn over $167,500 (high income earners)
• are not protected by an award or enterprise agreement.

Where an employee is protected from unfair dismissal or there is a risk of a general protections claim, employers have two options. The first is to go through the disciplinary pathways as provided by the policies of the business. The drawback is that whilst this will protect the employer against a claim of unfair dismissal, these disciplinary processes are often time consuming and, in some cases, leaving the toxic employee in the workplace to fester can only make a bad situation worse. As such, the second option is to remove the employee from the workplace as soon as possible. However, if employers wish to terminate the employee at the earliest opportunity without following disciplinary procedures it is best to consult a lawyer first, in order to get assistance with navigating and mitigating the risks of unfair dismissal and general protection claims.

*This article was prepared with the assistance of Challita Tahhan