What Makes a Work Environment Toxic? An Investigation
I must confess to always being a little confused by the phrase “toxic work environment,” which sounds to me like the kind of vague, HR-speak meant to confuse people. After all, you don’t usually hear that phrase in non-corporate settings: When NYC taxi drivers staged a hunger strike last month in protest of debt that was literally driving them to suicide, they didn’t really use the phrase “toxic work environment.” Nor does it refer to conditions that might literally be toxic, such as when Tesla (and other companies) ignored pandemic safety protocols.
No, “toxic work environment” seems to refer specifically to office work, and generally describes a kind of psychological abuse, that is often racial or sexual in nature. It may not be literally toxic, but the harm is real. In Baxter Holmes’ ESPN story last week on the Phoenix Suns under owner Robert Sarver, he quotes a former employee saying, “It wrecked my life… I contemplated suicide.”
Unfortunately, the Suns story is just the latest in a string of such investigations: The NFL just finished up a similar report (which it has refused to release) on the Washington Football Team; earlier this year, the Mets conducted an internal investigation after reports about their workplace culture surfaced in the wake of scandals involving an ex-manger and former GM; and just a few years ago, the Dallas Mavericks faced similar allegations.
So I spent the weekend going over all four stories, using the Holmes story as an excuse to reread the reporting in The Athletic on the Mets, in the Washington Post on the WFT, and internal report released by the Mavericks. I do not recommend doing this unless you want to feel very gross, but the lack of clarity around the phrase was bothering me. Frankly, it seems politically motivated, a way of figuring the story as something other than a labor issue. After looking at all these stories, I’ve come up with a few commonalities. Some of these are likely obvious, but I think it’s worth going over them in detail, to figure out what they mean, and what kind of response is warranted.
1) Creeps in power
There’s a line in Holmes’ story that struck me as odd: He writes that many ex-employees “describe a toxic and sometimes hostile workplace under Sarver.” Initially, I was confused about how a workplace could be “toxic” though only “sometimes hostile,” but my understanding is that a “hostile environment” has a specific legal meaning in cases like this. On the other hand, a “toxic environment” seems to be more of a catchall term for any workplace with a ton of creeps.
The obvious consistency running through all these stories is behavior that strikes most people as disgusting, boorish, and generally creepy, often from people in positions of authority or power. Let’s just quickly go over some of the gross shit documented in these reports:
In the Washington Post report on the football franchise, it describes a private, unofficial ten-minute video compiled of “lewd outtakes” from a promotional video for the cheerleader swimsuit calendar that was shared with Daniel Snyder and other high-ranking figures in the organization. (Snyder and others have denied this.)
According the ESPN’s report, former Mets GM Jared Porter sent a young female reporter who covered the team 62 unanswered text messages, culminating in a picture of his penis.
Chris Hyde, a sales executive for the Dallas Mavericks from 2000 to 2014, was known to view pornography and sexually graphic content on his computer at work, and also emailed several such images to his colleagues.
Robert Sarver allegedly told two executives that the Suns should have local strippers impregnated by NBA players, so they would be inclined to stay in Phoenix. (Sarver denies saying this.)
These are just a few examples*, but stories like this tend to be what stick in your head. Behavior that is so outrageous that the typical defenses, like “It was just a misunderstanding” or “It was taken out of context,” fall on deaf ears.
*The Mavericks report, which I had never read in full before, is particularly damning and gross and truly shocking to read.
The details are so disturbing that they get most of the attention which, counterintuitively, makes the problem appear simpler than it is. After all, if the offenders are doing things that so obviously cross the line, then the answer seems obvious: Just get rid of these creeps. Hyde and Porter were fired. Snyder “stepped back” from running the team. And now there is pressure on Adam Silver to do something about Sarver.
But there’s an obvious problem here. All these reports documented persistent abuse that lasted, in some cases, for more than a decade. You could possibly understand how behavior could persist that long if it occupied some gray area, if there was some debate about whether what was going on really was inappropriate, or just in poor taste. But when behavior so egregious lasts for so long, it’s obviously not a question of a few creeps.
2) No oversight
The first missing piece is the lack of accountability that the creeps face. Here, though, there seem to be two different types of stories. The first is that victims don’t speak up, either because it’s not clear who to tell, or it’s clear that such complaints won’t be taken seriously. In the Mets/Jared Porter example, the victim was a journalist, so there was a professional risk to speaking up (a frequent concern when the targets are members of the media). At the Washington Football Team, there was one HR staffer for 220 staff members, suggesting that any system for reporting abuse was obviously bullshit.
The second type of example is that victims do speak up, but nothing (or almost nothing) is done. These parts of the reports are less detailed, but often more interesting and revealing than the conduct itself. Let’s look at a couple of the responses:
In The Athletic’s report on the Mets, they describe how allegations of discrimination against David Newman led to him leaving the team in 2018, but he was brought back in 2020:
That woman — the one who believed she was discriminated against on the basis of her pregnancy — says she corroborated what her co-worker told Alderson about Newman and told Alderson that Newman made life “miserable” for those around him. Alderson responded that Newman’s behavior was “unacceptable,” she said, but then remarked that he believed in second chances and vowed to tell Newman to “knock it off.” Newman’s hiring was announced later that day.
From last week’s ESPN story on the Suns:
One female former employee said that after being physically assaulted by a male co-worker outside of the office, a female co-worker went to HR out of concern for the employee's safety. The two told ESPN that HR spoke with the alleged victim, ultimately deciding that simply moving her desk would resolve the issue. At that time, the alleged victim said there were two rows of desks -- with partitions separating each one -- and that hers was right next to the male co-worker's. They moved her to the second row. "I couldn't escape," she said, adding that if she stood up, he was right there, probably less than 10 feet away. "It was a joke. An absolute joke."
This seems to get closer to a systemic explanation of “toxic work environments,” as it goes deeper than the presence or absence of creeps. It is also about enablers, but even here it’s important to be careful. All of these reports castigate the HR departments or supervisors involved for failing to curb the bad behavior. The Athletic report on the Mets singles out a top HR official who “seemed to prioritize pleasing ownership.” Similarly, the Mavericks’ internal report condemns Buddy Pittman: “Even though he was the Human Resources Director, Pittman did not prioritize the handling of most personnel and disciplinary issues.”
But the problem is not individual bad actors within HR departments—it’s the departments themselves. Any attempt to fold oversight and accountability into the corporate hierarchy itself are inevitably going to produce systems that “prioritize pleasing ownership” and “not prioritize the handling of… disciplinary issues.” Their goal is to cause the least disruption possible, applying “fixes” that involve moving a desk here or a stern talking-to there. Indeed, ESPN’s Suns report might be the best illustration of this, depicting an HR department with no single bad apple, but which is nevertheless designed to bury complaints:
Former employees told ESPN that, in some cases, employees lied on team-administered surveys about working for the team because they feared retaliation or felt the exercise was pointless: “There was no way in hell I was going to answer that thing honestly,” said one former human resources representative. A second former HR rep said employees were told not to file complaints and that they shouldn't come to the HR office, that they should instead meet outside the office: “I would say, ‘Let's go take a walk. Because if they see you being here, they're gonna come after you.’” Several employees said they were taking antidepressants and going on medical leave because of the issues they were having with superiors, according to the former rep. Added the first former HR rep: “Unfortunately, HR is a place that most people come to, to get refuge from things that go on. You should be able to go there and get some help. [But] it's sort of a culture of complicity. Which I was a part of. And I hate saying that.”
Indeed, these HR employees don’t seem like bad people—they seem like people forced into a bad system.
Of course, the obvious answer here is to remove disciplinary authority from the corporate hierarchy. In other words, make sure the people dealing with misbehavior are independent and not incentivized to protect the company. But doing so would threaten the absolute power of the boss, which is one of capitalism’s sacred cows. So instead the response is to insist that we just need to build a better HR. This is why so much liberal energy is directed towards firing people, whether they be the offenders themselves or their supervisors, or suggesting that things like DEI seminars and racial awareness trainings are the key to fixing the issue. The idea is that with the right training or good managers, you can stop bad things from happening.
But, as we saw before, the issue is not that people don’t know these things are wrong, and it’s not that good people were unaware of what was happening. So it’s not clear how better training or a new staff is going to achieve better outcomes. It is only a way of clinging to the fantasy that you can protect employees simply by firing the right middle managers, but without actually organizing and empowering workers.
3) Unwritten rules
One way you can see the importance of absolute power for bosses is in the lack of specific and impartial rules about this stuff. Not that such rules didn’t exist, but that they were superseded by unwritten rules. The last recurring feature that stood out to me was the simultaneous presence and irrelevance of official rules, mission statements and trainings about sexual harassment and proper workplace behavior. From the Mavericks team report:
Over the time period covered in this investigation, the Mavericks issued at least three separate employee handbooks… Each of these handbooks contained content regarding sexual harassment and provided accurate statements of what constitutes unlawful sexual harassment. The Mavericks also provided anti-discrimination and anti-harassment training to employees in 2008 and 2015, to supervisors in 2008, 2013, and 2015, and to scouts in 2014. These trainings included an accurate statement of what constitutes unlawful sexual harassment and advised that harassment should be reported to Human Resources.
Nevertheless, these rules are always secondary to the whims of the boss. You can see that in the way HR was understood to be a place that would bury your complaints, but you can also see it in Alderson telling Newman to “knock it off” or Sarver announcing “I don’t like diversity” at an organizational meeting. In stories like these, concerns of employees are brushed aside, even when they are supposedly backed up by the facts and the stated rules of the organization.
Maybe the strangest story, though, comes from the part of the Mavericks report regarding Chris Hyde, the guy who liked to email porn to coworkers, whose misbehavior lasted 14 years. In 2008, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban found out about graphic sexual images on Hyde’s computer and sent him this email:
If you have any offensive pictures on your PC at the Mavs Chris, I will have you fired on the spot. No questions asked. I dont [sic] give a shit what you do on your own, but when its [sic] on a work computer, that crosses the line.
Just a few months later, Hyde threatened to shoot multiple colleagues. He was then told that he was “hereby placed on indefinite probation and subject to immediate termination should any of these issues persist or any other violation of company policy occur.” A few years later, the team president saw MORE lewd images on Hyde’s computer. This time nothing at all happened.
Then, in 2011, there was an incident the report refers to as “the condom incident.” The fewer details you know about this incident, the better off you will be, but suffice to say it was another serious lapse in judgement by Hyde. That same year, he got in trouble for getting kickbacks from a ticket broker, and then in 2013 he did the same thing again. Cuban AGAIN sent him an email, this time saying, “Let me be clear again. Follow the rules i set or you will lose your job chris. The integrity of the process is more important than the money. Are we clear?”
Finally, in May of 2014, after yet another incident of inappropriate behavior towards a colleague, Hyde was fired. But what you see clearly in this example is an organization that is making up the rules as it goes along—even though it supposedly HAS rules about sexual harassment! It’s just that the official rules are less important than the unofficial ones that are subject to the whims of the owner. At first glance, Cuban does not come off as very powerful in this story, constantly drawing lines in the sand and then letting Hyde cross them. Indeed, the report concluded that Cuban was unaware of most of Hyde’s behavior, and “failed to adequately address the discrete and troubling incidents that were brought to his attention.”
But the issue stems from not adhering to clearly defined rules and consequences for misconduct. Instead, Cuban alternates between threats to fire Hyde and telling his supervisors, “Don’t make a bigger issue out of it than it is,” and so those supervisors are left to guess about how they ought to handle Hyde in a way that will please Cuban. No wonder, then, that they downplayed the issue and let such persistent bad behavior go unaddressed for so long. This is yet another example of how unwritten rules can be wielded against labor. Had there been transparent rules that were understood by all, then Cuban and those supervisors would not have had such a free hand, but Hyde would almost certainly have been fired earlier.
I do not want to make this sound easier than it is. There will certainly be contestable incidents. There is no universal standard of creepiness, and rules cannot capture every situation. Behavior can be misconstrued, details can be forgotten or taken out of context, etc. Take, for example, this line from the Holmes story, in which he describes a Suns meeting in 2004: “Three people in the room told ESPN that, during the meeting, Sarver made a comment they felt was racially insensitive; they could not recall specifics but said they felt he too loosely used the term ‘Black guy’ during the conversation.”
You can see how such an example would be interpreted differently by different people. It is not inherently racist to use the term “Black guy,” but you can probably imagine ways that someone like Sarver could say it that would make people uncomfortable. There is no simple rule that is going to capture nuance like this.
But the takeaway from looking at all these reports is that the problem here is not “gray areas.” And yet the refusal to take the steps necessary to empower workers ensures that’s how these discussions are framed. These reports are all written as if the authors are trying desperately to find a smoking gun, trying to find the anecdote that definitively proves a boss long rumored to be a jerk is, in actual fact, a jerk. There is seemingly some level of detail at which point things go from “gray area” to “toxic work environment”—you’ll just know it when you see it.
My hunch, though, is that making the details so important does nobody any favors. It traumatizes and embarrasses victims, while simultaneously making perpetrators defensive and uncooperative. Attempts to address the the problem get lost in these details, trying to determine precisely where they cross some imaginary line.
And none of this solves the underlying issue, which is power. While Robert Sarver is probably having a bad week, I bet he’d much rather have a conversation about what exactly he said in a meeting 17 years ago than the specific, reasonable steps that could be taken to curb his power. As tempting as it can be to focus on the creeps, the structural solutions would seem to lie in steps 2 and 3. That’s ultimately where the power lies…