the truth about your workplace culture that keeps you up at night

This is a 4 part series on the various points of a workplace culture. Find the four parts here: Workplace Culture, Toxic culture,  Tolerable culture and a Magnetic Culture.

Claudia was frustrated with the ongoing staff retention issues and how it was impacting client services. 
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Over the last six months, three of her key staff had left for better-paying jobs in other organizations. For the most part, they had taken jobs that were not steps up. In fact, one person actually took a job that represented a decrease in responsibility and authority.

The latest staff survey sat on her desk and the results weren’t bad, but they weren’t stellar either.

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When we sat down with Claudia to explore what was going on for her and her team, we took her through a quick clarifying exercise. 

After asking some curious questions, Claudia was able to point out several key areas of concern: 

• While staff are doing their jobs, they don’t do much more than they have to.
• The staff don’t seem to enjoy one another’s company as much as they once did.
• In some programs, the majority of communication seemed to be via email, as if everyone is keeping their distance. It’s terse, polite, but primarily transactional. 
• In some instances, Claudia was  dealing with interpersonal concerns that are passive-aggressive
• Several supervisors are close to burnout, likely due to their overwhelming workload.

After talking with Claudia, a key takeaway she seemed to land on was that many staff cared but didn’t believe they could change things on their own. She knew they were right. 

For Claudia, it is time to find out how she can somehow connect to their initial passion for the work together and create a better workplace culture. 

Like many organizations we’ve worked with, Claudia is dealing with a tolerable workplace culture. Her workplace isn’t toxic, but something is amiss.


A tolerable workplace is not bad enough to leave, not good enough to give it your all; it’s one where half of the workers put in enough effort to keep their jobs, and the majority say they could do better.

A tolerable workplace is characterized by:​​

• compliance
• tolerance
• indifference
• A grin and bear it attitude
• doing just enough to get by

In a tolerable workplace, people have simply been tolerating far too much for far too long. 

In a TOLERABLE workplace, employees are not engaged and that is a problem! Just as it was for Claudia.

DO THIS: Take a moment to scan back over the story. Note how many of the descriptors could describe your current workplace culture. Perhaps more than you’d like?

Tolerable workplaces are OK, but Magnetic Workplaces are so much better. They draw people in and they keep them there. Staff make an active choice to stay and they are actively engaged. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They don’t stay because it’s not bad enough to leave. 

We’ve helped hundreds of leaders re-engage their staff and reduce turnover. Next up … it’s time to learn about a Magnetic Workplace and how you can help create one.

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