CAREER FOCUS
Removing the Toxins from Company Culture
High-achieving businesses embrace purposeful company cultures in which leaders help employees feel valued, heard, and engaged. Not every company is like that.
Written by Robin Flanigan
THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN an unhealthy work environment and a toxic one, but both can lead to burnout, an all-too-common condition among both engineers and their superiors.
Forty-six percent of engineers and 34 percent of executives report teamwide burnout, according to the 2024 State of Engineering Management Report by engineering management platform Jellyfish.
That may mean low or no energy, feeling continuously distracted, or having trouble finding purpose in what used to be meaningful work.
“The environment matters more today than it ever has,” said Peter C. Atherton, P.E., president and founder of ActionsProve, LLC, and author of Reversing Burnout: How to Immediately Engage Top Talent and Grow! “It’s different than it was just 10 years ago. We are in a new era.”
While about two-thirds of Atherton’s clients are high-achieving engineering and architecture firms, roughly one-third of them are in crisis, struggling with one or more aspects of their business or organization. That often includes chronic and unsuccessfully managed stress.
In the past, many workers felt lucky just to have a job. Today, Atherton said, top-talented employees who have many options and other organizations reaching out to them these days—particularly since Covid, when many aspects of the workforce changed—expect leaders to create a culture focused on much more than logistical progress.
“Are we working in an environment where it’s not draining all the time—where it’s getting the best out of us and not just the most out of us?” asked Atherton, who addressed this question in his newest book, Next-Level Leadership: How to Build and Leverage Your Essential Team Success Ecosystem.
Currently, there is more work to be done than people available to do it—a pervasive situation throughout the U.S. economy but particularly acute in the engineering trades, Atherton said. That has led to an inflection point, he said, where a more purposeful company culture in which leaders help employees feel valued, heard, engaged, and able to contribute to their own and their organizations’ successes can make all the difference.
“We’ve just gotten busy again, and in some cases, we’ve taken our eye off that aspect of what Covid taught us,” Atherton said.
He recommended responding to the situation specifically, and to organizational and team design generally, the way engineers would approach bridge design—thinking about how the columns, beams, and cables, with their compressive and tensile forces, work together in harmony.
“There’s a tension and a pressure that just needs to be understood and balanced and ultimately leveraged,” he said. “It allows us to get to new places, overcome something that otherwise would be dangerous or impassable.”
“Designing a culture has to be done explicitly and with intentionality.”
Peter C. Atherton, P.E., president and founder of ActionsProve, LLC
Atherton’s tips for some ways to go about this include:
Get some rest and manage your time wisely. Try not to bring work problems, tensions, and pressures home. And if you get stuck on a problem in the middle of a workday, give your brain a break and take a walk in nature, if possible. This allows space for new perspectives and possible solutions. “We’re smart people and we work for smart people,” he said. “We might be able to make some adjustments by managing our own time and stress.”
Seek out support. Talking to a peer group, therapist, coach, or mentor may help preserve your sanity, as well as help “gain the language, competence, and confidence to have a conversation with your supervisor” about making a shift of some sort, he said.
Talk about a potential shift. Let your supervisor know how you’re feeling, while being proactively and thoughtfully engaging. Atherton suggested asking, “Is there a way we can make some adjustments?” and “Is this going to last forever?” Most of the time, he noted, supervisors are unaware of these feelings and appreciate being given the chance to modify what isn’t working well. But don’t expect your supervisor to solve things alone. “Let’s be professional, let’s be human, and let’s have a real discussion about this, because that’s what creates respect and clarity,” he said.
Shift teams. Sometimes conversations don’t change things. Atherton cited one of Gallup’s most famous leadership research breakthroughs showing that 70 percent of the variance between the highest-engaged teams and persistently disengaged teams comes down to the manager. “So, you could be in an incredible organization with a great executive culture, but you just need to change groups,” he said.
Take time off and make a plan. This may be necessary to think about how best to move forward, because even if you can tolerate an unhealthy workplace for a while, “it eventually will beat down even the best people,” Atherton said. Just keep in mind that the world will continue to evolve. “Are you going to evolve with it? If you take a time-out, for how long and what will you do? Because at some point you need to move forward,” he added.
Leave if needed. Thriving cultures at work don’t happen by accident, and this is especially true for those that last a long time, Atherton pointed out. “Designing a culture has to be done explicitly and with intentionality. If that’s not the case at your workplace, and your mental health is suffering, it may be time to look for opportunities elsewhere where the culture better aligns,” he said.
Robin Flanigan is an independent writer in Rochester, N.Y.
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