Starting up your own business takes time, and many a fine entrepreneur has to work a day-job to make ends meet until they can get things going. Naturally, when your dream business is at home but your daily work is in a stuffy office, store, building site, or school, work can become something of a drag.
Every minute spent doing repetitive tasks that seem to have no major impact on anything else except your boss’s income and the general uneven circulation of wealth feels like a waste of time and of your talents. So of course, you soon get fed up. But there’s a big difference between being unhappy at work because you’re frustrated with your lack of time, and dreading going to the workplace because it is a toxic environment.
The former may just have to be tolerated a while until your home business starts seeing some returns. But the latter needs to be dealt with, since a toxic work environment can damage your physical and mental health, and diminish your motivation – no matter how desperately you want your own business to thrive and offer you a way out.
So just what do we mean by a toxic work atmosphere? It’s defined by two factors: the environment where you work, and the effect it has on your feelings.
The issue is primarily connected with negativity. If a host of negative attitudes and actions from colleagues and management at work make you feel anxious about turning up each day, depressed while you’re there, and worried about it the whole time after you get home, you can likely consider it to be a toxic work environment.
It may be an overall atmosphere of distrust. This can occur when management steal ideas or break the very rules they are there to enforce. A lack of support and encouragement from management can also contribute to the toxicity, and a cliquey environment or widespread bullying can make things worse.
If you can’t yet afford to quit, then getting by in the meantime requires distancing yourself from the most negative of colleagues and concentrating instead on building relationships with the good guys and doing work on yourself. Don’t suddenly shut out your negative colleagues, because if they notice then it can just make things work. But learn to avoid them and slowly spend as much time as possible with more positive presences.
Take any opportunity to get out of the workspace, whether it’s a task you can do remotely, a seminar, or a training program. The latter are especially good because you can build skills for your home business on somebody else’s time and dollar. In the office, congratulate yourself on your own wins and support your ‘good guy’ colleagues through the bad times and the good. Try to feed some positivity into the system without for a moment believing that it is your responsibility to fix a broken business in a broken society.
But don’t forget to cover your back along the way. Without talking about it with even your trusted colleagues, keep a diary of the negative incidents that impact the toxicity of your workplace: arguments, betrayals, lies, the hiring and firing of employees. You might need it if you should ever be wrongly fired or need to bring a case of harassment or similar against your boss.
And of course, use it as an opportunity to learn about how to avoid creating a toxic work environment once your own home business is up and running and you’re in charge. Remember that a business is a community, and the people in it thrive on support, trust, transparency, putting humans before dollars.
For further insight how to cope along the way, take a peek at this new infographic from resume.io.
