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I was working for the newspaper. It was one of my first jobs out of college.
As I worked, it was really great because we knew each other and it was really family oriented.
You could pretty much trust people and we worked together as a team.
This is Herman. Herman worked as a designer for a Midwest newspaper for 15 years before it was sold and merged with another newspaper.
When the company decided to sell, they had another company that was just a couple of cities over from us that decided to buy our office and our equipment.
The day that they took over, the previous company that owned us actually fired us, fired the whole staff.
And then this new company came in and they stood in front of us and they say, well, we are officially hiring you.
And everybody in the office clapped and it was just, you know, like, okay, well, glad we still have a job and everything was well.
But immediately we were being treated as though we were just kind of second rate people compared to them.
Merging two company cultures is not an easy task.
There are usually many unknowns for the employees of the company being acquired.
For Herman, it came as a huge relief to be able to keep his job.
Despite the second class treatment from the acquiring newspaper, he tried to maintain a positive outlook and prove himself to the new management.
But no matter how hard he tried, Herman couldn't shake the negative stigma that was placed on him from the start.
My name's Carly and this is Toxic Workplace,
a podcast that gives a platform to those who have survived highly toxic work experiences only to come out with newfound wisdom and a renewed sense of self.
A toxic workplace is more than just the daily grind.
It's a soul crushing experience that will chip away at your sanity until you're about to lose your mind.
It's an abusive relationship that's hard to leave.
And the longer you stay, the more you lose sight of who you set out to be.
Probably had a staff of 25 to 30 people.
And then the new company comes in and they pretty much had the whole county that is next to us.
They had a secondary office and then they had a main office.
And so they made our office the third one.
So we had two counties that were now part of this newspaper incorporated together, consolidated.
My department, we ran ourselves, but then all of a sudden we had a supervisor and they were telling us what to do right away.
And we had no clue what they wanted.
I had to fight for my position.
I just had a new baby and I didn't want to commute.
The people that came in, they had their own artists and they immediately shipped me to another office to work with someone else as a floater designer.
And that I didn't really like, but I had no choice.
I had a family to raise and I said, OK, well, I'll just see what it's like, go with the flow.
And it might have a longer commute, but at least I still have a job and maybe I could come back to this office maybe another time.
Herman's future with this newspaper was in the hands of new management.
He was thankful just to keep his job, especially with the new baby at home.
After he was relocated, his commute drastically changed from an easy bike ride to work to an hour long drive on the highway.
The employees of the acquiring newspaper did not welcome Herman or his colleagues with open arms.
They looked at my county as kind of like a rural, low talent county compared to them.
And they treated me like that. And I had to prove myself, of course.
That's what I was getting the impression from the new staffs. These lowlifes are coming in.
He lives with cows and doesn't know what the difference between north and south or whatever.
We just came out from the cave or something.
I did try to prove myself and I did very well at that.
I proved to them that I could do things that they didn't think I could do.
That was the first thing. And I think that at that advantage, I was able to prove that I could do the work.
And I became a supervisor assistant for the art director. I was an assistant art director.
But that was really not for me. One of the employees was frustrated and left.
I'll call her Anne. Before she left the company, she was just a designer.
We never really connected, Anne and me.
I got wind when I was assistant art director. I guess she had some issues.
And I might have been part of the issue and I don't know what that was.
Maybe she wanted the position. I don't know. But I always treated people fairly.
But whatever reason, she just had it out for me.
She went and got a degree in the masters in communication.
A couple of years later, she comes back and she took over the position of art director for all three offices.
And she was going to shake things up. And that got me kind of thinking I was going to have problems when she come back.
I tried to think back. Did I say anything wrong to her?
There were no red flags to that point, but I kind of saw the writing on the wall. Put it that way.
So when she did get the position, of course, the rumor mill began with everybody.
I think she felt that our department in the smaller town needed new talent, new blood.
Right out of the box, she had a company-wide meeting with all the designers in all three offices.
And I'm not sure if management or the higher-ups talked to her.
I felt like I had a radar on me. I had a target on my head from the beginning.
By the time Ann came back as art director, Herman had been transferred back to the small town office that he started in.
Herman's intuition was that Ann had something against him, although he was stumped as to what it was.
Herman is an easygoing, laid-back guy. He's also hardworking and a loyal employee.
He was with the newspaper for 15 years at this point, and he was well-seasoned as a designer.
But Herman's attributes didn't seem to hold up their value to Ann's liking.
I had been in the company, of course, by that time in 15 years. This was the final year.
I had gathered a lot of experience, and I'd gone through a couple different positions in the company, and I'd reached the max PTO I could get.
I had outstanding employee evaluations with my former supervisors.
I'm never a complaint whatsoever, and I always did above and beyond.
And I felt like at this point, I was suddenly becoming incompetent.
I felt like when she said that they needed to start looking for new talent in our office, and I'm thinking, wait, what did they just hear?
I was, at the time, 43. I felt like there was an ageism kind of thing going on.
And I just was very professional, very calm, and everything like that whenever I was around her, just to show respect and prove that I'm a good worker.
She would have mandatory meetings, and this was before Zoom.
We had to meet physically, or she didn't want a phone conference when we had meetings.
And in the area I live, we have very bad snowstorms, and sometimes the police will shut down the roads.
One day we had a police order that we weren't allowed to be on the roads. We even tried to.
We got in the car. I took everybody outside. We got out there, and the police turned us around, and we came back, and they explained that we went out.
And the weather patterns from her county and my county are completely different.
We might have a blizzard on one side, and over there, the sun's out, and there's nothing there, no snow, nothing.
I tried to send her a picture of out our window there, you know, the snow, but she goes, you need to be here now.
Like, demanding, demanding. She kind of reprimanded our team for not showing up to the meeting.
You should have been here. The meeting was important that we were going to discuss certain things, and we ended up having a phone conference.
And it wasn't important to me. It didn't seem like something that pressing or that we needed to get together for,
but it was just more of a session of how we need to improve, and it put me in a spot where I may be insubordinate or something, you know.
It seemed as though we were suddenly doomed to find something to, you know, get us in trouble.
Ann's unwillingness to compromise over the staff meeting due to a snowstorm sheds light on just how difficult she was to work with.
A phone conference would have easily sufficed, but her need to control quickly escalated things into a no-win situation for Herman and his colleagues.
A manager does not care about their employees if they're willing to sacrifice their safety for the sake of hearing themself talk in a staff meeting.
Ann was too hyper-focused on her own agenda to even think about the well-being of those she was supposed to be leading.
Ann was a poor communicator when it came to setting clear expectations for Herman,
which seems intentional since she studied communications for her master's degree.
Her emails and messages always had some kind of hidden agenda behind them. They were cryptic.
I felt like that I was under the microscope.
We had a large workload and sometimes the pressure that we were coming under started to show,
and Ann decided that she wanted to meet each one of us individually.
She was going to come to the office and she sent in an email, bring something.
That's all it said was bring something.
So she did come to the office and everybody brought something.
When she meant bring something, she meant bring a portfolio, but that wasn't clearly stated in the email.
So I came in and I had this old silver coin, silver dollar coin.
So, well, I brought this silver dollar coin here, set it down.
Well, we're here to talk about your skills and abilities and how well you design.
I was expecting you to bring some portfolio to show the body of your work.
Basically, she was saying I had to re-interview for my job, but didn't really state that.
And she said, well, I wish you would have brought samples of how you changed and grown and gotten better
and your repertoire of designs.
And I thought back, you know, the whole time you guys have never even given me a real chance to do any growth or anything.
We're just constantly pushing and getting things out the door, getting it done, doing a pretty good job at that.
Make sure we get our advertisements out.
But as far as work and the design and the scope that she was looking for, I didn't have it.
And she told me that we're trying to improve our skills.
And she made me sound as though I was kind of a has-been or that my quality of work has gone downhill.
You know, and I'm thinking, boy, what a difference in a year.
A year before that, I was the top guy or top designer generating money and making designs.
And then now I'm being singled out.
It was a subtle approach and questioning my design and my talent.
And that kind of made me feel very self-conscious and low self-esteem.
And then afterwards, when that meeting was over, she sat with my ad director and they sat for a long time.
And the office was right out behind glass.
They were watching me and talking about something I didn't know they were talking about.
I wasn't the only one interviewed.
They also interviewed the other designers as well.
And they talked for so long.
And I was like, what are they talking about? What are they looking at me for?
Ann had something up her sleeve.
The meeting she set up with Herman wasn't meant to highlight his skills and abilities,
because if it had been, she would have been very clear with her expectations.
Performance evaluations in meetings should always be clearly defined.
Never a surprise.
There should have been a more formal outline, but the least she could have done was explain in more detail
what she expected Herman to bring to the meeting.
Saying, bring something, leaves things up for interpretation.
The cryptic email, the way she put Herman on the spot in the meeting,
and how she purposely had a visible discussion about him in a fishbowl of an office,
shows how Ann was manipulating the situation to generate incompetencies in Herman
that would serve her agenda to force him out.
A week or two afterwards, we were shuffled around again.
She sat me down and she goes, we're going to send you back to the main office,
so my commute was going to be longer again.
And I had just bought a new bicycle to commute with, and I was trying to stay healthy.
And they watched my workload too at the same time, and they were having some kind of a competition.
We kind of got a clue that she was going to do this, because she had a typed paper that she left behind
when she left the office that said all the places that we were going to be moved to.
And I think she left it behind by mistake or maybe on purpose, but we all kind of looked at it
and were thinking, well, they're going to get split up.
During there was a period where the salespeople, so we don't want you to take away Herman,
because he knows what he's doing, he's been around for years,
and they were afraid that if somebody new came in, they'd have to retrain them.
And that didn't last long, because Ann had her hands in to get me out to the main office.
In fact, by that time, there were no designers in my office.
They just consolidated everybody into one big conglomerate in the main office, so everybody had to commute.
This was way before remote work was ever a thing.
The workloads were thinning out, you know, as the newspaper industry has been hit hard with the internet.
It was just like they were going to say, okay, we're going to see who's the best here.
It kind of became like a competition, almost like Survivor.
We were constantly watched.
So this is when, about the time when I got out there, that Ann began giving me special projects to,
I assumed that would stump me or different things like that.
But when I got to the office, we had all been put together.
It was an open office so we could all see each other.
We didn't have privacy at all.
There were some secret projects that she gave me.
She's tried to stump me, but I managed to do a great job.
One job that I was given, I was supposed to make charts of color.
And these colors were like color combinations for press.
It had to do with making charts of color and numbers.
When I was given this special chart, they demanded it, and they would say you had to have it done at a certain time.
It was a nearly impossible task.
They gave me an impossible deadline.
But with my knowledge and with my skills, I was able to figure something out that would make me get my work done rapidly and quickly and correctly.
And I don't think they expected me to get it done on time, get it done correctly, and finish very well.
It was like I stumped them.
And then I was given another one, which was secretly from the publisher.
The publisher was the main boss of the whole newspaper.
I believe that he was in on it.
They gave me another special project where I had to take a map of our whole sales area, and I had to label the cities and the zip codes on them.
And they demanded that I have the cities and the zip codes together on this special map.
And they said if I didn't get it done at this time, that I'd be in a lot of trouble.
Even the publisher came to my desk and told me you need to do this, this, and this, and this.
And well, I did it.
And I had some struggle with it.
But in the end, I got it.
During that time, as I remember, they began to not allow us to have overtime.
And there was a time where I was given a project that I had to have overtime with it.
There was no way I was going to get it done on the time schedule.
So I did stay overtime, and I did get it done and get it done correctly.
And I got in trouble for that because I did the overtime.
Later on, this is another aspect of it.
They started furloughing each of us.
They say they take some people out and see how production was without one person being in.
Now, sometimes they would make us go home early.
Sometimes they would take us out of the office and we'd go watch a movie or a video of like an inspirational,
motivational movie or something.
So they would take us out for a couple hours to see how things were.
It seemed like they were trying to test and see who was most productive or when things would happen if people were missing
or just to test the time or whatever.
And about that time, the publisher, because the company was having revenue problems,
he gathered the staff together into a room and we watched a slideshow showing how much money that we were losing.
And the publisher started his rant and he told the staff,
if you don't like working here, we don't want you here. You can leave now if you want.
We want people who want to work here. And a lot of people are upset about this.
And, you know, I myself, I'm thinking I'm trying to be productive and everything else.
I understand there's revenue problems, but I'm trying to be the solution, not the problem.
The diminishing revenue of the newspaper caused an increase in pressure to produce more with less.
This led to micromanagement and scrutiny of time spent on projects.
The morale was low amongst the staff who were anxious and stressed out from the workload.
And leadership wasn't doing anything to improve it.
If someone in leadership is saying, if you don't want to work here, then you can just leave.
They know the morale is low. But instead of asking, how can we improve?
They're basically giving an ultimatum. Either you stay in these poor conditions or you don't have a job.
It's a tactic to get employees to keep their heads down and deal with a miserable work culture.
I got the feeling that they were trying to just frustrate people enough that they just quit on their own
because maybe they heard them complain or maybe they felt that they were expendable.
I don't know, but they made it really rough for them to either get to work or to do the job that they were meant to do.
We were highly watched in the main office. It seemed like the time just when we went to the restroom,
some managers would follow some people to the restroom and see how long they took and another water cooler thing.
I just talked to somebody, one of my coworkers, and sure enough, Ann comes up and says, you know, you need to keep busy.
You couldn't have like a little conversation, not to say that I did all the time, but just even a conversation.
How was your weekend? Or how's the family? Kind of thing like that. Nothing could get away with that.
We were under tight reins at the time. They started a new, I guess, time tracking machine on the computers
to figure out how long we took to do one project at a time and how long it took and who it went to.
And so that they were testing our workloads, like we'll see how much this person is productive.
And they were making number charts and things like that.
And it really became a nuisance because we had to follow along this new program and do things.
We had to mark everything we did. I started to feel, you know, micromanaged and having health problems,
feeling like, you know, I was missing days, angry, stressed, depressed, low confidence.
And it was just wearing me on. And I knew I shouldn't be like this, that this is not life.
And well, I would leave when it was dark and I would get home when it was dark, because, you know, not so much this summer,
but in the Midwest, depending on what time zone you're in. I didn't get to spend much time with my kids.
I wanted to see them, but oh, man, I just, I was trying to say to myself, I got to get ready for the next day.
I didn't have time even to read a book, you know, and I would come home and I was like, just drained.
Weekends, we would always go somewhere, but it just seemed like my time even to talk with my spouse, it was very limited.
But I don't know how I did it sometimes, but I did.
At this point, Herman was pushing through the burnout that was taking a toll on his mental health.
The stress of his work life was pouring into his home life and there was no work life balance.
All of his daylight hours were spent working in a micromanaging office where he was the next target for the chopping block.
I sat down with Ann to have my employee evaluation.
And that's when I think it really hit me that it's time to go.
She sat me down and mind you, this is a year before I was like top dog and did really well.
And I felt like I was hitting all the marks and hitting all the bases.
When I sat down with the job evaluation, you would have thought that I was probably the most incompetent, unproductive person in the whole universe.
Pretty much insulted me saying that I wasn't meeting any goals or I wasn't doing enough.
She was sending me a subtle message, kind of that I don't want you here.
When someone tells you things like that, it's not always true.
And if you let that kind of negative talk, those kind of people get to you and you let yourself believe it, that really can hold you back.
What you need to do is pick yourself up and get out of it.
I didn't know that at the time. I was like, oh man, I messed up.
I don't know what I'm doing. I can't get this to work.
In this country, we identify our personalities with our careers.
When you become so enmeshed in your career that it becomes an identity,
dealing with burnout and bad performance evaluations can trigger an identity crisis that leads to depression, anxiety, and despair, according to Harvard Business Review.
In Herman's case, he was enmeshed in this newspaper.
It was his first job out of college and he had built his career around it.
The majority of his waking hours were consumed by it.
So when he was told that he wasn't meeting the mark after 15 years of hard work and progress, it was soul crushing.
During this time that rumor mills were probably the second most productive thing in the office, my supervisor, Ann, would naturally brag.
And people knew that everybody who was in that department, that they found upon people who came from the smaller office.
So they pretty much labeled us as less competent than they were that somehow they lived in the better side of town or whatever.
I don't know why, but that's how I was meant to feel inferior to them.
I probably had the same education. I'm probably one of the same colleges they did, everything else.
But there was a joke in one of them and then I somehow got in this controversy of that joke.
And then everybody had fun with it. And they kept bullying me and making fun of me, making me feel like I was the
the joke because I was looked down upon and kind of bully me.
I don't know. It didn't make any sense. They didn't know me.
They didn't know my abilities or even give me a chance.
But they felt like, well, we proved our point. This guy's a loser.
And that really kind of added to the stress and the anger to that.
And it really made it more toxic for me. I did have some friends though.
We kind of stuck together, but it just seemed to get worse.
It was like I was being dragged down.
The newspaper never quite accepted Herman and his old colleagues.
They were there to produce work, not have small talk and get to know each other.
This became crystal clear when the newspaper bought NFL tickets for everyone in the office except Herman and his old colleagues.
While everyone else was at the game, they were stuck back working in the office.
Somehow our company snagged a bunch of tickets and they took all of our staff except for three of us.
They paid for it and they all took a group shot.
They all kind of hushed around us like it was top secret.
They didn't tell us three about it, but they all went to the game.
They made some kind of an excuse that, oh, we only had enough tickets for people who live in this county and not the other.
If you're part of a merger and your company acquires another, it's critical to accept the acquired company as your own.
Otherwise, a divide will form and the culture will have an us versus them mentality.
This is detrimental to the morale and fuels bullying.
Herman tried to keep up with all the curveballs that were thrown his way.
And although he was able to keep up, he couldn't overcome Ann's determination to push him out.
Since the pressure didn't cause him to quit, she took it into her own hands to let him go.
You know, one day I came in and sitting there working on some stuff and all of a sudden two guys from IT came up to my desk,
grabbed my computer off, packed it up on a cart and they escorted me down to HR.
My manager, Ann, was with me and the assistant manager, we walked to HR and I walk into HR's room.
And the HR manager is sitting at a little desk and she has a piece of paper in front of her and she goes,
Herman, you're being laid off today. You're going to sign this paper for your severance.
Ann sat down and she didn't say a word, just looked at me.
And I signed the paper and the HR director says, OK, we're going to give you your severance pay.
You no longer work here. You have to exit the building. No explanation.
And she goes, you need to sign this paper so that you don't come back to Suez.
And the assistant manager says, OK, you got to leave now, Herman. You got to get out the door.
The funny thing was, is that day that I came to work, I carpooled.
I had an hour away drive and I had no way to go home.
And my other co-worker, they had to let him go half a day to take me home.
And I'm looking, everybody's patting me on the back saying, good luck.
Everybody saw when IT came and took the computers away, packed it up.
I put my bag, I grabbed what I could out of my drawer and then I left.
And then afterwards we were driving back to town and I told my co-worker, I said, hey, let's go over that bar over there.
Let's go have a beer.
After getting let go, Herman focused on sharpening his skills and improving his resume.
It was a vulnerable, dark time in his life.
He says in hindsight, he should have put his health first before diving into furthering his education.
But hindsight is 20-20.
At the time, I felt as though this was all my fault.
I had some severance to keep me going for a little while.
So I felt like this is the time that I need to find a really good job and get back on track.
And from that point on, I decided to sharpen my skills.
I went to a career coach and I think that having the career coach really helped me.
They helped me improve my interview skills.
They helped me get my resume network and everything.
And then I decided to go take every kind of online course I could because I knew that my next job,
I'm just going to have to stay there a while and I really needed to pick myself up.
But I think the main thing I really should have been focusing on before I did all that was myself.
I should have been worried about my health, my mental health.
I think eventually I did do that.
I came to the conclusion that this wasn't my fault, that I was just in a bad place.
I had to change my direction and have some self-compassion and try to get back to being healthy again.
I really had gotten to do some dark places and didn't take care of my health like I could have.
But when you're let go from your first job and you're experiencing new feelings that you've never had before,
I guess the point I'm trying to make is reach out for somebody.
Reach out for somebody you trust, the people that can help you back because you can't do this stuff all by yourself.
I tried to focus on finding a job right away to try and fix myself, to get myself back to a point of being happy and confident.
I had to go through a few jobs that didn't pay very well, but I was able to raise my kids.
And I think because of that, I was more focused on keeping the bills paid.
And because of that, I took the focus off myself. It took me many years.
I had a few jobs and had a few false starts, even tried to start a business.
And then finally, I was able to find a dream job. But here's how I got it.
I improved my skills. I improved my interview skills. I went online and talked to people, networked.
One day I get a call from a recruiter and they asked me, they said, you look like a fit for this job.
And we want to see if you're interested. I said, sure, I'm interested.
It was out of the blue. I was actually doing other work for another place remotely.
And they said, well, we'd like to meet you next Tuesday to come in for an interview.
And I said, sure. And then they called me right back and they said, can you come to interview tomorrow?
Am I ready or not? And I said, if I say no to this, I'm going to lose this job.
So I went in, talked to the HR people and the person I was taking the job over from. They hired me on the spot.
And my dream job, I'm in it now and it's been great.
And before I even got the job, I actually got myself back on track and I'm in a good spot right now.
The years between getting let go and landing his dream job were exceptionally challenging for Herman.
But he never gave up on pushing through, even in moments of despair.
If you're pushing through a dark time, know that there's always light on the other side of darkness.
You just have to keep moving forward to find it.
Asking for support from someone you trust isn't a sign of weakness, but a sign of humility and courage,
which are both characteristics of a strong person.
Take care of yourself. Remove yourself from toxic situations.
And if you do, you'll eventually find the light you've been searching for.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast.
If you have a story to share, please go to ToxicWorkplacePodcast.com and click on Be a Guest.
Your story will be told anonymously. All names are changed to protect the employee and the company.
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