| McKinsey Classics | January 2022 |
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| The job market will probably continue to be a challenge for employers in the new year, which means that your workplace—whether remote or in-person—needs to be as comfortable, collaborative, and welcoming as possible if you are to retain workers. |
| So what is your company’s culture like? Do people in your office—or you yourself—explode at meetings? Make sarcastic jokes about employees? Interrupt them when they are presenting? Treat them as if they were invisible? Send them withering e-mails? Scold them publicly?
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| If so, you have a workplace jerk problem.
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| Fifteen years ago, we published an article about workplace jerks—particularly managers and executives—by Robert Sutton, a management professor at Stanford. One psychologist whose work Sutton describes asked the subjects of a study whether and how their bosses behaved abusively. Six months later, he found that employees with abusive supervisors quit their jobs at higher rates; those who remained were less committed to their companies and more prone to burnout. Many other studies have similar findings.
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| One story Sutton tells, about a 36-year-old man humiliated in public by his boss, is painful to read. But you owe it to yourself and your employees to think about our 2007 classic “Building the civilized workplace.”
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| — Roger Draper, editor, New York |
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| Did You Miss Our Previous McKinsey Classics? |
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| What do CFOs do upon taking office? In retrospect, what do they think they should have done? Read our 2008 classic article “Starting up as CFO.”
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