Why You Must Keep A Record
For your own sanity, primarily.
I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy because toxic workplaces make me angry. I want to help as many people as possible do as I did: survive long enough to emerge with my mental health, dignity and career intact, on my own terms. I’m committed to sharing everything I learned the hard way. A big thank-you to all those who’ve endorsed this project by becoming a paid subscriber: Your generosity helps make Toxic Workplace Survival Guy sustainable.
Survival Tool#2: Keep a Record
Your mind will tell you that you don’t have time.
That you’re being paranoid.
That it’s unnecessary.
That if you only work harder, and deliver better results, you’ll be shielded from the toxicity swirling all around you.
Don’t listen.
These are the voices of the parts of yourself that are still refusing to face the fact that you’re stuck (for now) in a toxic workplace. (SurvivalTool#1).
And these voices will invent almost any excuse to prevent you from taking the necessary steps to protect yourself, and find freedom.
You must keep a precise record of toxic workplace interactions, noted down in as much detail as possible, as they occur.
You must take screenshots of emails and messages.
And you must record relevant conversations (where legal and you have permission) to keep an infallible record of what was said.
You don’t need Toxic Workplace Survival Guy to tell you this: You can find any number of posts recommending this practice when navigating a toxic workplace.
But such posts are almost always based on a dangerous fallacy: That the human resources (HR) department has your best interests at heart.
This is a lie.
HR works for the company, and will always place the corporation’s interests first.
If you’re an HR professional reading this, and this triggers you, I invite you to take a pause, let the activation settle, and calmly tell me in the comments why I’m wrong. I’m sincerely curious about what you have to say. If you offer a perspective that could better equip people to navigate a toxic workplace, I will consider sharing it in a future edition of Toxic Workplace Survival Guy.
False Promise
The myth of the benevolent HR department fuels a self-defeating fantasy: That a moment of truth will arrive, where impartial adjudicators ride to your rescue, and use your meticulous evidence of workplace toxicity to hold the perpetrators accountable, and restore justice to the land.
Not going to happen.
Either nobody will bother to read your carefully-prepared timeline, or if they do, they will plead that their hands are tied when it comes to taking any meaningful action.
If you do end up in one of the rare situations where there is some kind of internal due process, or even a legal case, then having a thorough, contemporaneous record of the many ways the toxicity manifested is, of course, essential.
But in 99 percent of cases, the toxicity ruining your workplace won’t cross the threshold where the powers that be conclude that it’s become too much of a liability to be allowed to continue.
Chances are, the toxicity is an integral feature of the company, because the business model would implode if staff all simultaneously demanded management stop treating them like objects.
That means that keeping a record is primarily a gift to yourself.
And a very precious gift at that.
Cultivating Detachment
Because the next step to surviving a toxic workplace is to start to cultivate a sense of detachment.
Toxic workplaces are so stressful, demoralising and unjust that it’s easy to fall prey to emotional thinking, and make bad decisions as a result. (We’ll be talking in depth about this in future editions of Toxic Workplace Survival Guy).
Suffice to say, only by becoming detached can you think through your options for changing or escaping the situation clearly.
Of course, we all know that a workplace is toxic precisely because it is so triggering — which is why being detached isn’t easy.
And “cultivating detachment” should never be mistaken for placing the onus on the target to put up with abuse.
Nevertheless, when you know that you’re suffering, but the situation is not yet toxic enough to force you to quit on the spot — you can begin to cultivate a sense of internal distance from the insanity and hostility in your office.
By closely observing the dynamics at play among your colleagues, and observing the thoughts and feelings that their traits and behaviours trigger in you, you strengthen your capacity to be the witness of your own experience.
That’s the single biggest step you can take towards changing your perspective.
You’ll start to see that the toxic workplace is intimate — but not personal.1
The gaslighting, micro-management, exploitation and manipulation may be directed at you — but, in the final analysis, it’s never about you. You’re merely a screen on which traumatised co-workers are projecting their own unhealed wounds, by volunteering to throw you under the wheels of a machine run according to the merciless logic of late-stage capitalism.
Keeping a detailed record can help you begin to see that process more clearly.
Seeing Through Their Projections
Like a psychiatrist approaches her work in a secure unit; or a primatologist approaches her study of Great Apes in the wild; you can recognise that you may be in your toxic workplace, but you are not of your toxic workplace.
The subjects of your study will no doubt fling all kinds of sh*t at you, but none of it’s ever personal, because the people throwing the sh*t can’t actually see you.
They can only see the leering reflection of their own disowned traits — which they’re projecting onto you.
In the soul-sapping death march of the toxic workplace, this can be difficult to appreciate — especially when your nervous system has been triggered into a constant fight-flight activation by the latest unreasonable demand, or you’ve been demeaned or humiliated in front of colleagues once again.
But by documenting the behaviours you witness — precisely what was said, by whom, and when — you’ve already taken a step towards detaching.
You have re-established a degree of agency.
You have affirmed the part of you that is unaffected by any of what’s happening — the indestructible, eternal Self that remains far beyond the reach of anything anyone in your office can think, say, or do.
And you have take another step towards setting yourself free.
Summary
No excuses: You must keep a detailed, daily record of who did and said what, and when, in the toxic workplace. This will support your wider process of detaching internally from the situation, and ultimately transcending it — either by changing your circumstances within your existing organisation, or finding a better job somewhere else.
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I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy during my spare time from working as an editor at nonprofit climate accountability news service DeSmog (a model workplace). Sharing, liking, commenting or buying me a coffee helps make this project sustainable. Thank you!
This is an application of a phrase I first heard from Caroline Myss: The Universe is intimate — but not personal.