Reply to What Are Signs of a Toxic Workplace?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Relevant malefactors are referred to only in pronouns. ie group of staff will be discussing a possible action and someone will say "She's not going to like this" or "We have to get her to approve this" or "Who is going to send it to her for approval?"--without any name being mentioned, everyone knows it is the toxic boss being discussed.

CYA maneuvers are prominent

[b]Groups and processes that theoretically exist to discuss/perform/allocate certain tasks are token entities; real decisions about those tasks are made elsewhere.[/b][/quote]

Yesss[/quote]

Gonna say this.  Some form of informal parallel hierarchy that doesn't resemble that actual org chart that exists on paper.  In our toxic workplace, the admin was allowed by the section head to task all of the employees in the section -- and a lot of the taskings involved her assigning her own work that she didn't like or didn't know how to do to us.  she was also really sexist and believed that all women should do secretarial work, so if you were a woman in the section, watch out.  You are now in charge of collecting RSVP's for events.  The weirdest part was that the admin didn't understand most modern technology, so she would do things like include an email address and ask people to email her ot rsvp for events, even though we had events software that automatically collected the info and put it in a spreadsheet.  No, she wanted us to spend our days collecting emails and putting the info into a spreadsheet.  Bizarre.[/quote]

This happened to me. When I first started my fed job 6 months ago, a particular low level admin insisted that despite the supervisor and deputy supervisor titles, SHE actually ran the office. I thought this was ludicrous and meant she kept everyone on track with their time entries, ordering supplies, etc. Oh no, this employee “reviews” our files and tries to give us directives.

Most annoying, she is the main office gossip. You can actually HEAR her down the hall talking about you!  For example, last week I heard her “double checking” with another coworker (who is on my level) about whether I was correctly applying a dense and lengthy policy she had never even read and even if she had, wasn’t qualified to give an opinion.

And management is close to retirement so doesn’t care and lets this admin run the office.   [/quote]

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