Welcome back to the Employees about the God, podcast where we navigate corporate the corporate jungle so you don't have to just survive. You can thrive. I'm Mark Carey. Today we're tackling at the heavy stuff. Question that keeps you up at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday. Is my boss actually toxic or are they just difficult? And more importantly, if the ship is sinking, how do you prove it wasn't your fault? We are talking about documenting a hostile work environment, a very popular phrase that we uh see a lot of activity on in terms of people interacting with our content. Now, before we dive in, a quick disclaimer. I'm an attorney. I'm actually an employment attorney, so this is educational, of course, but here let's go. First, let's make a distinction. A tough boss might have high standards, send curt emails, or be generally annoying. That's unpleasant. But it's usually legal, and people don't really understand that. A toxic boss, and specifically a hostile work environment, toxic boss, in the legal sense, is very, very different. And legally, a hostile work environment is usually requires the behavior to be discriminatory based on things like race, gender, age, or religion. And it must be pervasive enough to interfere with your ability to do your job. But if even if it doesn't meet that strict legal definition, toxicity can ruin your career. Here are three red flags that signal you need to start documenting immediately. And why do you document? Because you have to bring that case to me so I can review it to tell you whether you have a case or not. That's what that's why you have to document, among other things. First, the goalpost shifter. You hit a target and they say, I never asked for that. Or they change the requirements retroactively to make you fail. We see that a lot, and we bring that out in client affidavits. Chronologically speaking, it makes the boss look like an idiot because usually they are, and they don't think that the employee client of ours is smart enough to document things, but they do. Number two, the gaslighter. They deny conversations happened or blame you for their lack of communication. You start questioning your own memory. Don't do that. Usually you know that what you did and you document things because you were there. You took a journal entry in your own about what had happened. Number three, the isolator. It's probably by far the most common uh fact situation we see. They the the boss, the toxic boss, excludes you from critical meetings, ignores your emails, or bad mouths you appears to cut you off your support system. I can go on and on about this in terms of this uh isolation syndrome type of tactic, but it happens all the time. Probably about, I would say about 75% of the cases we deal with a hostile work environment toxicity issue. If you're nodding your head right now, you need to start re uh building your paper trail. So, what is the art of documentation? How do you document? You just can't walk into the HR and say, my boss is mean. You need evidence, you need a contemporaneous record, generally emails, your journal entry, and a sworn affidavit if you need to, if you're gonna try to support a case of legal claims. But here is a three-step protocol to follow. The golden rule of storage, never, and I mean never, keep your documentation solely on a company property. In fact, I would keep it on a private laptop at home so the company can't access it through a VPN. If you are fired tomorrow, you lose access to your work, laptop, and email immediately. So keep a physical journal at home or use a personal cloud document like a Google Docs on your personal phone, but be careful forwarding company emails to your personal account as they can violate nondisclosure agreements. Instead, transcribe the notes manually. We did a whole podcast on this as well. Step two, the who, what, where, and when format. When you write an entry, be a reporter, not a diary writer. Remove the emotion, don't be a victim. Here's a bad example. My boss was a total jerk today and yelled at me for no reason. It was so unfair. The good example is February 17th, 10 a.m. location, conference room B, boss, John Smith, witness, Jane Doe. John raised his voice, slammed his hand on the table, touched me physically, sexually, and stated, you are incompetent. He claimed I missed a deadline despite my email from February 15th, proving submission. I admit that one a little bit for you just to give you emphasis. Step three, confirm it in writing, the CYA email. If you have a verbal altercation with your toxic boss, summarize it and email immediately. This is a lawyer's trick. And you send it to the boss, and you send it to the boss's boss, and then send it to the HR where you're documenting things. Here's an example. You say, uh, just want to clarify a conversation from this morning. You stated that the project requirements have changed to X and the previous work on Y will not be used. Please let me know if I misunderstood you. If they don't reply to you, your email stands as the record of what you understood. These emails are critical for you creating a narrative for your case. And using emails to timestamp things and to uh create a chronological order of events is how clients of our proof cases basically get large severance packages worth a lot of money. Okay, so you have a week's worth of notes. Now what? Don't run to the HR. The moment you have one bad altercation interaction with your boss, HR's primary job, you should know this by now, is to protect the company, not you at all. A lot of people have misunderstanding about that issue, but they're not there to help you. You work in a private government and and the HR departments like the like the Secret Service or the FBI, they they don't give a shit about you. All you have is outside folks like myself and employment lawyers to interact with to help you and this podcast. You generally want to go to HR when you have a pattern of evidence, but that shows the boss's a liability to the company. But you're only going to do that, only gonna do that when you have your detailed affidavit. You've got it notarized, you've probably worked in my office with our attorneys, and we have built the case for you where it's demonstrates that you know it's beyond toxicity, it's a bot a boss who's discriminated against you based upon some type of legal basis, such as age, sex, gender, whatever, pregnancy. We've seen it all. Having this documentation gives you two super superpowers. The first one is a negotiation leverage leverage. If you are managed out or laid off, having a record of mistreatment can sometimes help you negotiate a better service package. I will guarantee you that it will have a positive effect if your affidavit asserts factual basis for discrimination, whistleblowing, retaliation, you name it, that's illegal, it's going to bolster your uh ability to get more pay out of your uh in your service negotiation. Number two, and less uh important but important, is unemployment insurance. If you are forced to quit, constructive discharge, you usually get, you don't get unemployment. But if you have proof of the mistreatment in discriminatory hostile environment, you have a better chance of uh winning your claim. So nobody wants to spend their workday acting like a private investigator, but in a toxic environment, you your memory is your enemy. And documentation is your best friend. So protect your peace of mind, but protect your paycheck as well, which is really what we're all always doing here is it's all about the money, your paycheck. But ensuring that you have money coming in, either you're on your way out of this job, or you've got to basically have a job search, and then when you land somewhere else, you gotta, you know, build security to have uh income via you know have your employer pay you to the end of employment, or and then it segue into a severance situation where you have severance pay coming in. So that's the idea of documentation. It's very important. Most people don't understand why they do it. Now you know. So with that said, have a great week and thank you for letting me be of service again.