What toxic culture revelations at the BoM teach us about internal comms and management style

Optimistic executives like to think of employees as potential “ambassadors” who can help take positive corporate messages out into the community.

That is sometimes true, especially when employees feel loyalty and pride in what the company is doing or saying.

But the rapidly unspooling story of an apparently toxic culture inside the Bureau of Meteorology is a brutal reminder of how quickly unhappy and disillusioned employees will jump at the opportunity to reveal all to a voracious media.

This is not about conventional whistleblowers. Although research shows that many whistleblowers initially tried to raise issues through proper channels and went public only when they believed the system was failing to respond.

The problem — evident at the Bureau of Meteorology — is when one adverse event triggers a much wider outpouring of built-up anger and resentment.

In this case, the trigger was the badly-timed and mismanaged effort by the Bureau to direct the news media to refer to the organisation by its proper name — not BoM or the weather office. Coming in the midst of devastating weather-related floods, the rebranding initiative provoked inevitable outrage and was quickly withdrawn.

The whole sorry saga was reportedly the result of an inflexible timetable, driven from above with no recognition of the changing situation out in the real world. But the media fascination with how much it cost, whether it was really a rebrand or a brand refresh, and who gave it the green light, was not the issue. 

The “rebrand that wasn’t” was in fact only a symptom of a deeper cultural problem inside the Bureau, and it unleashed a much broader concern that had long been bubbling below the surface.

For example, the Guardian reported that employees and their union had contacted a range of federal government ministers alleging bullying, widespread underpayment of overtime and unsafe working hours. Union official Beth Vincent-Pietsch said the issue went back five years. “We’ve been airing concerns for a long time. But the debacle of the rebrand has made things so much worse.”

And two former staff members told the Guardian of an exodus of communications staff in the last two years, alleging a “horrendous” culture with staff mentally “broken” and “distraught”.

At the same time, the ABC said staff told them the rebranding was symptomatic of cultural issues at the Bureau, where management and messaging are prioritised over meteorology. It reported a former staffer from the communication team saying: “We don’t wish any of this negativity on our friends who are still there, but we’re glad to see the people who run the show are being exposed.”

The same theme appeared in the Saturday Paper, which reported the workplace culture was so toxic that one man had been hospitalised twice for psychiatric care, another had a heart attack while working extreme overtime, and others took stress leave because of panic attacks and anxiety regarding management oversight.

One source told the paper good people were slowly forced out, especially meteorologists and staff in the media and communication division. It said staff in these areas complained of “severe dysfunction” which was infecting other parts of the service. “There is such a strangled culture there now.” 

In response, an unnamed spokesperson for the bureau (not a named senior manager) told the Saturday Paper that although there has been “some staff turnover” public service survey results about employee engagement “do not reflect a toxic culture”. 

It is hardly surprising that employees and former employees are so willing to talk to the journalists, especially given that the last 18 months have reportedly seen more than 20 staff leave the media and communication division, whose core role is to maintain close relations with the media. Plus the “duty meteorologists” often talk to TV and radio journalists for live crosses to provide weather updates. 

The media outreach was pretty much inevitable when professional meteorologists felt they were excluded from top management and when debilitating turnover in the public relations function undermined the critical capacity of communicators.

Of course, not every company is concealing a seething reputational crisis such as exposed at the Bureau of Meteorology. Yet there are important lessons to be learned, especially in relation to the crisis risk posed by unhappy and angry employees.

Staff and management will often disagree on a range of issues, but that is very different from employees across the organisation pouring out their disenchantment to eager reporters.

While the whole story of what has happened at the Bureau has yet to be fully revealed, it seems clear that an important factor has been a disconnect between staff and management. 

A key role for top management is to be aware of what is happening further down the organisation. To be willing to listen to bad news and to let employees know that their problems are important.

Just about every crisis is preceded by warning signs or red flags, yet sometimes executives fail to see, or just ignore, those warnings. Think no further than when Rio Tinto blew up 46,000-year-old rock shelters in the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara to expand mining, despite local warnings of the site’s cultural significance. However, management believed they had the legal authority to proceed and there was a failure of upward communication. The result was resignations and long-lasting reputational damage.

Or consider the notorious case of the BP-owned Texas City Refinery, near Houston, where local staff warned repeatedly about the potential risk of cost-cutting on maintenance and safe operations. When a massive explosion in 2005 killed 15 workers, injured 180 others and severely damaged the refinery, responsibility was sheeted home to the board in London, where then-CEO John Browne was notorious for not wanting to hear bad news. 

Researcher Andrew Hopkins studied the crisis and found a culture at BP in which many top people knew of problems, but few would speak up. “Only good news flowed upward. No one dared say the wrong thing or challenge the boss”.

Listen and learn

This same challenge of failure to recognise and deal with a potential crisis, and failed upward communication, was seen in the notorious Intel Pentium Chip crisis of 1994 which is still studied as a classic example of cross-functional conflict and dissent within the executive suite. Despite warnings from inside and outside the company, a technical problem with a new computer chip was allowed to escalate into a major crisis, eventually costing a one-off charge against earnings of $475 million. 

In the wake of the disaster, Intel boss Andy Grove later famously wrote: 

“Most CEOs are in the centre of a fortified palace, and news from the outside has to percolate through layers of people from the periphery where the action is. I was one of the last to understand the implications of the Pentium crisis. It took a barrage of relentless criticism to make me realize that something had changed and that we needed to adapt to the new environment.” 

For managers watching the unfolding crisis at the Bureau of Meteorology, the lesson should be clear.

When bad news or warnings are blocked for any reason the result can be a disaster. The need to listen to employees and to dissenting opinions was nicely captured by an unnamed manager in a recent report about the role of the CEO: “One of the most important things is having people around you who tell you how wrong you are.”

In the same vein, American academics Paul Nystrom and William Starbuck once argued that top managers should listen to and learn from “dissenters, doubters and bearers of warnings” to remind themselves that their own beliefs and perceptions may not be correct.

Rightly or wrongly, in many organisations the role of dissenter — or devil’s advocate — falls to the communication professional. 

In the case of the Bureau, it is reported that management was reluctant to properly evaluate concerns within the organisation. But the usual watchdogs — the much-depleted communication professionals — were reportedly muzzled or were too inexperienced to know when to bark.

Dr Tony Jaques is an expert on issue and crisis management and risk communication. He is CEO of Melbourne-based consultancy Issue Outcomes and his latest book is Crisis Counsel: Navigating Legal and Communication Conflict.