Culture in the Courtroom: Are you next?
The toxic culture at Ubisoft was just one of the 49 case studies that I referenced in my latex book, Detox Your Culture. Last week three former executives were in the courtroom to start answering the allegations made against them.
Former senior leaders Serge Hascoët and Tommy François are charged with widespread harassment, abuse and discrimination. Whilst former director Guillaume Patrux has been charged with harassment and bullying.
Since 2019, I have been saying that a reckoning will eventually be coming for those that either perpetrate or preside over toxic conditions for employees. I take absolutely no gratification from seeing that the process has started. Lives have been irreparably changed for the worse for people who were just going to work.
Yet it is a signal to managers everywhere that poor behaviour will not be tolerated and the reputational (and financial) consequences for those organisations that don’t deal with these individuals will be irreparable.
These leaders are not the first and they won’t be the last and others around the world need to not only take heed of this but to start getting their houses in order pretty quickly or else they will find themselves in the same position.
Here in the UK, new rights for workers take effect in the second half of 2025 and one survey of over 500 UK businesses found that 58% of employers admitted to ‘having little knowledge of the impending legislative changes’.
Key changes include:
Day-one dismissal protection
Flexible working by default
Enhanced harassment prevention
Guaranteed hours rights
Strengthened sick pay
Pay equity and transparency
The bill also establishes the ‘Fair Work Agency’ which will have sweeping powers to investigate and prosecute individuals and organisations that don't uphold good working conditions.
The key reason that I wrote Detox Your Culture was to help everyone to better understand how to create a positive, safe, working environment and to provide a blueprint for leaders to forever avoid finding themselves in the courtroom.
It's not too late to start this process, but by 2026 it might well be.
Last year I wrote that toxic culture need not be an inevitability. However, the very leaders who continue to apply old fashioned behaviours and thinking to their own organisations are also bringing their own children up to demand better from their employers, so a clash of ideologies is almost certain.
Leaders everywhere would do well to remember that their legacy will be shaped not by the knowledge that they had, the profits they delivered or the work that they did, but how they treated the people that worked for them. Worse still, it could also be shaped for the charges they faced for a failure to provide a duty of care.
There will be many more cases of culture in the courtroom, just make sure that it isn’t your organisation.
