The work culture doesn’t always tend to be healthy, it can be toxic too. For example you may remember Uber’s early 2010s saga.

Uber, the company that transformed the transportation industry, experienced explosive growth right after launching the service in the early 2010s. Its then-CEO, Travis Kalanick, was known for being aggressive, bold, and disruptive. This rapid “innovation” mindset resulted in employee burnout, ethics issues, and the need to work long hours, which created a very toxic work culture at Uber. It was good for the company's growth, but the employees weren’t happy with the culture at all.

And it’s not that Uber had slapped “Hustle Culture,” “Hardship,” or “Win-at-all-costs” in their core values. Rather, the leadership took a different approach to growth while preaching a different thing in core values, which created that toxic work culture in the first place.

This went on for a few years before one of Uber’s engineers, Susan Fowler, shared her experience working at Uber, writing an article in 2017. The article went viral, Uber fired Travis, and rethought the company culture under its new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.

Culture is the behavior you reward or punish.