A toxic workplace can inhibit any progress or development in a career. On the psychological front, this could lead to negative mental-health outcomes e.g. anxiety and depression. When we think about how toxic work environments play out, it affects the wellbeing of the employees and eventually adversely affects your health.
How to identify a workplace with toxic culture?
1. Too Demanding and Unrealistic Expectations
Every employer and organisation desires a productive office, but how to maximize employee productivity is not only an art; it’s a science. If your employer expects you to sacrifice everything for the company, it will hurt more than just your career. Being expected to connect to your workplace all day, every day is not only toxic to the work environment; it’s taxing to your physical and mental health. Moreover, it doesn’t make employees more productive but actually hurts productivity.
2. High Turnover
Bear in mind that resumes can take a hit in interviews when an employee leaves a job too soon. But a company that has a high turnover rate indicates something, it’s time to take a critical look at the workplace and not the employees.
3. No Respect for Employees
While many organizations would pay extra for overtime. However, there are other organizations that exploit its workforce by extracting extra work hours from its people. This puts their personal life at stake i.e. people aren’t able to create a work-life balance due to such working patterns. A good example we always hear is, working during vacation or odd hours of the day is just utter employee exploitation and disregard for their personal life.
No respect for employees would also mean suppressed employees. What this means is the employees’ opinion is rarely acknowledged and the management fails to meet the needs of its workforce and practices suppression. An organization that does not pay heed to its people simply means your work environment is unequivocally toxic.
4. Manipulative and Blaming Behaviour
While it is normal in life when things go wrong on the job, a good workplace culture would have a strong team to gather around and discuss what happened, why it happened and the lessons that can be gleaned from the failure. Conversely, a toxic workplace culture is indicated by the blame game ie leadership in the organization looks for a scapegoat more often than it looks for the lessons learned by failure. Similarly, if a workplace culture that is woven around manipulative treatment from top to bottom, then you have fallen prey to toxic work culture. The most common example we hear is, superiors act in a manipulative way to push juniors to take on extra work off of their hands, it is simply bullying and abuse of power.
How to deal with it?
Befriend like-minded colleagues who share your values. When you find an ally, you break that phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance. These relationships act as a support system and can begin creating the spaces where people feel safe to voice concerns. Secondly, modeling the behavior you wish to see. This could have positive influence on others to act and become respectful, positive and focused at work. Finally, keep clear and comprehensive documentation to hold them accountable in order to protect themselves and prevent retaliation.
