5 Warning Signs of a Toxic Workplace and How to Protect Yourself

We’ve all been there…showing up to our job with all the best intentions for having a productive and positive day….and then, seemingly out of nowhere, we’re emotionally slammed by someone else’s bad behavior. We do our best to ‘not take it personally,’ ‘focus on the positive’ and ‘move forward with our day.’ When this type of experience becomes the norm, people around you not only believe it is okay to treat others that way, but it can even become the rewarded norm, leading to a toxic company culture.

I’ve worked in just as many toxic companies as I have healthy ones. And I’m not talking about experiences that are a couple of bad days or someone who can be ignored with the right mindset. I’m talking about the ones that cause distress before, during, and after you go to work. However bad those experiences are, I’m grateful for them. I now know the warning signs and have the honor of identifying and helping those environments detox and heal.

It’s important to be able to identify and navigate what you are and aren’t willing to experience (and participate) in each day of work.

Here are 5 experiences that commonly occur in a toxic company culture:   

1. Feedback is one way. It’s encouraged for the C-suite staffer to provide on-going, public and direct feedback for their team members. However, there is no format for their worker bees to return the favor. Executives aren’t open to receiving feedback, they’re just the givers of improvement – there’s no need for them to grow (they’re seasoned executives after all). 

2. Gossip is a standard form of currency. Knowing the chatter around the water cooler AND reporting juicy gossip back to your manager is seen as power. This can be the worst of the worst. You think you’re venting to a confidant to get something off your chest and then it’s magically used against you in a meeting with the person you were venting about! How could they have known? Trust is fleeting and skepticism takes over in all interpersonal conversations. Additionally, it breeds a vicious cycle of then “talking trash” about the whole experience and further gossiping about others! 

3. Different rules apply to different people. In a recent job, there was a perk policy about working remotely once a week. I LOVED it – until I had a major ‘foot in mouth’ moment. During a casual conversation, a colleague asked about my tracking sheet for my work from home time. I had NO IDEA what she was talking about. I told her I never saw one and was never asked about what I did when I wasn’t in the office. She was immediately devastated. Why did she need to fill out the form and I didn’t? Who else had to fill out this form? And even while this put me in the “I know we don’t have to monitor you” category, it made me feel awful. Why were “policies” in place for some people and not others?  When people at the same level are treated with different standards, bad things happen. 

4. Your body rejects it.  Your body literally starts to say “NO! Make it stop!” Sleepless nights, physical pains, “mystery allergies”, and even hives can begin to pop up that were never there before. They rear their head while being at work or even thinking about work. I once had a job where I would get violently ill on Sunday nights. It would range from throwing up to the inability to get out of bed. I didn’t understand the correlation until I realized the only time I felt this way was after a few days reprieve from a psycho CEO and the looming knowledge that I’d be trapped with them again for 5 days. 

5. Stories are told about turnover. This is a particular classic with the millennial generation. Time and time again, toxic workplaces are claiming that their young people are leaving because that’s “just who they are”. It’s a really convenient sound bite to cling on to if you don’t want to really understand why you can’t keep anyone for more than a year. While it’s true that we don’t stick around as long as previous generations. It mostly relates to lack of accountability, negative relationships with our direct supervisor and not having a sense of purpose in our role. If you’re in a toxic company culture, none of those motivators tend to thrive, so how could you expect people to stick it out?

If you’re stuck in a toxic company culture. I encourage you to spend time figuring out what you’re willing to put up with and what is not worth it.

You can even try out my Drain & Fill exercise to see what trends and unique experiences are going on in your day-to-day. When we invest at least 40 hours a week at work. So what’s the point of being alive if the majority of it spent being the receptacle of bad behavior or, even worse, getting sucked into it!