Do You Have a Toxic Workplace Culture? | 10 Surprising Signs of a Toxic Work Environment

Do you have a toxic workplace culture? In this video, Jeremy Webb, founder of Organizational Engineering covers the signs of a toxic workplace, answer the question: what is a toxic work environment, and lists the impacts of a toxic culture. A toxic work environment will destroy employee engagement, morale, productivity, quality, and your organization's performance and success. Recognizing the toxic work environment signs is the first step to fixing the issues and building High-Performance Organization.

[sarahhelmer]

I just left my toxic boss of seven year and I feel AMAZING. In the end if was affecting my mental health and I had to get out of there

[TheCoolOwen]

Yup, describes everything at my job. It’s a total disorganized mess

[suzannemeyers]

Can someone please list some bigger companies that have healthy work environments? It feels like everywhere is like this....toxic

[滔滔污力]

Speaking of the tenure, if it’s too short it’s also going to a a red flag, because it could be due to the toxic “hire to fire” culture like Amazon. Their PIP system is very notorious.

[izamalcadosa]

Happy New Year 2024!! Just found your channel!! Great advice!! I've seen all of these red flags at my last contract job at TCW out here in LA!!

[bluewooda]

Hi Jeremy, thanks for the great video. I need your help to identify if the new company I started working at is toxic. So here is how it working there: we are mostly working from home, and there is little communication between all colleaques. Whenever I need to get some information I am dependent on, the colleaques are always "too busy" to respond, so the only way is to push them through sending email with CC copy to my manager and then luckily will get a one-line respond. The responsibilities as well as the project handling chain is unclear and undefined (everybody does what they think is right), so everybody is trying to throw their assigned tasks from their shoulders to somebody else. Most projects are failing and many of the customers are not sattisfied. While on onboarding process I got almost 0 training and am overwhelmed by tasks from the failing projects. I recently got sick due to burnout and on a sick leave now. The only thing is the salary is a little above the average. I don't know if this company is good enough to be called "toxic" and does it worth staying there due to the Ok salary ? If its really toxic, I will do my best to quit it.

[siog]

I work in a care home that I think is utterly toxic. I'm a housekeeper. Most of the housekeepers have avoided going to the housekeeping manager with problems. The CEO was in one of the wards, pretending to be helping with the cleaning. He was in and out that quickly, the housekeeping team in that ward hadn't realised that he was there, until the photo that was taken appeared in the newsletter. When I tried to get the day off for my granny's funeral, I was told that I had to take a days unpaid leave in order to go, as compassionate leave was only for immediate family, which my employer says my granny wasn't.

[chrisw]

Sounds familiar to my prior employment. Other red flags:

Micromanagemnt. There's a reason this was on every toxic boss list I ever read. Waste of time and disempowering.

High turnover: we had the McDonalds goong "at least we're not that bad".

Positivity as an expectation, not a managerial goal: I think too many miss the step in that process.

Excessive focus on teamwork: not a bad conceot, but the more someone pushes it, the more you should check to see if they're contributing or free riding.

Last minute culture: nothing says bad work envrionment like pushong deadlines.

[NIA-]

I work for city government. Most o these are apparent in municipalities, and it's no different where I am. I am getting out.

[jageb]

You just basically described all human organisations.

[lazarusblackwell]

Every job i worked was toxic.

Bosses were incompetent and didnt give a shit.

Old employes were constantly on the verge of losing their minds or they just didnt care about doing their job.

There are SO MANY of these kind of places that somehow, with all their problems, "exist"

[lajoyalobos]

When the OSHA inspector shows up and half of your support just scatters like cockroaches because precisely ZERO of them hold the correct licensing. Also, when you work insane hours of overtime (over 100 hours) but HR conveniently miscalculates your paycheck in their favor. Or that time a co-worker simply did not receive a paycheck, manager dilly dallied and hid herself until a threat to report them to the state labor board fixed it up quick.

[keepsitatalltime]

#6. I knew I wasn't crazy. I thought this same thing.

[MixSonaProductions]

even the smallest startup can have heavy politics

if you are one of the top performers at the office, you could be the target of political play.

they might gang up on you

[mikeyllo]

I found the statement about average tenure to be the exact opposite of the criticism I've heard to date. I was born three years before the start of the millennial generation. Accordingly, I've been lumped in as a job hopper. These generalizations do not factor in that all but one of the organizations I've worked for has been acquired or ceased operations completely...yet, I always have to explain job changes as if I made the choices on my own. I recently hit 7 years at my current organization. I started as an individual contributor and now I'm a senior manager. Every individual that was in my department when I started has since left the organization. Since everyone else has left this company, it's disturbing to think that I could be going from being classified as a job hopper directly into now being classified as a part of the problem because I stayed. We really can't win, can we? Granted, I know the comment was a generalization and is applicable based on "average tenure, " but what do we want employees to do? Do we want them to stay and grow with the organization, or do we want them to go? Which is it?

[OrganizationalEngineering]

The article I mentioned will be coming soon. If there are any signs you think I should add to the list, drop them in the comments!

[evalynchuran]

Companies that allow violence and then fire the person that is doing their jobs right. Holding back monies owed to the worker and then blaming the worker for it.

[thesisypheanjournal]

I started looking for a new job the second week on my current job. Red Flag #1: It turns out "We'll make sure we get you full time hours" is not the same as "We'll make the position full time." Sorry, not negotiable. I need full time. I have an interview scheduled for tomorrow.

In the mean time I'm trying to learn as much as possible so that I can spot issues and address them effectively instead of getting sucked into their poor patterns of behavior.


When I was hired, and during my first couple of days, I was repeatedly told that they were hoping I could help address the very poor documentation and staff getting into ruts. (It's an agency that provides companion care and behavioral support to people with intellectual disabilities.) In retrospect, it's a very similar situation to one I was in over twenty years ago where management thought, "She's really a wiz at this. If we transfer her to the program where the people are who suck at this, she'll make them good at it!"

So there I am, hired to "talk to the front line workers regularly. We need to get their documentation improved. They can't justify the hours we're billing for because they're just documenting observation, observation, observation. They're supposed to be providing support!" Pretty clearly some of the staff ARE providing support but aren't documenting it, and some of them are just documenting how frustrated they are.

[EugeneAxe]

If the turnover rate is more rapid than a McDonald's.

[john_c_matthews]

Bruh… my unit shows every single one of these. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.