According to author and employment expert Joe Mull, employees today know they deserve better — and they’re right. “Employees and candidates are more discerning than ever,” Mull says in his book Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work. “They simply will not stand for a less-than-ideal employee experience.” 

Competition for quality employees is fierce, and businesses are racing to engineer an employee experience that will attract those workers to them. Here’s how you can start identifying whether your work environment is toxic and begin to build a better work culture. 

What Defines a Toxic Workplace?

Most of us have met our fair share of toxic people in our lifetimes. Toxic people radiate negativity, are manipulative, and create problems wherever they go. They can even make the people around them feel psychologically unsafe. And when it comes to a toxic workplace, those effects are reproduced on a larger scale.

A toxic workplace enables and even encourages damaging behaviors, such as bullying, demeaning, and manipulation. In some cases, it may go beyond the managers turning a blind eye and actually be baked into the organization’s culture. Stress, distrust, and humiliation are the name of the game in these circumstances. A toxic workplace can even increase your employees’ anxiety and depression.

With such adverse outcomes, it’s not hard to imagine why employees would want to flee. Unfortunately, the danger of a toxic workplace is that people can feel trapped and unable to leave as the pressure and unhappiness builds. This creates a self-sustaining cycle of negativity, which makes meaningful change that much harder to implement.

Signs of a Toxic Workplace

In time, a toxic work environment can cause irreparable harm to your employees and, before long, your organization itself. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to tell whether you’re creating a toxic work environment when looking at it from the inside. So how do you recognize the signs of a toxic workplace in order to address them?

Here are a few warning signs to look out for: 

• Negative employee relationships. Of course, it’s too much to hope that all of your employees will socially click. But there’s a difference between a cool but cordial professional relationship and outright hostility. If you’re constantly dealing with drama or conflict between your workers, that’s a sign of a toxic workplace. 
• Culture of punishment. Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s important to acknowledge those mistakes so people can learn. However, making employees feel bad for messing up isn’t productive. If workers feel humiliated and demeaned every time they make an error, it will quickly impact their happiness. 
• Lack of boundaries. If you call your employees at home, expect them to check their email outside of work hours, and ask them to come in on days off to get more work done, your workplace probably has boundary issues. 
• Too much stress. This is one of the most significant signs of a toxic workplace. Even in fast-paced and demanding positions, a constant onslaught of work stress is a recipe for burnout and turnover. 

The Importance of “Employalty”

Turnover is the enemy of any successful business. The hiring process is expensive, time-consuming, and creates unnecessary stress on your existing employees in the meantime. You may find yourself pulled into an endless cycle of turnover where you’re constantly struggling to fill roles as more workers leave. 

But to prevent turnover, you must first consider what causes employees to seek greener pastures in the first place. According to Joe Mull, the reason is simple: “In short, employees are tired of having to work so very hard all of the time at jobs that are so very hard all of the time. People have looked at their lives and said, ‘I’m tired of being constantly tired.’” This is a life lived by many for too long, and people have had enough.”

Workers are fed up, Mull says, with being asked to sacrifice their quality of life for a job that doesn’t offer them much in return. The answer, he says, is to cultivate a thing called “Employalty.”

“If you want to more easily find and keep devoted employees, you must design and provide jobs that don’t diminish peoples’ quality of life. Remember, people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job,” Mull says. “This is the key and the path to staying fully staffed with good people doing great work.”

Impacts of Toxicity on Healthcare Workers  

High turnover is a problem many medical organizations have struggled with for years—even before the pandemic. So it’s critical for leaders in the medical industry to closely examine their workplace culture for signs of toxicity that may be driving away good employees that will be difficult to replace. But toxicity impacts medical workers in other ways.

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Toxic work environments erode trust, which creates an environment that can harm employees and patients. Not only will employee dissatisfaction grow in these organizations, but the risk of medical errors rises. That’s why building healthy organizations are in the best interest of every medical leader. 

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So how can healthcare organizations implement Employalty to avoid turnover and create a positive work environment?

Cleaning Up Your Toxic Work Environment

The road to detoxifying an unhealthy workplace is long, and you should be prepared to invest time and energy into making those large-scale changes. As a leader in your organization, employees will look to you when they take their cues. Here’s a checklist to help get you started:

• Analyze Your Own Behavior: It will be impossible to lead your workplace to a happier, healthier place if you’re playing a role in contributing to a negative office culture. If you’re consistently demonstrating poor behavior, take steps to keep your side of the street clean before directing others to do the same. 
• Model Appropriate Behavior: Leadership means exhibiting the behaviors and attitudes you want each of your employees to display. That means staying drama-free, not taking sides in employee disputes, avoiding gossip, and all the other destructive behaviors that harm workplaces. 
• Connect Employees to Needed Resources: Sometimes, a leader’s job is to ensure their employees have access to the resources they need to be successful—both personally and professionally. Referring employees to human resources or employee assistance programs to explore counseling or conflict resolution can play a big role in diffusing toxic behavior. What’s more, many employees don’t know that these resources exist for them. 
• Provide Support: Being a positive source of support for all your employees can go a long way toward diffusing workplace toxicity. If everyone knows that you’re a trusted resource, they can bring problems to you for resolution rather than resorting to other toxic behaviors. 

If you still find yourself struggling with employee turnover as you work on making these changes a reality, you can get connected with a skilled staffing agency like MyTeam to connect you with quality employees who will help make your positive workplace transformation a reality. 

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