Have you ever had that feeling that you have landed in a toxic workplace? asks Mark LeBusque, Harvard-trained consultant, author and founder and director of The Human Manager.

Something doesn’t feel right. Your logical and intuitive selves seem to be at a standoff, neither prepared to give an inch. The ‘logical you’ is creating stories about the material gains of staying, that a possible promotion is just around the corner. Whereas the ‘intuitive you’ is poking you in the ribs saying that you only get praise one day per month and being stressed, fearful, and miserable for the others is no way to exist.

5 signs that your workplace may not be as healthy as it should be.

There’s a bad smell of a toxic culture, a little like the one when you open the fridge and eventually find that out of date meat that has been pushed to the very back shelf. You know the one that just won’t go away, and the odour is getting unbearable for you.

This sounds a lot like a toxic workplace.

How many times does this story play out?

So, how do you get a sense when a workplace is toxic?

Here are five key observations I have made over thirty years of working in and helping organisations remove toxicity from the workplace.

The 5 Tell-Tale Signs of Toxic Workplaces

You’re Surrounded by Look at Me Leaders:  The CEO is commissioning a statue of themselves at the front of the office that requires the common folk to bow to as they walk past each day. Continually reminding anyone within earshot that they have singlehandedly ‘saved’ the business with their brilliance. Toxic teams are not teams – they are made up of a group of self-serving narcissists with the Chief Narcissist leading from the top.

Control and Compliance Before Care: There is a feeling that anyone who doesn’t have a fancy title is controlled in every way possible by those with the fancy title. Everyone knows their place and have been ordered to read and memorise the company compliance manual. Humans leave their ‘human’ at the front entry and assume a robotic version of themselves in a daily fight to just survive. 

B Grade Actors are the Stars: Toxic workplaces are like a set on a reality show. Managers and their team members behaving like B grade actors or reality TV wannabes being nice to each other face to face and then sticking the knife in when they get together in their little cliques. The truth is that everyone is out for themselves, and there are no genuine friendships among employees. There’s lots of gossip and rumours, and the water cooler is the ‘green room’ where it’s safer to take off the makeup or mask and go out of character. 

Knowledge is Power and the People Are Outputs: In a toxic workplace, humans are treated like outputs. Stretch targets designed to squeeze every last drop of human effort ensure that the people are too tired to spend time in developing. Your hard work is never acknowledged with positive feedback and recognition of failures is frequent. After all, the narcissists don’t want the outputs to succeed them and threaten their self-entitled power base.

Employee Attrition is Excused as Not Fitting In: A toxic work environment has nothing good to offer except dysfunction, poor morale, sickness and eventually burnout. Management doesn’t care and HR turns a blind eye to what becomes an epidemic as humans will start running for the door to find a better situation. Employee attrition is a very costly activity, but in toxic workplaces, there’s always an excuse that those who leave, “they just didn’t fit the culture.”

What’s the answer here?

Fight the urge to justify being miserable, as misery is contagious and you will soon become a carrier and infect others, not just inside work. That can have some long-lasting and catastrophic outcome for you.

Trust your gut – it’s rarely wrong when it comes to the feeling that you’re trapped in a toxic workplace environment.

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