Toxic workplace checklist: how to maintain a healthy and thriving work environment

Most of us try to find a better work-life balance, but what happens when our professional lives become a source of stress and anxiety? Setting up a toxic workplace checklist is paramount to avoid your workplace developing into a hostile and unhealthy environment. Toxicity in the workplace can come from three directions: your corporate culture, the people, and the job itself. Crazy deadlines, gossip, lack of trust, verbal abuse, bullying, harassment, disconnection, micromanagement… are all signs of a toxic workplace. 

How often do you ask your employees for feedback about how they feel at work? Have any members of your staff experienced burnout? Do you sense a lack of connection and engagement among your workforce? It is crucial to make a list of rules and guidelines to prevent negative and toxic behaviors from happening in your organization.

Here are the key aspects to include in your checklist and valuable recommendations for fostering a positive and healthy work environment where everyone can be happy and thrive. 

Definition and consequences of a toxic work environment

What's a toxic workplace?

A toxic work environment results from poorly handled organizational aspects like poor corporate culture, bad management, inappropriate behaviors, etc. Employees who work in such a workplace tend to become disengaged, feel unvalued, experience a lot of stress, and struggle to motivate themselves to come to work and do their jobs.

Usually, you can determine if a workplace is toxic simply by looking at three components. Your company’s culture, interactions between people, and the job are like three intertwined pillars forming the backbone of a positive or toxic work environment. 

Various aspects are part of this “triangle-shaped” cornerstone.

Creating a positive work environment requires understanding the behaviors and actions that breed negativity. This helps you avoid them and spot them as early as possible. We dedicated a full article to this topic if you want to know more about what causes a toxic work environment.

The impacts of toxicity in the workplace

Employee satisfaction highly influences your business’s evolution. Therefore, a company is unlikely to keep growing long-term if workers are unhappy and anxious. Understanding that your staff is the backbone of your organization is crucial. Acknowledging this aspect enables you to shift your decision-making into a more people-centric direction and make better choices to improve their experience.

But why is it so important? To keep it short, workplace toxicity increases chronic stress, the risk of employee burnout, and turnover. It also decreases employee motivation, engagement, productivity, talent attraction, and workplace connection.

Many businesses are starting to realize the importance of job satisfaction and employee well-being. Putting a toxic workplace checklist in place to evaluate your work environment is an efficient way to analyze the overall atmosphere and make changes accordingly. Now the question is, what are the key points to include and the cases to tick to ensure your company is a great and positive workplace?

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11 key aspects that must appear on your toxic workplace checklist

1. Relationships at work

As mentioned, people can be the reasons why your workplace is toxic. Toxic colleagues and managers are a big issue that must be addressed and dealt with seriously. Do you wonder how your workforce can become a source of negativity? Behaviors such as verbal abuse, gossiping, harassment, favoritism, or discrimination can strongly affect how your team members feel at work. Work relationships play a key part in fostering workplace connection, but they can also trigger anxiety and impact your employees’ performance in the long run.

2. Inclusion and equity in the workplace

Continuing with interpersonal relationships, having a diverse workforce is a massive advantage for any business. It allows you to work with like-minded people from multiple backgrounds and with various life and work experiences. However, workplace diversity is useless if all your staff don’t get the same chances and opportunities or are not treated equally and fairly because of their differences. Lack of inclusion and equity at work undoubtedly creates a toxic atmosphere among your workforce. Analyzing this aspect should be at the top of your toxic workplace checklist.

3. Employees’ expectations match

Are you trying to meet employees’ expectations? Ignoring your workers’ needs impacts every business, both directly and indirectly. It is unlikely that people will stay at a company if their requirements are overlooked, even though they get a good pay-check. Regularly assessing their satisfaction and improving your work environment should be part of your toxic workplace checklist, as misalignment can lead to frustration, resentment, and disengagement.

4. Stress levels in your workforce

Does your workforce complain about unrealistic deadlines? Do they often share that they feel stressed and unhappy? Periods of stress happen in every job. Stress can also be good when it remains temporary and does not become a constant feeling. Otherwise, it’s called chronic stress, which can lead to employee burnout. Measuring the level of anxiety among your workforce is, therefore, essential for maintaining a healthy work environment.

5. Leadership style in place

How your team members feel toward their jobs and the organization is highly influenced by their relationship with their manager. What is considered a toxic leadership style? Which actions sustain a harmful work environment? Not having an employee-centric approach can easily create a negative work atmosphere. Micromanagement, lack of recognition, absence of trust, and vertical management are, among other behaviors, that breed a toxic work culture.

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6. Employees' health

Are your team members getting sick more often than usual? A decline in the health of your employees can be a symptom of workplace burnout. Of course, you must be mindful when talking with your coworkers about this topic, as the reasons might be personal and have nothing to do with their job. But it is important to address it as a toxic environment can lead to work depression, which directly affects your staff’s physical, emotional, and mental health. Remember that paying attention to their health and well-being is also part of building a trustful relationship.

7. Clear communication and transparency

Lack of communication and transparency from management and higher positions is often a source of stress, dissatisfaction, and disengagement for team members. Transparent communication is key to maintaining a positive work culture and making your workers feel considered and valued. Ensure you assess this aspect when going through your toxic workplace checklist. Spend time analyzing what communication means and gather your staff’s opinions on this topic.

8. Workload management

A person can only carry out a certain number of tasks before reaching a breaking point and starting to feel overwhelmed, stressed, disengaged from their job, and burned out. To avoid a toxic work environment, it is paramount to ensure that the workload is equally and fairly spread among your team. Also, ensure that deadlines are realistic and that your staff is equipped with everything they need to perform their tasks efficiently.

9. Corporate culture

What type of corporate culture are you trying to build? What values do you promote in your workplace? Organizational culture shouldn’t be left to grow by itself, as it has a powerful influence on how your staff feels and behaves. Analyzing this aspect and ensuring your business has a strong and healthy working culture is critical to avoiding the development of a toxic company culture.

10. Feedback

How often do you ask your team members for their opinion? Do they (not you) believe they can easily voice their needs and share feedback? Are their requests and ideas taken into account? Being heard and listened to is highly important to feeling considered and valued as an employee. Therefore, when analyzing the atmosphere of your workplace, you have to check this aspect, too. Constantly feeling ignored and underestimated can affect how your staff feels and be a natural source of negativity at work.

11. Turnover rates

Checking your turnover rates is essential when analyzing the atmosphere that prevails in your workplace. While the motives for employees quitting can vary, leaving a toxic work environment is a great reason to resign. Therefore, it is essential to understand why your staff is quitting. If one of the previous aspects comes back often as one of the main explanations, you know where to start making changes.‍

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5 ‍tips to create a thriving work environment for your employees

1. Create a positive workplace culture

Building a strong workplace culture is essential to avoid a toxic work atmosphere. It creates guidelines for what you want and don’t see. Be clear about your corporate values and include them in every area of your organization: your leadership style, your workspace, your work model, your events, and so on. To promote a more people-focused and positive work environment, you must encourage it in all aspects of your business. 

2. Encourage an employee-centric management style

57% of people leave their jobs because of bad management. Leadership has a massive impact on the work atmosphere. For this reason, it is crucial to foster an employee-centric management style. Workers value their well-being and happiness in their professional lives more than before. Working with a toxic boss, then, is a no-go for many. The happier your team is, the more engaged, productive, and loyal they are. Training your management staff is a great way to ensure they enhance their teams' positive and healthy work environment.

3 . Support diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) at work

Fostering DEIB in the workplace is also essential for a positive and healthy workplace. It creates a more diverse, equal, and inclusive work environment, while fulfilling the expectations of today’s workforce. Millennials and Gen. Z, particularly, highly value companies that promote DEIB practices. Underestimating the weight of fair and inclusive behaviors can result in a toxic work atmosphere and seriously affect employee satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty.

4. Adjust your workplace to new ways of working

The way we work has changed significantly over the last couple of years. Being obliged to go on-site daily from 9 to 5 is now a deal-breaker for a lot of people. While we’ve seen some big companies forcing employees back into the office, hybrid work answers workers’ expectations and is the norm for many. Understanding and supporting this shift fosters work-life balance, well-being, satisfaction, talent attraction, and staff retention. Letting your team work flexibly shows your will to become a modern workplace and create a people-centric and thriving work environment.

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5. Go through your toxic workplace checklist regularly

As an employer or manager, it is important not to take situations and people for granted. Your workplace was maybe considered a positive and healthy work environment last year. But many elements might have changed since then. You might have hired new employees, developed new working policies, restructured your business model, etc. All this influences how your staff feels at work. It is crucial to ensure that it hasn’t negatively impacted their connection with your organization, their jobs, and their colleagues. So, take your workplace checklist (which you should also update regularly) and review each aspect with your team members to ensure your company remains a thriving and positive workplace.

Toxicity in the workplace is neither good for your staff nor your business. You now have a detailed toxic workplace checklist to pinpoint the signs of a hostile work setup and act accordingly. Ignoring this aspect is shooting yourself in the foot. Employee experience and people-centricity are becoming key factors of successful organizations. Do you want to foster well-being, satisfaction, engagement, and retention? Use this toxic work environment checklist to ensure your staff develops a sense of belonging, gets empowered, feels valued, and enjoys their work. 

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