You must find a job that makes you feel comfortable. After all, you’ll spend most of the day at work, five times a week. It takes up a considerable chunk of your life, and the way you feel at work will determine how you feel in general.
Keeping that in mind, if you work in a toxic environment, then this toxicity affects the rest of your life. You start to feel depressed, on edge and stressed out. Nobody deserves to be in a toxic work environment, but this can happen without us realizing it.
Thankfully, you can get out of a toxic workplace. As soon as you notice the telltale signs, you can submit your notice and leave. Start searching for a new job, get some interviews lined up, and enjoy a much better life. So, on that note, here are the warning signs your work environment is toxic.
Your employers or fellow employees emotionally abuse you
Emotional abuse is too common in the workplace. To make matters worse, we often don’t realize it’s happening – or we try and hide from the fact that it’s going on. This type of abuse takes many forms, and it could mean your employer keeps calling you offensive names or threatens you discretely. The same can be said of your fellow employees – maybe they forced you to do their work and threatened to hurt you if you told anyone?
Sometimes, abuse is obvious. Other times, you don’t register it because you’re so afraid. A telltale sign is if you start having panic attacks or get really anxious about going to work or when you’re thinking of something that happened in the past. If you went to an inpatient PTSD treatment center, you’d find that a lot of the people there are suffering because of emotional or physical abuse in the workplace. It has a massive psychological effect on you and can cause severe emotional trauma. If certain things remind you of your boss and you get terrified and upset, then that’s a big sign they’ve emotionally abused you. Seek help, talk to someone you can trust, go to the authorities, and get out of this workplace!
There are arguments all the time
Even if you’re not involved in them, arguments are a sign of a toxic workplace. This should be a place where people feel comfortable and can work without distractions. Everyone should get along and work together as a team!
If there are always shouting matches between team members, and you have disagreements all the time, then the work environment is so toxic. The problem is, you become so used to arguing that you feel like it’s normal. But it’s really not! A workplace is never going to be quiet, but there shouldn’t be so much anger all the time.
You experience casual sexism or racism
Again, this might not be directed at you, but it’s still a massive issue. A lot of women suffer from some type of casual sexism at work. Typically, this is from the office ‘lads’ who think it’s funny to talk about the way you dress, make inappropriate comments, or just generally divulge in prehistoric ‘lad banter.’ You shouldn’t be subjected to this anywhere, let alone at work. If this problem persists after you’ve told your boss about it, then that makes things even worse. It shows they don’t care or don’t see it as an issue, you could even think of legal action and there are lawyers for employees that you could think about talking to if it has got to a tipping point at work.
The same goes for racism at work; it happens a lot. You may get passed up for promotions as a white employee with worse performance stats beats you to it. Or, you could just hear casual racist comments from other employees as they talk about different things. If the company you work for employs racists and doesn’t take any notice of them, then you’re in a very toxic environment.
There’s a ridiculously high turnover rate
Turnover rate is the rate at which employees are leaving a business, with new ones coming in. When this rate is low, it shows that people enjoy working for a company. It must have a positive work environment, a great company culture, and it treats the employees well. As such, people are more inclined to stick around.
If the turnover rate is high, and you’re always working alongside new people, then what does that tell you about the business? There’s clearly an issue because nobody wants to stay, and they’re looking to get out as soon as possible. For me, this is a telltale sign of a toxic work environment – and one that most people miss!
Like we said, watch out for these signs, and then take action. Don’t put yourself through the pain of staying in a toxic workplace. Get out while you can, and find a much better job.
