We all feel stressed at work even on normal days, which is normal in the working life; what’s not normal is hating going to work every day. It becomes more than just a stressful day, you might feel physically ill or you can’t even get out of bed, you might even hate the idea of going to work.
This is the moment you have to stop and ask yourself, is this feeling because you’re stressed or because your work environment is toxic? Do you hate your job or you hate the company?
There are multiple signs that could lead you to discover that your company’s environment is toxic, here are some of them.
1- Lack of Communication
Communication is essential between employees and if it doesn’t exist, then something is wrong.
If you’re wondering how you can spot a lack of communication, you might find that your team barely communicates and each member works separately; they don’t know anything about each other and they don’t even collaborate; each one of them will be doing their tasks without communicating with another member.
Lack of communication might affect teamwork.
2- Unfair Treatment
Unfair treatment can be represented in many situations that you probably experienced before.
You might find that promotions and special treatment go to people who don’t deserve them, especially if they don’t work as hard as you or the rest of your team. You also might find most of your vacation requests are being rejected.
Other signs of unfair treatment are when some of your tasks can be assigned to someone else and when someone else takes credit for what you have done.
3- Bad Management Type
One of the signs is how the manager manages the employees.
Some managers like interfering in the employees’ tasks and always get involved in every little detail, while other managers are not the understanding type and always start problems with their team.
There are managers who don’t care about their employees and always put work and clients first, which affects the employees’ performance and stresses them.
4- No One To Ask For Help
It’s common at any workplace that you get help whenever you ask for it, but not in a toxic environment.
You could ask multiple times for someone to help you in a certain task or to brainstorm with you but you get nothing in the end.
In every work environment, you would find that all employees collaborate and help each other but when it comes to the toxic one, you would find that everyone is working on their own and you could barely see any help given.
This will also make you fail in forming any type of communication with your colleagues.
5- You Can’t Catch A Break!
You will always feel stressed and you will always find yourself facing a lot of troubles.
A toxic work environment will be full of problems and stressful times; technically all of the signs above will lead to sparking troubles between employees. Also, you would find a lot of gossip in the office and negative energy everywhere.
You won’t be able to take a break either from the office problems or from the workload.
6- You Can’t Decide Who’s Doing What
You might find some team members interfering in others’ tasks.
Anyone can do anything even if it’s not their specialty; you can find yourself or other employees doing tasks that are not in their field just because they did it once. This would be stressful and can burn out the energy in the office.
You can also find your tasks being assigned to someone else; so you will end up getting confused about the employees’ roles in the company.
An environment like this won’t help you improve nor enhance your performance, in fact, it might bring you down. So, whenever you’re in this situation, start looking for another company.