Toxic Work Environment: The Signs, the Cost, and What You Can Actually Do
There is a particular kind of Sunday afternoon that people in toxic workplaces know well. Here is how to tell a toxic workplace from a difficult one, what it does to you, and what you can do about it.
Claudina Hafenscher
COMENSA Accredited Senior Coach & Certified PQ® Coach
The Sunday feeling
There is a particular kind of Sunday afternoon that people in toxic workplaces know well. Around four o'clock, something shifts. The weekend is still technically happening, but you have stopped being in it. You are already back at your desk in your head, rehearsing a conversation that has not happened yet, bracing for a tone in an email you have not received.
Most people who feel this do not call it a toxic workplace. They call it a rough patch. They tell themselves the quarter is busy, the boss is under pressure, everyone is stretched thin. They give it another month, and then another one.
We work with a lot of capable, senior people who spent a long time explaining away something their body had already worked out.
What actually makes a workplace toxic
This matters, because the word gets used loosely and the looseness helps nobody. A demanding job is not toxic. A manager who gives hard feedback is not toxic. A busy season, a difficult colleague, a restructure that unsettles everyone: none of these on their own make a workplace toxic.
What makes it toxic is the absence of psychological safety over time. It is the sense that speaking honestly carries a cost. That mistakes get punished rather than examined. That what happens to you at work depends less on your performance than on your standing with a particular person on a particular day.
The distinguishing feature is not intensity. It is unpredictability combined with consequence.
A demanding workplace asks a lot of you and tells you where you stand. A toxic one asks a lot of you and makes you guess.
The signs, honestly described
Communication that runs sideways instead of forward. Decisions get made in conversations you were not part of, then announced as though you should have known. Gossip does the work that transparency should be doing. Expectations shift without anyone acknowledging they have shifted, so you are frequently wrong about something you were never told.
Behaviour that would be unacceptable anywhere else. Public criticism dressed up as directness. Micromanagement framed as high standards. The manager who is charming in the meeting and cutting in the follow-up. Intimidation rarely announces itself. It usually arrives as a joke you are expected to laugh at.
Rules that apply differently depending on who you are. One person's late arrival is a discipline issue and another's is a non-event. Workloads that everyone can see are unequal, and nobody will name. Promotions that follow proximity rather than contribution.
Exhaustion treated as commitment. Deadlines set at a pace nobody could sustain, then the sustaining of it becomes the baseline. Messages after hours that are technically not urgent but are answered anyway, because of what not answering seems to signal. Leave that is available in policy and impossible in practice.
Silence that has become a survival skill. This is the clearest indicator, and the easiest to miss from the inside. When people stop raising problems, hide small errors, and check who is in the room before saying what they think, the environment has already told them what honesty costs.
What it does to you, and why it is not weakness
Sustained exposure to an unsafe environment changes how you function, and it does so in ways that are easy to mistake for personal failure.
In mBIT, the coaching approach we use for exactly this kind of work, we pay attention to three centres of intelligence: the head, the heart, and the gut. Broadly, the head handles meaning and creativity, the heart handles values and connection, and the gut handles self-preservation and identity. In a healthy environment they work together. Under sustained threat, the gut takes over. Its job is to keep you safe, and it is very good at that job, but it has no interest in your creativity, your ambition, or your relationships.
This is why people in toxic workplaces report the same cluster of things. Work that used to feel interesting becomes something to survive. Decisions that used to be easy take days. You become guarded with people you like. You are tired in a way that sleep does not fix.
None of that is a character flaw. It is a nervous system doing precisely what it evolved to do, in an environment that keeps telling it there is a threat.
The trap: you start to think it is you
This is the part that does the most lasting damage, and it is where a lot of our coaching work actually begins.
Toxic environments are remarkably efficient at converting external problems into internal ones. You are criticised unpredictably, so you start scanning for what you did wrong. You are excluded from a decision, so you conclude you were not worth including. Over months, an accumulation of small signals hardens into a belief about your competence.
In Positive Intelligence terms, this is where the Judge takes hold, aimed inward, supported by the Hyper-Vigilant saboteur running constantly in the background. The result is a version of you that is smaller, more careful, and considerably less effective than the person who took the job. Which the environment then uses as evidence.
If that pattern sounds familiar, our article on imposter syndrome and executive self-doubt covers what to do when the doubt has outlasted the situation that created it.
What you can actually do
Set boundaries, and expect them to be tested
Boundaries in a toxic environment are not a single conversation. They are a series of small, unremarkable, repeated decisions. Not answering the message at nine at night. Taking the lunch break. Declining the meeting that has no agenda.
Expect friction. In a healthy workplace a boundary is absorbed. In a toxic one it is treated as a problem, which is itself diagnostic. Hold it anyway, and hold it quietly. You are not making a point, you are establishing a fact.
Document, properly
This is the advice everyone gives and almost nobody follows correctly, so here is what actually counts.
Write it down on the day it happens, not weeks later. Record the date, the time, who was present, what was said as closely to verbatim as you can manage, and what happened afterwards. Keep it somewhere that is not on a company device or a company account. Follow up verbal conversations with a short email confirming what was agreed, which turns a memory into a record.
There is a specific South African reason this matters. Under the 2022 Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace, bullying is recognised as a form of harassment and, in many cases, as unfair discrimination under the Employment Equity Act. If you ever need to raise a formal grievance or approach the CCMA, contemporaneous notes carry weight that recollection does not.
It is also worth knowing that the bar is high. A constructive dismissal claim under section 186(1)(e) of the Labour Relations Act requires you to show that continued employment was made objectively intolerable, not merely unpleasant. Courts and commissioners will also ask whether you used the internal grievance process first. Going straight to the CCMA without doing so can undermine an otherwise legitimate case.
We are coaches, not lawyers, and none of the above is legal advice. If you are anywhere near this territory, speak to a labour attorney early rather than late.
Stay out of the weather
Every toxic workplace has a running commentary: the WhatsApp group, the corridor debrief, the colleague who wants to tell you what was really said. It feels like solidarity and it functions like fuel. It keeps your attention fixed on the environment at exactly the moment you need it available for your own decisions.
You can be warm with people without joining the chorus. Practically, that often means listening without adding, and declining to speculate about motives you cannot verify.
Get support from outside the building
The single most useful thing you can do is establish at least one relationship where you can describe what is happening without managing anyone's reaction to it. A partner, a friend outside the industry, a therapist, a coach.
This is not only about relief, although relief matters. It is about calibration. Toxic environments distort your sense of what is normal, and they do it gradually enough that you do not notice. An outside perspective restores the baseline.
Plan the exit before you need it
Update the CV while you still have the energy to write it well. Have the coffees. Take the calls. Look at the market properly rather than in a panic at eleven at night.
Not every plan gets used. But there is a real difference in how you carry yourself when leaving is a decision you could make rather than a fantasy you have. That difference is often visible to the people around you, and it sometimes changes the dynamic on its own.
If you are the one leading the team
Some of the people reading this are not experiencing a toxic culture. They are running one, and they do not know it.
That is not usually malice. It is more often a leader under pressure whose behaviour under stress has become the team's weather, and who has no reliable way of finding out. The feedback stops arriving long before the problem starts showing up in the numbers. By the time it reaches turnover figures, it has been true for a year.
The useful question is not whether you are a good leader. It is whether your team can tell you the truth, and how you would know if they could not.
This is precisely what the Reality Check EcoMetric is built to surface: an honest read on the culture of a team, including the parts nobody will say out loud in a performance review. It is uncomfortable to run and considerably less expensive than the alternative.
When to stay, and when to go
There is no rule, but there are useful questions.
Is this the environment, or is it one person, and is that person leaving or staying? Has anything meaningfully changed after you raised it through the proper channels? Is the cost showing up in your health, your sleep, or your relationships outside work? And if you imagine yourself here in two years, do you recognise the person you picture?
Some situations improve. A manager moves on, a restructure lands well, a grievance is genuinely acted upon. Others do not, and staying becomes a slow negotiation with your own standards.
What we would say is this: you are allowed to leave a job that is harming you, and you do not need it to be objectively bad enough to justify the decision to anyone else.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if it is a toxic workplace or just a difficult one?
A difficult workplace is demanding and predictable. You know where you stand, feedback is uncomfortable but usable, and raising a concern does not carry a penalty. A toxic workplace is unpredictable and consequential. The test is what happens when you speak honestly.
Is workplace bullying illegal in South Africa?
The 2022 Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace recognises bullying as a form of harassment, and in many cases as unfair discrimination under the Employment Equity Act. Employers have an obligation to investigate and address it. Speak to a labour attorney about your specific circumstances.
Should I resign immediately if my workplace is toxic?
Rarely, unless your safety is at risk. Resigning first weakens both your negotiating position and any later legal claim, since constructive dismissal requires showing that continued employment was objectively intolerable and that internal processes were used. Document, raise it formally, get advice, and plan.
Can coaching help while I am still in the situation?
Yes, and it is often when it helps most. Coaching does not fix the environment. What it does is help you stay recognisable to yourself inside it, make clearer decisions about staying or leaving, and address the self-doubt that these environments reliably create.
What if I think I might be the problem?
That question is a better sign than you think, because the leaders who most need to ask it usually do not. The next step is getting real data rather than reassurance, which is what a structured culture assessment is for.
If you recognised yourself somewhere in this article, you are not overreacting and you are not alone in it. Have & Share works with professionals and leaders navigating exactly this: the self-doubt that builds up in an unsafe environment, the decision about whether to stay, and the work of rebuilding confidence that a workplace has spent months chipping away at, through individual holistic coaching.
Working Through This With Support
We use mBIT coaching, Positive Intelligence, and where the question is about a whole team rather than one person, the Reality Check EcoMetric. The first conversation is free and there is no obligation attached to it.
Ready to talk this through?
If this sounds close to what you are carrying, start with a low-pressure WhatsApp message or book a free discovery conversation with Claudina.
No credit card required. A low-anxiety, zero-obligation chat to see if we are a fit.