What makes a workplace culture start to feel wrong
The word 'toxic' is used so frequently now that it risks losing its meaning. A difficult week is not a broken culture. A challenging manager is not automatically a sign of a toxic environment. But there is a meaningful distinction between the ordinary friction of working alongside other human beings and the accumulated patterns that make people feel chronically unsafe, unseen, or disposable.
According to iHire's 2025 Toxic Workplace Trends Report, the most common markers of a genuinely problematic culture are: poor communication from leadership (affecting nearly 90% of employees in such environments), lack of transparency, the absence of constructive feedback, and an environment where people do not feel valued, safe, or respected. These are not one-off incidents. They are patterns.
The consequences are significant and well-documented. An MIT Sloan study during the Great Resignation found that workers were 10.4 times more likely to quit because of a toxic work environment than because of low pay. High turnover is both a symptom and an accelerant: as experienced people leave, institutional knowledge erodes, remaining staff absorb more pressure, and the conditions that drove people out are compounded.
Signs that a workplace culture is under strain
Communication that protects hierarchy rather than solving problems
In a culture that has drifted into difficulty, communication tends to flow in only one direction. Information is withheld or selectively shared. Leaders send mixed messages. Feedback, when it exists at all, is given without the psychological safety required to act on it honestly. The message, stated or unstated, becomes: the right response is to agree, to perform enthusiasm, and to resolve your dissatisfaction privately.
A silence that forms when something is clearly wrong
The clearest signal that a culture has drifted into difficulty is the silence in the room when something is clearly off. People sense the issue but they do not raise it. The unspoken calculation is that speaking up will cost them more than staying quiet. That calculation does not develop overnight. It is the product of accumulated experience: the times that someone raised a concern and was dismissed, sidelined, or made an example of. Once enough people have made that calculation, the silence becomes self-reinforcing. Nobody speaks because nobody else is speaking.
Blame rather than learning
In psychologically safe workplaces, mistakes are treated as information. In a culture under strain, they tend to be treated as evidence. As BambooHR's research on culture identifies, a culture where people fear being punished for errors rather than supported through them produces risk aversion, concealment, and a progressive disengagement from the kind of initiative that teams need to function well.
High turnover and persistent disengagement
Turnover is the most visible symptom of a culture in difficulty, but disengagement is often the more costly one. Disengaged people are present but not contributing. They do the minimum required to stay employed. They have mentally moved on while still physically occupying a desk. Disengagement is expensive, difficult to measure, and almost always a signal that people do not feel seen, valued, or genuinely included.
Exclusion and in-group dynamics
Cultures under strain almost always have visible in-groups and out-groups. Access to information, opportunities, and recognition is distributed through social proximity rather than merit or contribution. As Safe Work Australia's psychosocial hazard guidance identifies, poor workplace relationships and inadequate recognition are classified as psychosocial hazards under Australian workplace health and safety law. This is not just a cultural concern. It is a legal compliance issue.
Why culture change often stalls
A common response to a culture that has drifted into difficulty is a policy update, a values refresh, or a mandatory training programme. These interventions have genuine value. Clear policies matter. Values need to be articulated. But they rarely change a culture on their own, because culture is not what the values poster on the wall says it is.
Culture is what people actually do when nobody is watching. It is what behaviour gets rewarded versus what behaviour gets quietly tolerated. It is whether people feel safe enough to be honest about what is not working. Changing those things requires changing the relational conditions inside the team or organisation, not just the stated principles.
The central challenge in culture change is that it asks people to behave differently in an environment where behaving differently has historically been unsafe. You cannot ask people to be more honest when honesty has consistently been penalised. You cannot ask leaders to be more vulnerable when the culture has rewarded performance over authenticity. The conditions have to shift first, even slightly, before the behaviour can follow.
This is where the KanYini framework is useful. KanYini is a Pitjantjatjara word meaning the principle of connectedness through caring and responsibility. The idea at the centre of it is that belonging, genuine belonging where people feel seen, heard, and genuinely valued, is not a cultural nice-to-have. It is the foundation that makes trust, honest communication, and meaningful collaboration structurally possible. Culture change that targets stated values without building genuine belonging tends to produce the appearance of improvement without the conditions that make it sustainable.
What actually changes a workplace culture
Build psychological safety from the inside out
Psychological safety, the belief that you will not be punished for speaking up, is the prerequisite for everything else. It cannot be mandated. It is built through consistent behaviour: people at every level who acknowledge their own mistakes, who respond to difficult feedback without defensiveness, who demonstrate through repeated action that honesty is genuinely valued. One person who does this consistently changes the environment for everyone around them. The work is not top-down in the sense of direction alone. It is relational in every direction.
Address the presenting behaviour, not just the outcome
Behaviour that makes others feel unsafe or unseen needs to be addressed directly and promptly. The most common pattern is to manage around it, hoping the situation will resolve itself or the person involved will leave. This pattern signals to everyone watching that the behaviour is implicitly acceptable. Clear, consistent responses to behaviours that undermine safety and belonging are not punitive. They are a statement about what actually matters.
Build the relational skills, not just the policy framework
The gap between a stated commitment to a healthy culture and an experienced one is almost always a skills gap. People who want to have honest conversations do not know how. Managers who want to check in genuinely do not know what to say. Colleagues who want to address something early do not feel equipped to do it. KanYini Earth's learning programmes address exactly this layer: building the specific relational capacity that culture change depends on. How to notice. How to ask. How to stay present with difficulty rather than deflecting it. These are learnable skills, and teams that invest in building them create the conditions where their stated values can actually function.
If your workplace currently feels toxic
Start by naming what you are experiencing, to yourself first. Difficult cultures produce self-doubt: you begin to wonder whether it is you, whether you are being oversensitive, whether this is simply how workplaces are. It is not. What you are describing has a name and it is not a personal failing.
Document specific incidents if you are experiencing bullying or harassment. In Australia, the Fair Work Commission handles workplace disputes including bullying applications. Your state's anti-discrimination commission handles discrimination and harassment complaints. If you are experiencing health or mental health impacts from sustained workplace stress, a GP can provide support and also discuss a Mental Health Treatment Plan, which can provide access to Medicare-subsidised psychology sessions.
If the environment is genuinely affecting your health and things are not changing, leaving is a legitimate and sometimes necessary decision. Beyond Blue offers free support on 1300 22 4636 for people experiencing the mental health impacts of a difficult work environment.
Culture changes when the skills are there to change it
The gap between a stated commitment to a healthy culture and an experienced one is almost always a skills gap. How to notice. How to ask. How to hold space for a difficult conversation without deflecting it. These are learnable, and they are what determine whether an organisation's values actually function in practice.
KanYini Earth's learning programmes build exactly that relational capacity. If you are in a position to bring these into your organisation, start a conversation with us. If you want to support the work more broadly, every contribution, financial, shared content, or volunteer expertise, moves the same mission forward.
Contribute to KanYini Earth: www.kanyiniearth.com/fundraiser/kanyiniearth-learning-course
Walk with KanYini Earth.
References
iHire. (2025). Toxic workplace trends report 2025. https://www.ihire.com/resourcecenter/employer/pages/toxic-workplace-trends-repor...
MIT Sloan / Leaders Institute. (2025). Toxic work environment: warning signs and the way forward. https://www.leadersinstitute.com/toxic-work-environment-warning-signs-and-the-wa...
BambooHR. (2025). The top 15 signs of bad company culture. https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/bad-company-culture
Safe Work Australia. (2022). Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work. https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/managing-health-and-safety/men...
Fair Work Commission. Dispute resolution. https://www.fwc.gov.au
