How you'd detect toxic work culture in remote company?

Question

Nico Spijker · Accepted Answer

We actually wrote a blog about this a while back, here's the summary: 1. Low creativity across the team 2. Work is never finished before the deadline 3. High turnover among employees 4. Confusion and ineffective collaboration 5. Teams are siloed 6. Fear of failure or management 7. Interpersonal tensions between teams Won't paste the whole blog here but if curious you can check it out here: https://rock.so/blog/toxic-work-...

Ayaz Qureshi · Answer

@nicolaas_spijker Nicely summed up. Do you think the line between toxic and challenging work is way too fine?

Nico Spijker · Answer

@ayaz_qureshi1 It all comes down to communication in my opinion.

- Are you setting up team members for success with a challenging tasks or just throwing hard tasks at their direction?
- Is there a support system for challenging tasks where people have clear guidelines on who to reach out for what, and where to find relevant documentation?
- Are expectations realistic/flexible enough to take into consideration the complexity of the task at hand?

Often it can look like the line is fine, but if you're open to discussing the task and support team members you'll often notice that people quite enjoy taking on new challenging work.

Answer

@nicolaas_spijker This is good, very good. I will add, lack of honest, open-hearted discussions and sufficient disagreement. If people do not disagree enough in a team it could mean that the team members are totally disengaged or that they do not just care, and even that they do not believe in what the team is trying to accomplish (they are only there to benefit financial or from the social status).

How you'd detect toxic work culture in remote company?

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