4 Ways to Deal With Toxicity Among Co-Workers

The advice for dealing with a toxic workplace has not really changed in a decade. Set boundaries. Keep work at work. Find the right people. Know when to leave. What has changed is everything else: the share of workers who say their job is toxic, the cost to companies that do nothing, and the depth of evidence behind each of those four moves.

In November 2025, Monster's mental-health-at-work poll reported that 80% of US workers describe their workplace as toxic, up from 67% the year before. A separate analysis by Donald Sull and his MIT Sloan colleagues, drawing on 34 million employee profiles and 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, found that toxic culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting attrition. People leave bad cultures faster than they leave bad pay, by an order of magnitude.

The four strategies below have not been replaced. They have been thickened, by research and by post-pandemic patterns of work.

First, check whether it is actually toxic

Not every difficult colleague makes a workplace toxic. Telling the two apart, one bad actor versus a culture problem, matters because the four strategies below apply differently to each. The MIT Sloan group has a checklist that has held up across thousands of companies.

Sull and his co-authors call them the Toxic Five: cultures that are disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, or abusive. As they put it: "The Toxic Five attributes, disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive, poison corporate culture in the eyes of employees." If two or more of those describe the day-to-day, the issue is structural, and one team move will not fix it.

Vivek Murthy, US Surgeon General. Official portrait, 2022 / ©US Department of Health and Human Services (public domain)

The US Surgeon General's framework, released by Vivek Murthy on 20 October 2022, runs the inverse experiment. Murthy's Five Essentials describe what a healthy workplace owes the people inside it: protection from harm, connection and community, work-life harmony, mattering at work, and opportunities for growth. Read alongside Sull's Toxic Five, the contrast gives a fast diagnostic, what is missing here is usually a better predictor than what is present.

A useful written reference is a clear company code of ethics. The point is not to find the perfect framework. It is to stop calling something toxic when it might be a difficult quarter, and to stop calling something a difficult quarter when it has actually been the same five problems for two years.

Way 1: Set boundaries that actually hold

The original advice on boundaries came from Billy Roberts, a therapist at Focused Mind ADHD Counseling. His point, that the absence of boundaries is one of the main drivers of work stress, has aged well. Out-of-hours emails, intensifying workload with no visible progress, and unfriendly relationships at work are still where it shows up first. What has changed is that more of those signals now arrive after dinner.

In a hybrid setup, the boundary is not a desk you leave behind. It is the rule you decide to enforce on a notification badge. The Slack ping at 10:42pm, the Teams message that "won't take five minutes," the meeting that lands on your calendar without an agenda, these are now the texture of psychological hazard, and treating them as background noise is how you arrive at burnout without noticing.

The international standard for psychological health and safety at work, ISO 45003, published in 2021, lists exactly these patterns, bullying, unmanageable workload, lack of support, after-hours pressure, as psychosocial hazards employers are expected to identify and manage. Boundary-setting at work has graduated from personal preference into a documented category of harm with its own ISO number, which puts the conversation about it on different footing than it had in 2021.

In practice, the floor looks like this: a set of hours during which you do not respond to chat, a stated turnaround time for non-urgent requests, and a written agreement (not one you carry in your head) about what counts as an emergency. Tools help. The harder part is not the tooling, it is being willing to defend the rule the third time someone tests it.

Way 2: Keep work at work, even when work has no walls

The 2021 version of this section opened with a line that has aged poorly: the house should be a place of relaxation. For most knowledge workers, the house is now also a meeting room, a screen-share studio, and a backup office on Wednesdays. The advice still applies, but the target moved.

Murthy's framework names work-life harmony as one of its Five Essentials, and his foreword to the framework says why bluntly: "The pandemic also sparked a reckoning among many workers who no longer feel that sacrificing their health, family, and communities for work is an acceptable trade-off." The reckoning showed up in the numbers. Gallup's 2024 State of the Global Workplace put global engagement at 21% and US engagement at a decade-low 31%. On every well-being measure they tracked, daily stress, anger, worry, loneliness, actively-disengaged workers reported outcomes equivalent to or worse than the unemployed.

Mental detachment is the actionable lever inside that finding. It goes beyond leaving the laptop in another room, though that helps. The harder discipline is not running work problems in your head when you are not on the clock. There is now a body of evidence that this matters more for recovery than the particular hobby chosen, and that workers who keep work cognitively present at home report worse sleep and higher next-day stress regardless of how many gym sessions they fit in.

For a longer read on how the workplace shapes life outside it, see how the workplace affects an employee's experience. Recovery is half the system, and the half companies most often skimp on.

Way 3: Stick to the right people

The most-quoted line in this post since 2021 has been Thomas Hawkins of Electrician Apprentice HQ on what he called the brotherhood of the unhappy. His phrasing was sharp enough to keep:

"In a toxic working environment there will always be a group of people who can be called a brotherhood of the unhappy. They are first and foremost people who will never be pleased by work done, will always find a reason to complain and look for excuses. It is necessary to avoid this group like fire, and instead of unnecessary contact, it is worth taking care of relationships with employees who have a human, positive attitude toward the tasks performed."
Thomas Hawkins, Electrician Apprentice HQ

What we know now that we did not in 2021 is who is most exposed to that group. Sull's team found that women are 41% more likely than men to experience toxic workplace culture, with the gap widest at companies whose surface-level diversity policies were strongest. Picking a peer network, then, is a hedge against a structural pattern, not a personal preference.

The trickier case is when the toxic actors are not peers but leaders. The network advice flips there: instead of avoiding bad colleagues, you are looking for the colleagues who can help you read the politics, sanity-check the gaslight moments, and keep written records. In organisations where psychological safety is gone, the small group of people you trust is the entire functioning communication channel. Treat it accordingly.

Way 4: Know when, and how, to leave

The 2021 advice on leaving came from Petra Odak, then CMO of Better Proposals: keep doing the job well so you do not burn the reference, and use the spare hours to find the next role. That counsel is still sound, and still uncomfortable, in roughly equal measures.

What has changed is the labour market around her advice. Through 2025, Amazon, Dell, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, and Salesforce all moved to in-office requirements of three to five days a week. Studies tracking post-mandate workforces have found turnover concentrated among high performers and women; by some measures female turnover after a mandate runs roughly three times higher than male turnover. The companies running these mandates know this. Some are using the attrition as the point.

That changes the texture of looking for another job. The hiring pool now includes the post-RTO refugees, which makes it thicker and more skilled than the equivalent pool in 2021. Brian Elliott, writing for MIT Sloan Management Review, argues that the companies still attracting the best of that crowd are the ones doing the harder work: "Many executives still think of culture as something that only happens inside office walls. But real culture is how we work."

There is also a counter-move worth naming, because Sull's team found something that surprised them: lateral opportunities are 2.5 times more predictive of retention than compensation. If your company has an internal market for moves, an internal transfer can be the cleanest exit from a toxic team without triggering a full job hunt. And in cases where misconduct is part of what makes the place toxic, the option of reporting upward, internally or through an anonymous channel, can change the situation rather than only your seat in it. The case for reporting before walking, including from people who have not yet started, is set out in whether a job candidate can be a whistleblower.

The four ways have not aged. What has aged is the assumption that their cost is mostly personal. The cost of staying in a toxic culture is now documented in turnover percentages and in roughly nine percent of global GDP, depending on whose disengagement number you trust. The cost of building a workplace that does not punish the people inside it is a smaller, much cheaper number. Whether leadership acts on that arithmetic comes down to whether they are reading the file. And whether you stay long enough to wait for them to read it is the same question those four strategies were always trying to answer.