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Workplace Reality Check: Is Your Workplace Toxic?

Twelve questions about what your working week actually costs you, answered on a simple how-often scale. You get a total out of 36 and a plain reading of what that range tends to mean.

This is not a test of whether your workplace is officially "toxic." There is no threshold here that makes something official, and nothing you answer will place your job on one side of a line or the other.

Before you start

The scale

  1. Rarely or never
  2. Sometimes
  3. Often
  4. Very often

The 12 questions in this assessment

  1. By Sunday evening, are you thinking more about the people you will face than the work you need to do?
  2. Do expectations change in ways that leave you wondering when the rules changed?
  3. Do you prepare for ordinary conversations based on someone's mood, influence or likely reaction?
  4. Have you started saving messages, screenshots or notes because you worry events may later be remembered differently?
  5. Do you replay meetings after work, thinking about what was said and what you should have said?
  6. Does responsibility seem to shift depending on who is involved?
  7. Do you spend significant energy trying to work out where you stand with a particular person?
  8. Have you become more cautious about sharing ideas, asking questions or speaking openly?
  9. Do you rehearse emails or messages repeatedly because you are worried about how they may be interpreted?
  10. Do you feel that doing good work is no longer enough because relationships or influence affect outcomes just as much?
  11. Are you regularly exhausted by managing the environment around the work, rather than by the work itself?
  12. Have you caught yourself thinking, "Maybe I am the problem," without being able to identify exactly what you did wrong?

This assessment is interactive: enable JavaScript to answer the questions above and see your total. For reflection and education only, not a diagnosis or legal advice.

Assessing your results...

About This Assessment

This assessment is built around constructs that organisational psychology actually measures, rather than around a list of bad behaviours. The most useful of these is psychological safety, introduced in its modern form by Amy Edmondson in 1999, which describes a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. It is not about comfort or low demand. Edmondson found that teams with higher psychological safety often reported more errors, because people were willing to say when something had gone wrong.

The second construct is workplace incivility, defined by Andersson and Pearson in 1999 as low intensity deviant behaviour with ambiguous intent to harm, in violation of norms for mutual respect. Their argument was that incivility spirals, escalating through reciprocal exchanges over time. This is why every question here asks how often rather than how bad. The individual events in a corrosive workplace are almost always minor, which is exactly what makes them hard to describe to anyone. Frequency is the part that carries the information.

Your result is a reflection tool and nothing more. It is not a diagnosis, it cannot tell you whether any specific conduct meets a formal or legal threshold, and it is not a substitute for professional mental health, HR, employment, or legal support. If your situation involves threats, discrimination, or you feel unsafe, please speak to someone qualified rather than relying on a self assessment.

Research basis: Edmondson (1999), Administrative Science Quarterly; Andersson and Pearson (1999), Academy of Management Review; Sull, Sull and Zweig (2022), MIT Sloan Management Review.

Important: Quizzes on this site are for self-reflection and educational purposes only. They are not clinical assessments, legal advice, or a determination that any conduct meets a formal definition. If you are experiencing mental health difficulties, please consult a qualified mental health professional.

Related Reading

Quick Answer

This assessment asks twelve questions about your last four to six weeks at work, each answered on the same scale: rarely or never, sometimes, often, very often, scored 0 to 3. Your answers add up to a total out of 36, which falls into one of three ranges. It does not decide whether your workplace is officially "toxic." It shows how much of your attention the environment is taking.

What This Assessment Measures

Twelve questions about the habits a difficult workplace tends to produce: rehearsing messages, reading someone's mood before an ordinary conversation, keeping records in case events are remembered differently, replaying meetings after hours. Each is answered on the same scale, from rarely or never to very often, scored 0 to 3.

What the questions have in common is that none of them is about how hard you are working. They are about how much attention the environment takes before the work can start. That distinction is the whole point, because a job can be relentless and fine, or comfortable and corrosive, and how tired you are does not tell the two apart.

The individual items are deliberately small. Any one of them has an innocent explanation, which is exactly why they are so hard to describe to anyone else. Frequency is the part that carries information, which is why the scale asks how often rather than how bad.

What Your Result Means

Your answers add up to a total out of 36, which falls into one of three ranges. 0 to 11, Not Much Showing Up Here: this pattern does not appear to be dominating your week, whatever else about the job is hard. 12 to 23, Signs of Workplace Toxicity: enough of these things are happening regularly to be worth paying attention to, and worth comparing against how it looked six months ago. 24 to 36, Significant Toxicity Signs: most of your energy is going into managing the environment rather than into the work.

The number is a way of seeing the pattern at a glance, not a verdict. There is no score that means your workplace is officially anything, and a total on a boundary is not meaningfully different from one a point either side of it.

Common Questions

How do I tell the difference between a toxic workplace and a demanding one?

Difficulty is a property of the work, while toxicity is a property of the environment around it. The most reliable practical signals are direction, meaning whether pressure consistently lands on the same people, and correction, meaning what happens when bad behaviour becomes visible. A workplace can be extremely demanding and still healthy, and it can have a light workload and still be corrosive.

Can a workplace be toxic if nobody is doing it deliberately?

Yes. Most corrosive environments are produced by ordinary people under pressure inside systems that reward the wrong things, rather than by anyone setting out to cause harm. Intent matters for blame and for legal claims, but it does not change what sustained exposure does to you, and you do not need to resolve the question of motive before acting.

Does this quiz tell me whether I am being bullied at work?

No. This assessment looks at your workplace environment as a whole, which is a broader and different question. Workplace bullying has a specific research definition requiring repeated negative acts, weekly or more often, over six months or longer, with a power imbalance. That threshold is covered separately in our guide to what counts as workplace bullying.

Why do I keep doubting my own read on the situation?

Because the evidence arrives in pieces too small to carry the conclusion, and because these environments contain genuinely good days and good colleagues that contradict any general statement you try to make. Prolonged uncertainty is a predictable result of how the information is distributed rather than evidence that nothing is wrong.

If my score is high, does that mean I have to do something about it?

No. A total is information, not an instruction. Noticing is separate from acting, and most people need time between the two. What a high score changes immediately is where you point your attention, because personal improvement strategies do not resolve an environment problem, and recognising that alone tends to return some energy.

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