Toxic culture, as we reported in a recent article, was the single best predictor of attrition during the first six months of the Great Resignation — 10 times more powerful than how employees viewed their compensation in predicting employee turnover.1 The link between toxicity and attrition is not new: By one estimate, employee turnover triggered by a toxic culture cost U.S. employers nearly $50 billion per year before the Great Resignation began.2

While most everyone agrees that toxic workplaces are bad news, there is much less consensus on what makes a culture toxic as opposed to merely annoying. Scholars have proposed multiple, sometimes conflicting definitions of toxic culture, and a quick review of blog posts and managerial articles surfaces dozens of warning signals of toxic culture with little overlap across them.3 In Glassdoor reviews, employees criticize their corporate cultures for hundreds of flaws — including risk aversion, excess bureaucracy, insularity, and an impersonal feel, to mention just a few.

Employees grumble about a lot of things, but which elements of culture are so awful that they qualify as toxic? You might gripe about an old-school or bureaucratic culture, but is that enough to knot your stomach as you pull into the parking lot in the morning? How can we distinguish between a culture so awful that it qualifies as toxic versus one that’s merely irritating?

Pinpointing the elements that make a culture toxic is the first step to improving it. Leaders will dissipate their effort and attention if they try to improve every aspect of corporate culture that some employees find irritating. Instead, they should focus on addressing the core issues that cause employees the most pain and lead them to disengage, bad-mouth their employer, and quit.

To understand what makes a culture toxic, we analyzed the language employees use to describe their organization. When workers write a Glassdoor review, they rate corporate culture on a 5-point scale and also describe their employer’s pros and cons. The topics they choose to write about reveal which factors are most relevant to them. By analyzing the relationship between how they describe their employer and how they rate its culture, we were able to shed light on the cultural factors that best predict a toxic culture. We studied more than 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews from U.S. employees of Culture 500 companies, a sample of large organizations from 40 industries.

In an earlier analysis of the Culture 500 data, we focused on the topics that best predict a company’s overall culture rating based on the average of all employee reviews in that organization.4 Measuring company-level culture is an excellent way to identify factors that matter to many employees, such as benefits, perks, and job security. Focusing on company-level averages, however, might miss elements of toxic culture that are highly significant for a small percentage of the workforce. Therefore, for this study, we analyzed culture at the individual level.

To home in on what makes a culture toxic for employees, we focused on their negative comments. We used the text analytics platform developed by CultureX to identify which topics each employee discussed negatively. (We measured 128 topics in total.) We then analyzed which of the topics mentioned had the largest negative impact on how employees rated corporate culture on a 5-point scale.5