Hostile Work Environment: What It Means and What You Can Do

Hostile Work Environment: What It Means and What You Can Do

You have been having the same argument with yourself for months. Some days it is not that bad, and you decide you are being dramatic and probably too sensitive. Other days you sit in your car in the parking lot for an extra ten minutes before you can make yourself walk in. And every single person you have told about it has handed you the same two options. Put up with it, or quit.

If you have been searching hostile work environment at eleven at night, trying to work out whether what is happening to you actually counts as one, here is the short answer. A hostile work environment is a specific legal term. It describes harassment or discrimination aimed at a protected part of your identity, like your gender, your race, or your religion. A toxic work environment is the casual phrase all of us use for a job that is grinding us down. Those are two different things, and which one you are in changes what you are able to do about it. I did not know that until this conversation, and I run a practice where career coaching is one of the things we do every single day.

I want to say something before we go any further, because it shapes everything that follows. Most people who bring a work situation to our team are not confused about whether it feels bad. They know exactly how it feels. What they cannot do, from inside it, is sort out which kind of bad it is. Is this genuinely unsafe? Is this fixable? Is this actually survivable, and landing this hard on me because of something much older than this job? That sorting is close to impossible to do alone, in your own head, at eleven at night, with nobody to check your reality against.

It is very doable with someone whose entire job is helping people think clearly about their working life. That is what my career coaches do all day. So here is my promise for this article. What Dr. Jennifer Wisdom gave me in this conversation is real, and by the time you finish reading you will have language for your situation that you did not have this morning. But language is not the same thing as change. The part where you decide what to do and then actually do it on Monday, with the actual people, in the actual room, is the part almost nobody manages alone. That part is the work we do together.

What’s the difference between a hostile work environment and a toxic work environment?

A hostile work environment is a legal term. A toxic work environment is not. That is the entire difference, and it matters far more than it sounds like it should.

Jennifer stopped our conversation to explain this, and she was right to. Toxic work environment is how people talk casually about a job that is making them miserable, even when nothing about it feels casual. It does not point at anything specific. Hostile work environment points at something extremely specific. It signals that someone is claiming discrimination or harassment, and that a civil rights question may be in play.

Which means that saying this is a toxic work environment to your boss and saying this is a hostile work environment to your boss are two completely different acts. One is a complaint. The other raises a legal flag. Your boss may not know the difference either, in which case it sails right over their head. But you should know the difference, because it determines which door you are actually standing in front of. It also means the phrase is available to you deliberately, if you decide you want to escalate and make clear how serious this is.

Then she gave us the version you can actually use. Not one question. Three.

1. Is this tolerable?
2. Is this not tolerable?
3. Is this illegal?

And, critically, it can be some combination of all three. A situation can be intolerable and perfectly legal. A situation can be illegal and, on most days, tolerable. Those are different problems with different next moves, which is exactly why the question people usually ask themselves, is this bad enough, has no answer and never will.

If your honest answer is that your situation is not tolerable but also not illegal, you are in the largest category of people by a wide margin. You are also not stuck. We have a companion piece on what a genuinely toxic workplace looks like from the inside and what to do when you are in one, and it is the right next read if that is where you landed.

I will tell you what my coaches watch happen constantly. Someone spends a year asking themselves whether it is bad enough, which is a question with no answer, and burns a year of their life on it. Jennifer’s three questions are answerable. Sorting yourself into them out loud, with someone who is not inside your organization and has nothing riding on the outcome, usually takes about one conversation. For a lot of people that is the entire unlock.

What behaviors actually count as an illegal hostile work environment?

Legally, a hostile work environment involves harassment or discrimination tied to a protected characteristic, such as sex, race, religion, or pregnancy. General cruelty, favoritism, chaos, and bad management are not illegal, no matter how much damage they do to the people living through them.

Jennifer was careful here, and said more than once that she is not a lawyer. What she offered were the patterns she sees repeatedly when she is coaching people through these situations.

• Quid pro quo sexual harassment. Do this for me and I will promote you, or I will not get you in trouble, or I will not fire you.
• Hostile-environment sexual harassment. Pinups on the wall. Pervasively raunchy language. Conduct that makes the environment itself the problem rather than any single incident.
• Unlawful discrimination tied to a protected identity. Not being given the same opportunities as your colleagues. Significant pay disparity that is not explained by experience or performance and seems to track only with your gender, race, or religion.
• Pregnancy-related protections. There are specific circumstances in which a company cannot fire you solely because you are pregnant.

Her clearest example was a department that moved to a new building. All the junior people, who also happened to be women, were assigned to the basement. All the senior people, who also happened to be men, went to the top floor. When the women complained, they were told it was simply a junior and senior split, nothing more. Then a junior man was hired, and he appeared on the top floor.

Is that actionable? She would not say, because that is a lawyer’s question. But it is a perfect illustration of the sequence she walks people through. Step one, is this illegal or not. Step two, do I potentially have a case. Step three, is it worth bringing a case, or would I rather move departments, or leave.

It is worth knowing how common the non-illegal version is. In a study of 1,180 public sector employees, 71 percent reported experiencing workplace incivility within the previous five years, and roughly a third of the people instigating it were among the most powerful individuals in the organization (Cortina, Magley, Williams, and Langhout, 2001). Most of that is not illegal. All of it is corrosive. If your situation is in that enormous middle band, you have not failed a test. You are in the ordinary case, and the ordinary case still deserves a real response.

Is HR on my side, or the company’s?

HR works for the organization. Not for you. That is not a scandal and it is not a criticism of anybody who works in HR. It is simply what the function is.

Jennifer said this while going out of her way to praise her HR colleagues, more than once, and that is exactly why it landed instead of sounding cynical. Her point was structural, not personal. Everything HR looks at gets filtered through two questions: how responsible might the organization be for this, and how do we make it go away. Those are legitimate questions for someone in that role to be asking. They are just not your questions.

I said out loud on the recording that I had never really thought about it that way, and I meant it. The story most of us carry is that HR is the adult in the room, the neutral party who will look at what happened and advocate for the person who was harmed. They are not your enemy. They are also not your friend. They are on the company payroll, and that shapes what they are able to do for you.

The data on what people do next is sobering. The EEOC’s Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace found that roughly 70 percent of people who experience harassment never talk to a supervisor, manager, or union representative about it at all (Feldblum and Lipnic, 2016). Most people do not report. They absorb it, and then they carry it home, and eventually it shows up as burnout that has nothing to do with their workload.

You do not need to have a case, or a plan, or even a coherent story to talk to somebody outside your organization about this. Most people who bring a work situation to our team open with some version of I do not even know if this is worth mentioning. It always is. That first conversation exists precisely so you can say it out loud to a person who has no stake whatsoever in your company’s exposure.

How do I get legal advice I can actually afford?

Search for the best employment lawyer in your area, and call them. Most will give you a free 15 or 30 minute consultation, and that is usually enough to answer the only question a lawyer can answer for you.

This is the part of the conversation I pushed hardest on, because when someone says get outside legal counsel, the first thing I think is that legal counsel costs money, and the people in the worst work situations are frequently the people with the least of it. Her answer turned out to be the most practically useful stretch of the whole episode.

• Search for the best employment lawyer in your city or area. Most offer a free 15 or 30 minute consultation.
• Use that consultation for one thing: is there a legal issue here, do I have a case, and what are my options. Not for processing how it felt.
• If they think you have something, they can help you find representation you can actually afford.
• Many law schools run low-cost or free legal clinics.
• There are advocacy organizations serving specific groups, including services for pregnant and parenting women and services supporting Latino workers.
• If you are in a union, a grievance is the lower-cost first step.

One thing she said that I did not expect: in her experience, close to everyone she has worked with has ultimately declined to take legal action at all. Not because they had nothing. Because of the perception, accurate or not, that suing an employer marks you for future jobs and future leadership roles. She would not say whether that perception is true. She would say the perception is very strong.

Jennifer drew a line here that I want to underline, because it is the single most practical thing in this article. The lawyer answers one question, which is whether there is a case. Everything else belongs somewhere else. The anger, the second-guessing at two in the morning, the part where you cannot tell anymore whether you are the problem, the much bigger question of what you want your working life to look like on the other side of this. That is not a consolation prize, it is genuinely a different job. It is the job our career coaches do, and doing it with someone means you stop paying a lawyer by the hour to be your sounding board.

How can I improve my workplace if I’m not in charge?

More than you think, and none of it requires anyone’s permission. The moves that actually shift a work culture are small, unglamorous, and available to the most junior person in the room.

This is where the conversation turned, and it is the reason I wanted Jennifer on the show. Between put up with it and quit sits an enormous middle that almost nobody uses. Here is what she put in it.

• If you supervise anyone at all, build the bubble. You cannot control the organization. You can absolutely create a team of five that is kind, functional, and steady while everything around it is chaos. She has watched people do exactly this and hold it for years.
• Say something good about a colleague in front of another colleague. It gets back to them. Then they feel good, then you feel good, and the ambient temperature of the place changes. It is the exact inverse of the did-you-see-what-she-did-again culture most difficult workplaces run on.
• Ask clarifying questions. Help me understand what we are trying to accomplish. What would success look like here? Can we get everyone in the same room on this? The most junior person present can ask any of these.
• Move from content to process when you are stuck in a loop. I notice we are doing a lot of back and forth, and what I am giving you does not seem to be helping, and I am not understanding what you need. Can we talk about that, because it seems frustrating for both of us.
• Find a sounding board outside your chain of command. Sometimes the junior person is genuinely missing context, and an outside read catches that.
• If several of you are experiencing the same thing, organize mutual defense rather than a complaint session. There is a difference, and it matters.

She called the second one reframing, and then said, almost as an aside, that it is basic clinical psychology that happens to work in a workplace too. She is right, and it is the cheapest intervention on the list. We have written more about building positive working relationships if you want the longer version of how that compounds.

“It’s reframing. Basic clinical psychology stuff. But it works in a workplace, too.”

The mutual defense example came from her own history, and it stopped me. She was in a workplace where all the senior people were men, all the junior people were women, and the boss was openly sexist. The women took turns. When he went after one of them, another would step in, ask a question, redirect the attention. Nobody was ever defending herself alone. She described it as all of us collectively protecting each other, and the thing I keep thinking about is that the men in the room did nothing.

When your boss cannot tell you what they want

Jennifer named unclear expectations as one of the hidden culprits behind difficult work environments, and gave an example that will be familiar to a lot of people. She worked for someone who would ask for X. She would produce X, to the best of her ability. He would say that is not what I was looking for. She would ask him to help her understand what he wanted. He would say you are the expert, you should know.

Around and around, indefinitely. What she said next is the part I want every manager reading this to sit with. She has been on the other side of it. She has been the leader who did not communicate well because she was not sure what she wanted yet. And when that happens, she said, she has to make sure she does not punish the staff for not reading her mind. If she does not know what she wants, how exactly are they supposed to produce it? That is a level of self-awareness that is not common, and it is very learnable. It is also most of what we work on in emotional intelligence at work.

If you are reading this and quietly recognizing your own manager, there are signs of a toxic boss that separate someone who is struggling from someone who is genuinely doing harm. It is worth knowing which one you have.

There is research underneath all of this, and it is stronger than most people realize. Amy Edmondson’s foundational study of 51 work teams found that psychological safety, meaning a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, predicted whether teams actually learned and improved (Edmondson, 1999). Team efficacy did not. Belief in your own competence was not the variable. Whether it was safe to speak up was. Every single item on Jennifer’s list above is a small deposit into that account, which is why they work even when they feel too minor to matter.

You do not need permission to improve yourself, either

This was the thesis of the third act, and she said it plainly. You do not need permission to ask questions. You do not need permission to identify a misalignment or a miscommunication. You do not need permission to fix a process that is not working, or to write the SOP nobody wrote, or to make a checklist and offer it to your colleagues. You are not requiring anyone to use it. You are making a tool.

And you do not need permission to improve yourself. A lot of people are genuinely frustrated that their employer offers no professional development, and that frustration is fair. It is also not a reason to stay stuck. Identify the skill gap. Find the resource. Books, podcasts, online courses, Coursera. If your organization gives you even a hundred dollars a year, that is enough to start.

Her closing line on it is the one I would put on a sticky note. Six months from now, you can have done nothing and still be stuck, or you can have read a stack of things and be meaningfully better than you were. Either way, six months is going to pass. That is the whole argument for a successful career built deliberately rather than by default, and it applies whether you stay and improve the place or take everything you learned with you to the next one.

Here is the honest thing about that list. Every single item on it is easy to read and hard to do at 10am on Tuesday when your manager is being impossible and you have forty minutes before your next meeting. Knowing that you could ask a clarifying question is not the same as being the person in the room who asks it. Our career coaches spend most of their time on precisely that gap, which is not a knowledge gap. It is a nerve gap, and it closes much faster with someone in your corner than it does alone.

Why reading this article probably is not enough

I want to be honest with you about something, because I would rather say it than let you close this tab feeling briefly hopeful and then unchanged.

Everything above is real. Jennifer’s three questions work. The free legal consultation is genuinely available to you. Saying something good about a colleague genuinely does move a culture. None of that is padding.

But here is what almost always happens next. You read an article like this one. Something clicks, and you feel a flicker of relief because someone finally named the thing accurately. You make a mental note to try the clarifying question the next time it comes up. And then it comes up, and your boss uses the tone he uses, and your whole body does what it has been doing since long before this job, and you say nothing. Then you drive home and feel worse than you did before you read the article, because now you know there was something you could have done.

That is not a willpower problem and it is not a character problem. You are trying to run a brand new behavior, alone, inside the exact situation that makes the old behavior most automatic. That is the hardest possible condition for change. Almost nobody pulls it off by themselves, and the ones who do usually had somebody in their corner.

What actually works is having a person who knows your specific situation and your specific patterns. Someone you can talk to before the difficult conversation and debrief with after it. Someone who can tell you, having heard the whole story, whether you are being too sensitive or not nearly sensitive enough, which is a question you genuinely cannot answer about yourself from the inside. That is what career coaching with our team is. Not a lecture. Not a worksheet. An ongoing relationship with somebody who is actually paying attention to your working life.

If something in this article landed on something specific, that is your signal. We do free first conversations for exactly this. No pressure and no commitment, just a real conversation about what is actually happening and whether what we do here would help. We also have a range of options at different price points, including group programs and our lower-cost practicum, so cost does not have to be the thing that decides this for you.

What can a leader actually do to fix a bad culture?

Two moves, in this order. Get data, then talk to every single person.

I asked about this because so much of this country runs on small businesses led by people who were excellent at a job and then got promoted into managing humans without anybody ever teaching them how. That is not a character flaw. It is a training gap, and it is enormous.

Her first move is data. A pulse survey, an employee survey, something that tells you what is actually happening rather than what you assume is happening. She noted that leaders often avoid this precisely because they are afraid of what it will show, and her response to that fear is the best line on the subject I have heard. Better the devil you know than guessing. And the data tells you which problem you actually have, because an engagement problem, a culture problem, and a skills problem are three completely different things requiring three completely different responses.

Her second move is to talk to people. Actually talk to them. When she took over a position with 60 or 70 direct reports, she scheduled a 30 minute conversation with every one of them. Her administrative assistant pushed back and suggested doing it as a group. She said no. Individual. It took months.

What she found is the part that should stop every leader reading this. Most of those people had never once, in some cases across ten years at that organization, been asked by someone at her level what was working and what was not. Not a single time. She put every problem she heard on a whiteboard, then had to get a bigger whiteboard. Then she did something most leaders will not do: she went out to the customer groups with an honest slide deck. Here is who I am. Here is who we are. Here is everything we know is broken. Here is who we want to be, which is the best customer service in this organization.

People laughed when she said that last part, because at the time they were at the bottom. After a while, they were not. Her summary of the whole thing was that this is not a pizza party. It is seeing people as they actually are and helping them succeed. If that is the kind of leader you are trying to become, leadership coaching is built for exactly this transition, and we have written separately about how to be a good boss when nobody ever taught you.

If you lead people and something in this section made you uncomfortable, that discomfort is useful information and it is worth taking somewhere. The leaders our team works with are almost never the ones causing harm on purpose. They are the ones who suspect something is wrong on their team, have no framework for finding out what, and are afraid of what a survey would say. A first conversation with one of our leadership coaches is a low-stakes place to say that out loud before you commit to anything.

How do I know when it is time to leave a bad job?

When your values and the organization’s values are not the same, and you have tested that conclusion rather than just felt it on a bad Tuesday.

That was Jennifer’s own exit. She stayed through a flood, mold, a department chair actively undermining her, and colleagues who tried to take her staff, her space, and her equipment within the first week. What finally decided it was a harassment case she refused to drop, which ended with the offender getting a slap on the wrist. That told her what the place actually valued, as opposed to what it said it valued, and she left.

She also wrote a book about leaving, for which she interviewed more than 100 people. Not one of them regretted leaving. Some regretted not leaving sooner. If you are sitting on this decision, I would let that sit next to you for a minute.

If you are closer to the fence than the door, it is worth reading about what to do when you hate your job before you decide anything, and it is worth being honest with yourself about the best reasons for leaving a job versus the reasons that will follow you into the next one.

This is the decision people most often make alone and most often regret the timing of, in both directions. You do not need to have decided anything to talk it through, and you do not need to be in crisis to be worth an hour of somebody’s attention. A lot of the work our career coaches do is exactly this: helping someone figure out whether they are looking at a situation they can change, a situation they should leave, or a pattern they will carry with them either way. That is a very hard thing to see about yourself, and a fairly straightforward thing to see with help.

One last thing. The question you have been asking yourself, whether this is bad enough, is not a question anyone can answer, including you. Trade it for Jennifer’s three. Is this tolerable. Is this not tolerable. Is this illegal. Then take whichever answer you get and do one small thing with it this week. Ask the clarifying question. Book the free legal consult. Say something good about a colleague where somebody else can hear it. Or call us and say it out loud to a person whose only job in that conversation is you.

You have more power here than you have been told. It just does not look like the kind of power anyone taught you to recognize.

xoxo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

P.S. If you finished this and your honest reaction was that you can see your options now and you still have no idea why you are not taking any of them, that is a real and extremely common place to land. The What’s Holding You Back? Quiz was built for exactly that gap. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and it is a better use of the next ten minutes than another search at eleven at night.

Lisa Marie Bobby, PhD, LMFT, BCC, is a licensed psychologist, licensed marriage and family therapist, and board-certified coach. She is the founder and clinical director of Growing Self Counseling and Coaching, the author of Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love, and the host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast.