CEOs admit their company culture sucks

• In a poll, 52% of CEOs said their workplace culture was toxic, a 10-percentage-point jump from 2023.
• But only about one in three workers reported that their employers had a toxic culture.

You might think your job has toxic vibes. It turns out the person running your company might feel the same way.

In a recent Businessolver survey, 52% of CEOs said their workplace culture was toxic. That's a 10-percentage-point increase from 2023 and, notably, higher than the nearly one in three employees who said there was a noxious culture where they worked.

The findings on toxicity at work are significant because Businessolver found that people who said their culture wasn't beneficial were 47% more likely to report suffering mental-health issues.

But hold up. CEOs who believe they're sitting atop a bad-for-you culture would seem to be in a position to solve the problem. Right?

Yet Rae Shanahan, the chief strategy officer at Businessolver, which develops tech for managing employee benefits, told Business Insider that in many instances, company heads underestimate the impact that managers have on their teams.

She said that toxicity within an organization is about fear and that moves to reduce those feelings must start from the top.

"The CEO can't fix it, but the CEO can certainly set the stage," Shanahan said.

Young workers, in particular, could be looking to leaders to act. In the survey, 65% of Gen Zers reported a mental-health issue, while only 38% of boomers did the same.

CEOs are having a hard time, too

Businessolver also found that many corporate chiefs were struggling with their own mental-health challenges. Fifty-five percent reported having had mental-health issues in the past year, a jump of 24 percentage points from last year.

Those challenges haven't necessarily translated to a change in how those with mental-health concerns might be perceived inside organizations.

Among all survey respondents, CEOs were most likely to concur that companies regarded someone with a mental-health challenge as "weak" or a "burden." About eight in 10 CEOs said this was the company's view, while 72% of human-resources professionals and about two-thirds of workers said the same.

It's possible, Shanahan said, that some CEOs think showing empathy makes them look weak — and that they can't attend to the needs of shareholders and drive the business while trying to foster a more positive environment in the company.

"Sometimes people feel like if you talk about empathy, that you're being soft and you can't hold people accountable," she said.

The survey involved about 3,100 workers in the US — about 400 of them CEOs — and ran from mid-February to early March.

How to address the problem

Shanahan said one approach that might help companies better understand their cultures would be to treat workers more like customers. The user-experience teams that design products and services, she said, could be deployed to learn more about how an organization acts toward its employees.

That might involve digging into what happens, for example, when an employee joins the company. What types of communications do they receive? Do they get conflicting messages?

Beyond that, the fix could involve looking at what workers say will help their mental health. About nine in 10 employees said that measures like flexible working hours, open-door policies, and encouraging time away from work were important to helping fortify their mental health.

"If we have people that are performing — let's deal with the outliers, but let's treat the vast majority as adults and let them integrate their work and their home life," Shanahan said.