Half of tech employees think their work culture is toxic, though companies that have taken deliberate steps to address bad behavior scored better in a recent survey.
Blind, an anonymous work talk app, asked more than 12,000 tech staffers to respond to the statement: "I consider my current workplace a healthy working environment."
Slightly more than half, 52 percent, said the survey statement was “false,” versus nearly 48 percent who responded with “true.”
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) was named the tech company with the least healthy work environment, by 48.5 percent of its employees, followed by Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) at 46.5 percent, and eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) at 44.5 percent.
Employees who consider their workplaces healthier work at LinkedIn, where 17.3 percent responded true, followed by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), at 23.7 percent, and Uber, at 29.7 percent.
After about 20,000 Google employees worldwide walked off the job in early November to protest their environment, CEO Sundar Pichai promised to end forced arbitration in cases of sexual misconduct and provide more transparency and expanded sexual harassment training.
Uber’s founder, Travis Kalanick, resigned as CEO last year after complaints about the company’s culture, and new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has pledged to turn it around. In late October, Cameron Poetzscher, Uber’s vice president of corporate development, resigned less than a month after it was reported that he was the subject of a sexual misconduct investigation, per the San Francisco Business Times.
Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), which ranked seventh on the list at 35.23 percent, also announced last month that it would end its arbitration policy in cases of sexual harassment at work, and added
a new requirement that the company’s directors and executives must disclose all romantic relationships with Facebook employees, even if the employee isn’t in their direct reporting chain.
Intel, which topped the list as the least healthy work environment according to its employees, recently said it had reached "full representation" with its diversity targets two years ahead of schedule, HR Dive reported.
Blind noted that a dysfunctional work environment, one where sexual misconduct, discrimination or micromanagement are tolerated, can lead to poor health and damage personal relationships outside of the office, and that learning how to handle a toxic team environment can mitigate its impact on health and productivity.
