Hi All,

I am looking for some advice here. My workplace has recently become an extremely toxic, negative environment to come to for the past month. I realize a lot of people have things way worse now and are not working at all and I understand that. I am looking for individuals who are also working and facing similar issues. For the past several weeks, my co-workers as well as some upper management have become increasingly difficult, making every day a depressing, angry place to walk into.

Currently, I am one of the only employees physically at the office as most work from home. However with my duties, I cannot. I work in Admin/Assistant Office Management so they need someone here every day to handle deliveries, mail, walk-in customers, etc. Working at home is not an option for me.

I have noticed a dramatic increase on poor attitudes/poor behaviors/angry and aggressive communication from certain staff over the past several weeks more specifically. It has become an extremely uncomfortable working environment while all of this is still on-going. 2 are managers, the others are regular employees.

Some of the situations I face include: employees not responding to me (constant follow up), unnecessary or incorrect blame (specifically from 1 employee), employees constantly changing their minds on how they want tasks done, and getting mad no matter what I do, minimal or poor communication from management, I am being rushed when things do not need to be rushed, people are being pushy, demanding, disrespectful, condescending, belittling, hovering over me, grabbing items aggressively from my hands, shouting, expecting that all tasks must be done immediately and expecting immediate answers even if I do not know something. I cry several times a week in the washroom just to get a break. I barely have time to eat at work because any time I walk away from my desk, someone calls me and often needs something “asap”. I’ve tried placing boundaries and explaining to them I don’t like to be treated this way or explained that I need breaks just like everyone else but nothing has seemed to work.

I don’t see these behaviors calming down anytime soon, either. I can’t quit and have no job/no money and I also cannot just start job searching and get out of this horrible environment anytime soon because due to COVID, there are really not a lot of job postings lately. So…I have to wait it out here until I can apply elsewhere but I really do not know HOW to deal with these people anymore.

It’s causing me to lack appetite, lose sleep, create moodiness, affect my personal relationships, and it highly affects my weeknights and weekends. It just makes me increasingly miserable all the time and I have no one at work I can talk to.

I sometimes talk to my boss about it, who is the only other person here who somewhat understands these issues but unfortunately, she cannot do much aside from tell me not to take it personally…which is hard.

What do I do? Do I really just have to keep being treated this way be these people?

• This topic was modified 4 years ago by Holly.