'HR should know. If they don't know, they're not doing their job'

The warning signs are everywhere, if employers know where to look.

New data shows that nearly three in five U.S. workers say their job harms their mental health at least monthly, and more than 70 percent have stayed in a job they knew was toxic.

Monster's 2026 "State of Workplace Mental Health Report" reveals a pattern that occupational health researchers say is equally prevalent in Canada: employees enduring toxic working conditions that their employers are blissfully – or willfully – unaware of, with serious consequences to the business.

“Everybody knows. What happens, though, is some people shield themselves from it,” says Arla Day, professor of occupational health psychology at Saint Mary's University.

"Upper management may not be checking in with their employees. They may think, 'Oh well, this is just business as usual.'"

Why employees stay silent about toxicity

The Monster data offers a simple reason employers stay in the dark: employees don't tell them. Seventy percent of workers say they feel pressure to appear "okay" at work even when struggling, and 37 percent say they can’t speak honestly about mental health without facing negative consequences.

According to Day, the silence is rarely accidental and is often the result of a culture of fear.

"Typically, you won't have employees going to the CEO and saying, 'We hate you, this is a toxic environment,'" she says.

"They usually just smile nicely – they may feel they can't leave and they don't want to get fired, so they're just grinning and bearing it."

Financial dependency compounds the problem, she adds; considering how current economic conditions are causing employees to increasingly engage in job hugging, employers cannot assume that employees who are unhappy will quit.

"It's usually about job insecurity – they don't think they can get a comparable job elsewhere, maybe in terms of qualification or pay and benefits," Day says.

"So, they put up with the toxicity because they're like, 'The extra $20,000 is worth it and I can deal with it.'"

However, quiet toxicity has real consequences in the form of absenteeism, presenteeism, turnover and flagging team performance. Employees in toxic workplaces may still show up, Day says, but they won’t be able to perform. Or they’re unwilling to.

Legal and business case for action

Canadian employers are not simply facing a culture problem – they are facing a legal one. Provincial occupational health and safety legislation increasingly covers psychosocial risks, and recent changes to workplace mental health regulations have created new obligations around documenting and addressing conditions that harm workers psychologically.

For Day, the message for employers is that if employees won't speak up, HR needs to look harder.

"I would argue that HR should know," she says. "If they don't know, then they're not doing their job – or they're so inundated in it that they accept things."

Increasing workloads, especially with AI being adopted in most workplaces and employee roles constantly changing, mean stress is rising, and with it, expectations. But employers need to be aware of where acceptable stress and challenge crosses over into toxicity.

The distinction, she says, comes down to pervasiveness.

"It's those chronic stressors and that atmosphere of stress and anxiety, so it's not just a project deadline," Day explains.

"There's severe job dissatisfaction. I've had people tell me they go to the door of their workplace and just start crying before they go in, because they just don't know if they can take another day."

Toxic workplace: erosion of trust in HR

Day points to organizational reputation as an underappreciated indicator of toxicity – and one closely tied to the erosion of trust in HR itself. When HR departments exist inside a culture of silence, they can coast along without knowing the reality of employee experience simply because nobody is telling them.

"Everybody around them knows. All the workers know, their family knows, the community knows, but nobody's telling,” Day says.

“Nobody trusts HR, so they're not getting the feedback."

When employees don't trust HR, leadership loses its read on workplace culture, she stresses, advocating for a participatory approach, not a top-down fix that misreads the underlying problem.

"You can't jump in with solutions until you know what the problems are," says Day. "So, listening, asking, listening, and then implementing."

When the CEO is the problem

The most difficult toxic workplace scenario, Day says, is also the most intractable: when the source of the toxicity is the person at the top. In those cases, she says, the usual solutions, such as HR escalation, management intervention and progressive discipline, simply don't apply.

She explains that often these organizations tend to survive because they hold some form of market advantage, such as a dominant position in their industry, higher-than-average wages or scarce employment opportunities elsewhere.

This can keep employees from leaving despite toxic conditions, meaning legislation may be the only lever that can cause positive change, says Day.

"Depending on how bad it is... If there are claims against them showing they're creating an unsafe work environment, those individuals may change, or at least on the surface change some things, because they're going to be faced with repercussions."