The team consistently meets its targets. Deadlines are rarely missed. Employees respond to messages late at night.
Everyone seems committed, driven and willing to go the extra mile.
From the outside, it looks like a high-performing workplace.
But what if people are meeting those expectations because they're afraid of what happens when they don't?
A workplace can look successful on paper while quietly exhausting the people responsible for that success.
When High Performance Hides an Unhealthy Culture
Productivity is often treated as evidence that an organisation is functioning well. Strong results suggest effective leadership, capable employees and efficient processes.
But performance metrics reveal only part of the story. They tell us what an organisation achieves, not necessarily how those achievements are produced.
Consider two teams delivering equally strong results. In the first, employees have clear priorities, realistic workloads and the confidence to raise concerns. In the second, employees regularly work late, avoid disagreeing with management and feel that mistakes could damage their careers.
Both teams may appear productive. Their working conditions, however, are fundamentally different.
Research by Donald Sull, Charles Sull and Ben Zweig, published in MIT Sloan Management Review, found that toxic corporate culture was a powerful predictor of employee attrition during the Great Resignation. The analysis highlighted factors such as disrespectful behaviour, unethical conduct and failures to promote inclusion.
The implication is significant: organisations can achieve business results while simultaneously creating conditions that drive employees away.
Strong performance tells us what a team delivers. It doesn't automatically tell us whether the working environment is healthy.
When Being Overworked Becomes a Badge of Honour
In some workplaces, long hours are interpreted as commitment. Employees who stay late are praised for their dedication. Managers who are constantly available are seen as dependable. People who set boundaries may worry that they appear less ambitious.
Over time, excessive workloads can become normalised. The danger is that organisations begin confusing endurance with effectiveness.
A 2021 analysis by the World Health Organization and International Labour Organization estimated that working 55 hours or more per week was associated with greater risks of stroke and ischaemic heart disease compared with working 35–40 hours. These findings concern long working hours and health outcomes, not toxic workplace culture specifically. But they illustrate why sustained overwork should not be treated as a harmless sign of dedication.
An organisation may meet its quarterly targets while employees accumulate fatigue and stress. The costs may become visible only later, through health problems, absenteeism or turnover.
When someone in your organisation consistently works beyond normal hours, is it seen as a warning sign or something to celebrate?
Fear Can Produce Compliance, but Not Trust
Not every unhealthy workplace is openly aggressive. Some are characterised by subtle pressure. Employees avoid challenging decisions. Managers hesitate to admit uncertainty. Team members stay silent when they notice mistakes because raising concerns feels risky.
The workplace may appear orderly and efficient because few people openly disagree. But the absence of disagreement does not necessarily indicate trust.
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety established the importance of environments where people feel able to take interpersonal risks, such as asking questions and acknowledging mistakes. When employees fear negative consequences for speaking up, organisations may lose access to information they need to make better decisions.
Similarly, research discussed by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson in The Price of Incivility highlights how disrespectful workplace behaviour can affect employees' effort, commitment and performance.
The effects of unhealthy cultures are therefore not limited to how employees feel. They can also influence how effectively people collaborate, communicate and contribute.
A quiet, compliant team is not necessarily a trusting team. Sometimes silence reflects fear rather than agreement.
Why Wellbeing Initiatives Aren't Always Enough
Many organisations have responded to workplace stress by introducing wellbeing programmes. These may include mindfulness workshops, wellness activities, counselling resources and resilience training. Such initiatives can provide meaningful support.
But what happens when employees return from a wellbeing workshop to the same unrealistic workloads, unclear expectations and unhealthy management practices?
Research by William Fleming, published in 2024, examined individual-level employee wellbeing interventions and found little evidence of improved subjective wellbeing among participants across the interventions studied. The observational findings do not mean all wellbeing programmes are ineffective. They do suggest that individual interventions alone may be insufficient when the underlying workplace conditions remain unchanged.
An employee can learn techniques for managing stress. But those techniques cannot, by themselves, resolve persistent understaffing, unreasonable deadlines or a culture that punishes people for setting boundaries.
When addressing employee wellbeing, examine the working conditions creating pressure, not just the resources available to help employees cope.
Sustainable Performance Requires Different Questions
Organisations need to look beyond whether teams are meeting targets. They should also examine how those targets are achieved.
Are workloads manageable? Can employees raise concerns without fear? Are managers modelling healthy boundaries? Do performance expectations encourage collaboration or unhealthy competition?
These questions help distinguish sustainable achievement from results maintained through excessive pressure. They also require leaders to consider what their organisation rewards.
If employees are praised for constantly sacrificing personal time, that behaviour may become an unwritten expectation. If managers are evaluated solely on short-term output, they may have little incentive to address the human costs behind it.
Would your organisation still consider a team successful if its results came at the expense of employees' long-term wellbeing?
High Performance Shouldn't Require People to Suffer
Organisations need results. Employees need to be accountable. High standards are not inherently unhealthy.
The issue arises when achieving those standards consistently depends on fear, excessive pressure or personal sacrifice.
A healthy workplace does not mean lowering expectations. It means creating conditions where people can meet meaningful expectations without being worn down by them.
The strongest organisations are not simply those that achieve results today, but those that can continue achieving them without exhausting their people.
Perhaps the more important question for leaders is not only, "Are we performing well?"
But: "What is it costing our people to perform this way?"