Toxic workplace cultures are not losing the argument with the balance sheet. According to new research from Businessolver, they are currently winning it, and the gap between financial performance and employee experience is wider than most HR leaders are tracking.

Businessolver, working with research partner Edelman Data & Intelligence, surveyed 300 C-suite executives, including CEOs, CHROs, CTOs and CFOs, along with 1,000 employees across six industries for its 2026 State of Workplace Empathy study. The topline finding cuts against the assumption that culture problems eventually show up in results: CXOs leading organizations their own employees describe as toxic reported financial growth at nearly twice the rate of CXOs in non-toxic cultures. Sixty-six percent of employees overall said they trust their leaders, and that figure actually rose to 80 percent inside organizations employees described as both empathetic and toxic at the same time, a combination Businessolver’s data suggests is more common than HR leaders might assume. “Organizations are running into the trap of empathy being a buzzword instead of woven into the fabric of who they are,” said Marcy Klipfel, Businessolver’s chief engagement officer.

For HR leaders, the finding removes a comfortable assumption: that strong quarterly numbers are indirect evidence of a healthy culture. Businessolver’s data says the opposite can hold, with toxic-but-financially-strong organizations masking the workforce’s real condition until it surfaces in retention, employer brand, or legal exposure. Growth metrics as a proxy for culture health is no longer a defensible shortcut.

The original insight is what this does to a narrative HRTech covered in late June, when iHire reported that toxic workplaces were easing slightly, even as trust in HR to fix them kept falling. Read against Businessolver’s larger, C-suite-inclusive sample, that apparent easing looks less like real improvement and more like a measurement gap: self-reported softening at the edges while toxic dynamics keep pace with, or outrun, financial performance at the center. The two studies are not contradicting each other so much as measuring different layers of the same problem, and a team relying on one risks missing which layer it is looking at.

Source: GlobeNewswire