“It was a toxic work environment.”

Either we’ve heard it from a friend, or we’ve experienced it ourselves — the fact is, toxic places to work exist. How do we know they’re toxic? And why does it matter?

In 2017, I founded ParityYEG, a nonprofit organization dedicated to getting more women to run for public office, alongside some amazing women, after more than a decade of volunteering and advocating for gender equality in politics. While we all came from vastly different backgrounds and political ideologies, we had one thing in common — we wanted more women to run for office.

The Future of Work is a growing field for tech startups and a handy, shorthand way to describe what our focus is at Areto Labs. Work spaces are not physical anymore, and this past year has accelerated the shift to remote work, which essentially means, digital work. Our straightforward answer to this is our Coach product, which equips enterprise leaders with a little bot helper in their online workspaces, like Slack and Teams, to encourage engagement, communication, conversations and empathy building.