There is a particular kind of workplace silence that can look, to the untrained eye, like everything is fine.
An eerie lack of heated debates in meetings, tumbleweed blowing along the HR corridor. Conversations are pleasantly efficient. The difficult person who used to keep raising issues seems to have finally run out of steam.
Lovely.
Except no one cast a spell over the building to make everyone magically genial and easy to work with. It’s just that people have learned that speaking up is not a good use of their time.
And that is a different problem altogether.
Being heard does not mean getting your own way.
It’s probably worth getting this out of the way early.
At risk of stating the obvious, an organisation where everyone gets to say whatever they like, however they want to say it, is not a place people would want to stay for very long. Management constantly contorting itself to accommodate every idea or request would be completely unworkable.
I joined a debating club at school, and one of the very first lessons I learned was that having the right to speak doesn’t guarantee you win the round. The argument still has to win on its merits.
In the workplace, people will suggest things that are impractical, expensive, impossible or just not very good ideas. Sometimes the answer has to be no.
Being heard is about something different.
It is whether it feels worth saying something in the first place. Whether you think someone will listen properly, consider what you have said and, where possible, tell you what happens next.
In organisational research, this sits within the concept of employee voice.
The CIPD’s 2026 Employee Voice factsheet reports that around a quarter of employees experience high levels of employee silence. That means choosing not to speak up despite having something to say, often because the perceived risks of speaking up outweigh the likely benefits.
That is a lot of potentially useful information staying inside people’s heads.
Your people know things you don’t
Someone doing a job every day has access to information that may be almost invisible to those further up in the organisation.
They know which clunky process takes twice as long as everyone thinks it does, which bit of the system everybody has developed a workaround for, which air conditioner they have to kick to switch on. They know when customers have started complaining about the same issue, and when an apparently achievable deadline stopped being achievable several weeks ago. And why.
They also tend to know when someone good is fed up and putting their CV out there, when a team is too stretched to be productive or when a small irritation has become the reason people are calling in sick.
None of that information disappears if people stop raising it.
The organisation simply stops receiving it.
An employee who has stopped mentioning a problem can look remarkably similar to an employee who no longer has one.
We teach people whether speaking up is worth it
It does not usually take some enormous act of retaliation to shut this down.
It can be much more mundane.
Someone raises the same operational problem in a meeting and is told someone will look at it. A few weeks later, nothing’s been done. They mention it again and are told that everyone is aware, thank you, Diane.
Eventually, after it causes yet another problem, they raise it for a third time and get the distinct impression they are becoming a pain in the neck about it.
At that point, they understandably decide to stop mentioning it.
Too much aggro.
Six months later, the organisation is trying to work out why the same thing keeps going wrong.
The employee has not necessarily become disengaged, difficult or apathetic. They have just learned that raising issues takes nerve and effort and changes nothing.
That lesson can be a sticky one.
People learn which subjects are welcomed, which people are listened to and which conversations are likely to make their working day more difficult.
What makes this inconvenient for organisations is that people rarely send HR a helpful notification saying, “Just so you know, I have now stopped telling you things, because it’s not worth my oxygen.”
You tend to find out later.
There is a cost to not knowing.
Employee voice has been studied in part because organisations benefit when useful information flows upward.
A meta-analysis combining 85 independent samples and more than 31,000 participants found that employee voice was directly related to job performance, rather than merely another form of helpful employee behaviour.
There is a similar principle in the research around psychological safety.
Amy Edmondson’s early work found that teams where people felt safe taking interpersonal risks were more likely to ask questions, discuss mistakes and seek feedback. All massively learning behaviours. We want this stuff by the ladleful.
Translating this into human terms, there are some very everyday things at stake here.
It is obviously better if someone tells you about the mistake before it becomes a bigger, more expensive one, or when somebody can admit they don’t understand something before doing it incorrectly. It is also useful when the person doing the job tells you a process is quite ridiculous before three more departments start using it.
It’s obviously better for an experienced employee to say, “I’m struggling with this,” while there is still something you can do about it.
Which is why I get a bit irritated when being heard gets filed under the softer end of employee wellbeing.
It’s not just trust, belonging and how people feel about work, which is clearly hugely important. But it also affects the quality of the information an organisation uses to make decisions.
It is literally your insider intel.
Asking is only half of it.
Most organisations already have plenty of ways for people to express an opinion.
Engagement surveys, pulse surveys, one-to-ones, team meetings, staff forums, suggestion systems, anonymous feedback and town halls are hardly radical inventions.
Brilliant. But then what?
If I complete three surveys over eighteen months, repeatedly tell you the same thing is getting in the way of my job and never hear another word about it, you can save yourself the data centre energy for the fourth one.
It is not the same as being granted every anonymous survey wish, but you should be granted an answer.
“We looked at this, and we can’t do it because of X” is an answer.
“We can’t change that, but we can change Y” is an answer.
“This has come up several times, so we are going to test something” is an answer.
Even “we tried it, and it didn’t improve the problem” tells people that the information went somewhere and was taken seriously.
That is very different from launching another ‘have your say’ campaign into what appears to be corporate dark matter.
Managers have an awkward job.
Most employees experience company culture through a few key people, and the line manager is the most important one.
You can have an excellent speak-up policy, beautifully written values and six different feedback channels. But if somebody raises a problem with their manager and immediately gets defensiveness, irritation or a five-minute explanation of why they are wrong, or don’t understand the big picture, that is the bit they will remember.
To give the managers some latitude:
It is difficult to hear criticism of something you are responsible for without occasionally feeling criticised yourself. It is difficult to give someone your full attention when they catch you at the worst possible moment.
And sometimes you already know about the problem and have absolutely no power to fix it. You just get to be a slightly better-paid bad guy.
Being heard needs some tangible management capability behind it, like:
- Listening without immediately preparing the defence.
- Asking enough to understand what somebody is really saying.
- Knowing what you can deal with and what needs to go elsewhere.
- Explaining what will happen next.
- Disagreeing or saying no constructively without cutting off future conversations.
Those are learnable skills.
Pay attention to what you are no longer hearing.
One of the things we teach and measure within Human Upgrade is Being Heard.
It is my personal favourite area.
There are obvious wellbeing reasons for that. Feeling repeatedly dismissed, ignored, or unable to raise a problem can affect trust, belonging, and how someone experiences their life at work.
But that is only part of why it is there.
An organisation also needs to know what its people know.
The real test is not having a mechanism to speak, but whether staff believe speaking up matters, what happens when they do, and if their concerns reach the person who can act on them.
A workplace where very few problems are being raised may genuinely have very few problems. Or it may have become extremely good at putting its fingers in its ears and not hearing about them.
Those are two very different things.
If you are looking at the human factors affecting performance in your organisation, that is exactly the territory we work in at Human Upgrade at Work.
CIPD, Employee Voice factsheet, 6 April 2026
Newton, Chamberlin & LePine, “A Meta-analytic Review of Voice Behavior and its Unique Importance to Job Performance”
85 independent samples, 31,301 people.
DOI: 10.5465/ambpp.2014.17111abstract
Academy of Management Source
Amy Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999
DOI: 10.2307/2666999
SAGE source