The Memory
A few weeks ago, I was speaking with my sister-in-law about her job at a hospital. She worked in environmental services, the team responsible for cleaning patient rooms, restocking medical supplies, and handling biohazardous materials. I expected our conversation to revolve around the physical demands of the job. Instead, she began describing something entirely different.
She told me she had repeatedly raised concerns during her employment. Some involved inappropriate behavior by another employee. Others involved favoritism, workload, timekeeping, and leadership practices that didn’t seem right. Each time she spoke up, she expected someone would listen. Instead, she described feeling increasingly dismissed.
At one point she contacted Human Resources and left a message explaining her concerns. According to her, no one ever returned her call. When she raised the harassment concerns again in a staff meeting, two other women said they had experienced similar behavior from the same person but had never felt safe reporting it. Several coworkers told her privately that they had witnessed the behavior and urged her to keep pushing back. None of them reported it themselves. She also described concerns about her immediate supervisor and how work was being assigned within the department. Eventually, after raising concerns again, she was told the organization would accept her resignation, even though she insists she had never resigned. Her employment was terminated shortly afterward.
In the weeks since her termination, she says coworkers have been texting her: work is falling behind, supplies are going missing and things are not the same without her. Whatever the full story, the organization lost someone who carried valuable knowledge about how the work actually got done, and that knowledge left with her.
What stayed with me wasn’t one incident. It was the pattern that emerged across the entire experience. It raised a question that extends beyond one hospital.
What happens when employees stop believing that speaking up matters?
Why This Matters
Most organizations say they want employees to speak up. They encourage reporting concerns, asking questions, and raising difficult issues. Employee handbooks describe open-door policies. Ethics hotlines are established. Reporting procedures are documented. Ironically, my sister-in-law told me she never received an employee handbook at all, printed or digital, when I asked. Yet policies alone do not determine whether employees feel safe using them. Employees don’t decide whether to speak in isolation. They learn through experience: both what happens when they speak and what they observe happening to others. They notice whether concerns are taken seriously, whether people are treated fairly, whether speaking up leads to meaningful action, or whether it creates unintended consequences. Over time, those experiences teach employees what speaking up costs, whether it changes anything, and what they should do the next time something goes wrong.
Voice and silence are not simply individual behaviors. They can be signals about what employees have learned from the organizational system around them.
Healthcare provides a particularly powerful example. Entire patient safety initiatives have been built around the idea that employees must feel comfortable reporting errors, questioning decisions, and speaking up when something seems unsafe. Communication openness has long been recognized as essential to protecting patients. Yet the same organizational conditions that encourage employees to report patient safety concerns also influence whether they feel safe reporting harassment, favoritism, unethical behavior, or leadership failures. The systems that protect patient voice are often the same systems that protect employee voice. It is worth remembering what my sister-in-law’s job actually was: cleaning patient rooms and handling biohazardous materials. Her working conditions were patient safety conditions. A hospital depends on employees being willing to surface information, from unsafe working conditions to infection-control risks, before leadership can respond to it.
This pattern is reflected in research on healthcare professionals. O’Donovan, De Brún, and McAuliffe (2021) found that psychological safety, supportive leadership, and feeling valued all made speaking up more likely, but their most interesting finding was about experience: people who had spoken up before and been ignored often concluded there was little point in trying again. A dismissed concern does not just go unresolved. It teaches the person who raised it, and everyone watching, what to expect next time. Organizational responses don’t merely resolve, or fail to resolve, individual concerns. They shape future voice behavior. That is the lesson every dismissed concern taught my sister-in-law.
Culture is not defined by what organizations say they value. It is defined by what employees observe when someone raises a difficult truth.
Employee Voice Is Information
Organizations sometimes interpret employee complaints as negativity, conflict, or even resistance. But employee voice is information. It tells leaders where trust may be breaking down, where policies are not functioning as intended, where communication has failed, or where people are experiencing conditions differently than leadership assumes. When organizations dismiss employee voice, they do not eliminate problems. They lose visibility into what is happening in the system. Therefore, silence, resistance, complaints, and disengagement can be viewed as diagnostic signals—information worth examining rather than simply behavioral problems to manage. Instead of asking only how to stop complaints, overcome resistance, or increase engagement, leaders can ask what those behaviors may be revealing about the conditions producing them.
Organizations rarely suffer because employees identify too many problems. They suffer because important problems remain hidden. When employee voice disappears, organizations lose more than feedback. They lose early warnings. Ethical concerns go unidentified. Process failures remain unresolved. Patient safety risks increase. Innovation slows because employees stop offering ideas. Leaders continue making decisions with incomplete information because the information never reaches them. This matters even more in a period of AI-driven change. Organizations depend on employees to flag what is breaking during implementation, and employees who have learned that speaking up is unsafe will not flag it.
Silence is expensive because organizations stop hearing what they need to know most.
A Human-Centered Lens
Over the past several weeks, I’ve found myself thinking differently about employee voice. We often frame speaking up as an individual act of courage and choice. But what if we reframed it? What if employee voice is better understood as a reflection of the organizational conditions leaders create?
Amy Edmondson writes in The Fearless Organization that “no one was ever fired for silence.” This uncomfortable reality highlights a rational calculation: employees aren’t just choosing to speak; they are weighing the cost of speaking against the safety of silence. Hierarchy, inconsistent accountability, fear of retaliation, and dismissive leadership all influence that calculation.
Organizations rarely intend to create silence. More often, they create the conditions where silence becomes the rational response.
Hierarchy plays an important role in that calculation because it creates unequal power, not unequal value. Employees naturally assess whether those with greater authority will respond fairly and whether raising a difficult concern could carry professional or interpersonal consequences. When hierarchy is paired with transparency, accountability, and psychological safety, speaking up becomes more possible. When it is paired with favoritism, inconsistent accountability, or retaliation, silence can become the safer choice.
A trauma-informed perspective helps explain why these organizational conditions matter. It shifts the burden from the employee (“Why didn’t they speak up?”) to the organization (“Have we built an environment where speaking up is safe?”). Rather than viewing voice as an individual act of courage, it recognizes employee voice as an important indicator of organizational health. As Choitz and Wagner (2021) explain, employees should have meaningful opportunities to raise concerns, identify challenges, and participate in developing solutions, especially when something is affecting their safety or ability to perform their work effectively.
Organizations often encourage employees to speak up. Trauma-informed organizations go one step further: they intentionally create the organizational conditions that make speaking up feel possible.
In other words, voice doesn’t begin with courage. It begins with conditions. Trust. Fairness. Transparency. Psychological safety. Leadership accountability. The way hierarchy is experienced. Together, these organizational conditions influence whether employees believe speaking up is worthwhile, or whether remaining silent feels safer. Employee voice is not the condition itself; it is one of the earliest observable indicators of the organizational conditions leaders have created.
Rather than simply focusing on whether employees feel safe, it is essential to understand that employees continuously observe and adapt to what happens when others speak up. When raising concerns repeatedly leads to inaction or negative consequences, silence can become a rational response to the feedback the organizational system provides.
What a Trauma-Informed Response Looks Like
Creating these conditions requires more than putting reporting procedures in place or treating employee concerns as a matter of routine HR compliance. Every response to an employee concern becomes part of the organization’s future voice system and helps maintain a vital feedback loop within the larger organizational system. Promptly acknowledging a concern signals that communication channels are active and receiving input. Conducting fair and consistent investigations demonstrates that concerns will be taken seriously regardless of who is involved. Finally, closing the loop by communicating outcomes back to the person who raised the concern completes the feedback cycle, reinforcing trust and keeping communication channels open.
These responses matter beyond the employee who raised the concern. Other employees are watching. Each response becomes information employees use to decide whether speaking up will be worthwhile in the future.
Above all, respond meaningfully when someone first raises a concern. The first person who raises a difficult truth sets the precedent everyone else watches. If that person is ignored, or quietly pushed out, no policy language will convince the next person to come forward.
Leadership Reflection
If you lead people, here are some questions worth sitting with:
- What are employees learning from how your organization responds when someone speaks?
- Are reporting systems building trust or checking a compliance box?
- Where in your organization might silence be mistaken for agreement?
- What information might your organization be losing because employees no longer believe speaking will make a difference?
Closing
Silence is rarely the absence of problems. More often, it signals that the organizational conditions for employee voice have begun to erode. Organizations rarely lose employee voice overnight. It erodes gradually, one unanswered concern, one dismissed question, and one inconsistent response at a time.
Each of those experiences teaches employees something about whether speaking up is worthwhile. Eventually, an organization can become quieter not because there is less to say, but because people have learned there is little reason to say it.
When that happens, the organization loses more than employee voice. It loses one of its most important sources of information about itself.
Employee voice is not primarily a matter of individual courage. It is an observable indicator of the organizational conditions leaders have created.
References:
Choitz, V., & Wagner, S. (2021). A trauma-informed approach to workforce: An introductory guide for employers and workforce development organizations. National Fund for Workforce Solutions. https://nationalfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/A-Trauma-Informed-Approach-to-Workforce.pdf
Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. John Wiley & Sons.
O’Donovan, R., De Brún, A., & McAuliffe, E. (2021). Healthcare professionals’ experience of psychological safety, voice and silence. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 626689. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.626689