Your employees may know exactly what’s wrong. They just won’t tell you.

Good morning. If Still Monday has become part of the Monday survival kit, thank you. Keep voting, replying, and sending it to the coworker, manager or owner who would appreciate discovering that their workplace problems are surprisingly well distributed across humanity.

Today’s story begins with something every company says it wants:

Honest feedback.

The interesting question is what happens when somebody actually provides it.

Let’s get to work.

Imagine a company has a problem.

A product launch is going badly. A process is wasting hours. A manager is creating problems. Customers keep complaining about the same thing.

Someone inside the company already knows.

Maybe several people know.

Nobody says anything.

This sounds like a communication failure.

It may actually be a perfectly rational decision.

Investors in People recently surveyed more than 1,000 employees and 500 HR leaders across UK organizations for its Trust Paradox research.

Sixty-five percent of employees said they had avoided raising or speaking openly about something at work during the previous six months.

Sixty-one percent said they regularly “cover themselves”—keeping emails, taking screenshots or otherwise protecting themselves in case something goes wrong. Nearly one-third said they do it most weeks. Investors in People

That is a remarkable amount of defensive behavior inside organizations that probably have words like trust, transparency and ownership somewhere on a wall.

What are people avoiding talking about?

According to Investors in People, the subjects include workload and burnout, manager behavior, disagreement with decisions, organizational change and ideas that challenge how work currently gets done. Investors in People

In other words:

Not trivia.

Exactly the information management needs.

The employee who knows the deadline is unrealistic stays quiet.

The technician who notices a recurring defect works around it.

The salesperson who knows customers hate the new policy complains privately to another salesperson.

The analyst who thinks the strategy is wrong decides that the meeting is not the place to discover how seriously leadership meant “challenge us.”

Everybody leaves aligned.

Wonderful meeting.

There is an uncomfortable reason this happens.

Employees learn what happens to people who bring bad news.

They watch a coworker challenge an idea and get labeled “difficult.”

They see a manager become defensive when questioned.

They notice which mistakes are treated as learning and which become career events.

Over time, people become extremely good at answering one question:

Is saying this worth the risk?

A recent Organizational Dynamics paper argues that speaking up has become harder in modern workplaces because hybrid work, increasingly fragmented jobs and algorithmic management can weaken employees’ connection to managers and make it less obvious whether anyone is genuinely listening. ScienceDirect

Hierarchy adds another problem.

Senior leaders often believe people can speak freely to them because senior leaders know they would like people to speak freely to them.

Those are not the same thing.

Investors in People notes that leaders frequently underestimate how difficult honesty becomes as status differences grow. By the time information reaches the top, much of the original challenge can already have been removed. Investors in People

This is why an “open-door policy” does surprisingly little on its own.

The door can be open.

The employee can still have watched what happened to the last person who walked through it.

For owners and managers, silence is dangerous because it creates fake certainty.

No complaints.

No disagreement.

No bad news.

Everything must be fine.

Then the customer leaves.

The employee resigns.

The project misses.

The defect becomes expensive.

And leadership asks the timeless management question:

Why didn’t anyone tell us?

There is a decent chance somebody tried.

What happened next taught everyone else something.

In the same research, 61% of employees said they cover themselves at work at least occasionally, including by keeping emails or screenshots to protect themselves from blame. Meanwhile, 82% of HR leaders said they believe employees are mostly or completely trusted to use their judgment. Investors in People

Both groups appear to be enjoying very different companies.

The trust problem does not stop lower in the org chart.

Thirty-three percent of C-suite respondents said they had avoided speaking up about mistakes they made, compared with about 14% of employees overall. Investors in People

Please continue encouraging vulnerability from the top.

After Legal reviews it.

One in five employees said their trust in the organization depends heavily on which manager they happen to have. The same proportion had hesitated to raise concerns about a manager’s behavior. Investors in People

Your company may have one culture deck.

It can still have 47 different cultures.

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Try changing one question in your next project review.

Don’t ask:

How are we doing?

You will probably receive:

Good.

Ask instead:

What do you know today that could hurt this project later?

Then stay quiet.

Do not immediately defend the plan. Do not explain why the problem is already understood. Do not punish the first person who answers by giving them ownership of fixing everything they just identified.

Your reaction to the first piece of bad news determines whether you hear the second.

That is the system.

A problem discovered Monday might require one conversation.

The same problem discovered three months later might require a refund, a rework, overtime, a lost customer or a resignation.

The financial value of speaking up often has very little to do with the idea itself.

It comes from time.

Owners already understand early detection in equipment maintenance, cybersecurity, quality control and cash flow.

Culture works similarly.

A team that tells you bad news early gives you cheap problems.

A team that hides bad news until it can no longer be hidden gives you expensive ones.

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Think about the last thing that got you fired up about your job this year. Odds are it didn't come from a report. It came from someone who does the job, saying what happened when they tried it.

So we've filled a day with people like that. 

Maya Shaff, ŌURA. Leah Walker, Adobe. Georgia Humphries, Stanley 1913. Enara Roy, Halfday. Tyler Vaught, Edelman. Josh Rangel, Ogilvy. Sarah Whittle, ex-Crocs and Duolingo. 

And that's just the first wave of speakers. 

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CEO: My door is always open. I want people to challenge me.

EMPLOYEE: I think there’s a serious problem with the launch.

CEO: We’ve already discussed this.

EMPLOYEE: Okay.

THREE MONTHS LATER…

CEO: Why did nobody raise this sooner?

EMPLOYEE: Great question.

Do you feel safe speaking up?

Watch what happens when somebody disagrees with the most senior person in the room.

Does leadership become curious?

Defensive?

Dismissive?

Does the person get invited into the next meeting?

Culture becomes much easier to measure once something inconvenient happens.

Vote below and tell us what happens where you work when somebody brings genuinely bad news.

And if you know a manager who says “I wish people would just be honest with me,” forward this issue to them.

Preferably without taking a screenshot for your records.

Although statistically...

We understand.

Technically Monday. Emotionally “just between us.”

— The Still Monday Desk