Why People Don't Speak Up — and What Organisations Can Do About It

Silence in organisations is not usually the result of having nothing to say. It is usually the result of having calculated that saying it is not worth the risk.

The research on silence in organisations is remarkably consistent across cultures, sectors, and organisational types. The vast majority of employees, at some point in their working lives, become aware of information that they believe their organisation should know — a concern about safety, a suspected breach of policy, a question about the conduct of a colleague or a manager — and choose not to raise it. Not because they are indifferent to the outcome. Because they have made a judgment that speaking up carries risks they are not willing to accept.

This judgment is not irrational. It is based on evidence — accumulated through direct experience or through the stories that circulate in every organisation about what happened to people who raised concerns in the past. These stories, real or perceived, accurate or distorted, function as the primary source of information about what speaking up actually means in this organisation — far more powerful than any policy document or compliance communication about the reporting channel and its protections.

Understanding why people do not speak up is not an exercise in sympathy. It is a prerequisite for building a culture in which they do. The organisation that treats silence as a natural condition — that does not ask what it has done to create it — will not change it. The organisation that treats silence as a signal, that investigates what it reveals about the environment it has created, can change it.

What employees are actually calculating when they decide not to speak up.

The first barrier is fear of retaliation. This is the most frequently cited reason employees give for not reporting concerns — and the one that policy protections are most directly designed to address. But policy protections operate in the formal system. The retaliation that employees actually fear is largely informal: the shifted relationship with a manager, the exclusion from a project, the performance review that subtly reflects a changed dynamic, the reputation as a troublemaker that follows someone into their next role. These forms of retaliation are real, they are common, and they are very difficult to prove or remedy under formal protection mechanisms.

The second barrier is fear of being wrong. Many employees who observe something concerning are uncertain whether what they have seen constitutes a genuine problem. They wonder whether they have misunderstood the situation, whether they are overreacting, whether raising a concern that turns out to have an innocent explanation will make them look foolish or disloyal. This uncertainty is particularly powerful in ambiguous situations — which are precisely the situations where early reporting would be most valuable.

The third barrier is futility — the belief that nothing will happen as a result of raising the concern. This is perhaps the most corrosive of all the barriers, because it is often learned from experience. The employee who has raised a concern before and received no feedback, no visible follow-up, and no outcome has been taught, as effectively as any training could teach them, that the channel is not real. They will not use it again. And they will tell others what they learned.

The fourth barrier is loyalty — the genuine reluctance to report on a colleague, a manager, or a team that one feels connection to. This is not weakness. It is a natural human response to the complexity of workplace relationships. The compliance programme that treats loyalty as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a human reality to be engaged with has not understood the people it is trying to reach.

The fifth barrier is not knowing how. Employees who are uncertain about what constitutes a reportable concern, who do not know what will happen when they report, and who have not been given the language or the practical tools to raise a concern effectively are less likely to use a system whose operation they cannot predict.

Addressing the barriers requires different interventions for different causes.

Fear of retaliation is addressed not primarily through policy but through demonstrated protection. The organisation that can point to cases — even in anonymised form — where a person raised a concern, was protected, and was seen to be protected has provided the most powerful available counter-evidence to the fear. The organisation that cannot point to any such case has not demonstrated protection, regardless of what the policy says.

Fear of being wrong is addressed through normalising the raising of concerns that turn out to be unfounded. An organisation that celebrates the act of raising a concern — regardless of outcome — as evidence of the kind of engagement it wants, and that does not treat reporters whose concerns are not substantiated as having wasted the compliance function's time, creates an environment where the threshold for reporting feels lower and more achievable.

Futility is addressed only by closing the feedback loop. Every person who reports a concern should receive acknowledgement, meaningful follow-up at an appropriate point, and where confidentiality allows, an indication of what happened as a result. This is not only a legal requirement under the EU Whistleblower Directive — it is the single most important operational element for maintaining a speak-up system's credibility over time.