Your engagement results just came back. They’re bad. And your leadership team already has a list of reasons it’s not their fault.
“We’ve been through a lot of change.”
“People only left because they were offered better opportunities.”
“We operate in a softening market.”
I had a conversation this week with an HR professional at a large global company. She’d just received the results. Low response rate. Poor scores. 20% turnover.
And senior leadership had an explanation for all of it.
Here’s what that is, neurologically: cognitive dissonance.
When results contradict how we see ourselves as leaders, our brain works hard to close that gap. Not by changing behaviour. By reinterpreting the data.
A 20% turnover rate doesn’t become a signal to investigate. It becomes proof that “the market is softening.”
A low response rate doesn’t signal that people don’t feel safe to be honest. It becomes evidence that “they’ve been through a lot.”
Here’s the part that stopped me.
She knew exactly why the results were bad. Low psychological safety. People being treated as outputs, not humans.
But she didn’t feel safe to say it.
Think about that. The person whose job it is to surface the truth about the organisation’s health couldn’t speak it. Because the very thing being measured had infected the room she was sitting in.
This is what unaddressed psychological safety failure looks like. It doesn’t just show up in engagement scores. It silences the people who could fix it.
And this is before we look at what it costs.
Oxford University research using 15 million workplace surveys found that companies with the highest employee wellbeing significantly outperformed the S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq 100 in stock performance. A one-point increase in employee happiness predicted a 1.7 percentage point increase in return on assets and between $2 and $3 billion USD in additional annual profit. (De Neve, Kaats & Ward, 2023 — University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre)
I know where I’d be investing my money.
And yet this same organisation is investing in a two-day psychological safety workshop.
Here’s the problem with that. You cannot build psychological safety on top of unresolved psychosocial hazards. If incivility, disrespect, and unresolved conflict are already present, a workshop doesn’t address the foundation. It just adds a layer on top of an unsafe structure.
This isn’t a wellbeing argument. It’s a performance argument.
When your team’s prediction organ is in threat-state, it doesn’t innovate. It doesn’t problem-solve. It doesn’t speak up.
And right now, somewhere in your organisation, someone who knows what’s really going on has already decided it’s not safe to tell you.
What would it take for that person to feel safe enough to speak?
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