Work, Reconsidered: We Say We Want Honesty at Work. Do We?

A modern-day recruitingSHEro contemplates the evolving landscape of work, framed by a city skyline and symbols of innovation and strategy.

Most organizations will tell you they want employees to speak up. Be honest. Ask questions. Challenge ideas. Share concerns before they become bigger problems. Call attention to behavior that doesn’t align with the company’s values.

Then someone actually does it.

Suddenly, the conversation isn’t about what they raised anymore. It’s about how they raised it. Their tone was wrong. Their timing was bad. They should have said it differently, waited longer, gone through another channel, or found a way to make the message easier to hear.

They’re called negative. Difficult. Disrespectful. Not a team player. Their motives are questioned. Their loyalty becomes suspect. In some cases, they’re treated differently or experience retaliation.

The issue they identified may still exist, but somehow they have become the problem.

Apparently, the invitation to be honest came with terms and conditions no one bothered to mention.

We love the idea of honesty at work. It sounds good in values statements, leadership presentations, employee surveys, town halls, and open-door policies. Words like transparency, integrity, courage, and trust show up everywhere. But the real measure of whether a workplace values honesty is not how often leaders ask employees to provide feedback. It’s what those leaders do when the feedback is uncomfortable.

What happens when someone questions a decision made by a senior leader? What happens when an employee identifies a harmful pattern, challenges a broken process, or points out that the culture people are experiencing does not match the culture being advertised?

Does leadership get curious, or does leadership get defensive?

A self-assured recruitingSHEro dressed in a black ensemble and a cape stands in an office building, gazing at the city skyline with the iconic Space Needle visible at sunset. Before her sits a clear box brimming with envelopes and employee suggestions, while a boss man in a suit is seated at a desk in the background. The scene exudes an air of mystery and concern.

A lot of workplaces seem to want honesty as long as it confirms what leadership already believes. Employees are encouraged to speak openly, but preferably in a way that is carefully worded, emotionally neutral, appropriately timed, and unlikely to require anyone with power to examine their own behavior.

That isn’t honesty. It’s agreement with a suggestion box.

Employee surveys are one of the clearest examples. Companies ask employees to be candid about leadership, communication, workload, trust, belonging, and culture. Employees take the request seriously and share what they’re actually experiencing.

If the results are positive, they become proof of a healthy workplace. They’re celebrated in meetings, included in presentations, and sometimes used to help recruit new employees.

If the results are critical, the response can be very different. Leaders question whether employees understood the survey. They blame a difficult year, organizational change, low participation, poor communication, or a handful of unhappy people. They explain why the feedback is technically incorrect instead of asking why employees experienced the workplace that way.

Sometimes an action plan is announced. Sometimes the results quietly disappear. Employees hear very little about what will change, who is responsible for changing it, or whether leadership understood the feedback in the first place.

Then another survey arrives and employees are asked to be honest again.

Why would they be?

In a vibrant office overlooking a city skyline, two individuals engage in a detailed discussion. One holds a magnifying glass, examining the recruitingSHEro rather than the broken gear and a leaking pipe on the desk. The setting exudes misdirection and lack of leadership accountability while blaming the employee who bought a concern forward with the sun casting a warm glow across the entire scene.

If people repeatedly share concerns and nothing meaningful happens, they learn that their honesty requires effort and risk from them while requiring very little from the people asking for it.

Silence does not always mean everything is going well. Sometimes silence means people have learned that speaking up changes nothing. Sometimes it means they watched what happened to the last person who tried.

Retaliation is not always as obvious as someone being fired the day after raising a concern. It can be subtle enough for everyone involved to deny it.

A person stops being included in certain conversations. Their work is examined more critically. Opportunities disappear. Their communication style suddenly becomes a concern. Someone who was previously valued is now described as having a bad attitude. Every mistake becomes evidence that leadership’s new opinion of them was right all along.

No one has to send an email saying, “We’re treating you differently because you challenged us.” People can see the pattern.

They notice who is allowed to disagree and who is not. They notice which concerns are taken seriously and which ones are turned into personality conflicts. They notice when someone reports harmful behavior and leadership spends more time dissecting that person’s tone than addressing what happened.

Eventually, the organization no longer needs to tell people to stay quiet. They will decide for themselves that telling the truth isn’t worth the risk.

To be clear, honesty is not permission to treat people badly. Being direct does not excuse cruelty, bullying, harassment, discrimination, humiliation, threats, or personal attacks. Saying “I’m just being honest” does not erase the harm caused by what someone said or how they chose to say it.

There is a difference between raising a difficult issue and using honesty as cover for harmful behavior. Accountability should apply to how concerns are communicated as well as how they are received.

Three professionals engaged in a meeting with a view of Seattle's skyline at sunset, discussing ideas around a symbolic gear centerpiece on the table that is a reminder that leadership does not listen to feedback.

Someone can raise a concern respectfully and still make a leader uncomfortable. They can question a decision without attacking the person who made it. And they can identify a problem without becoming the problem. The fact that feedback is hard to hear does not make it harmful.

A leader feeling defensive does not necessarily mean an employee communicated inappropriately.

That difference matters because tone can become a very convenient distraction. Was the employee’s tone actually harmful, or was the message simply difficult to hear? Were they disrespectful, or did they disagree without making the disagreement comfortable? Are they negative, or have they repeatedly raised a problem that no one with the authority to fix it has addressed?

Calling someone difficult is much easier than asking whether they might have a point.

If leaders genuinely want honesty, they have to develop the ability to receive it. That means listening before explaining. It means asking questions before assigning motives. It means separating the actual message from the discomfort of hearing it.

It also means responding.

Not every piece of feedback will be correct. Not every concern will lead to the outcome an employee wants, and not every suggestion can or should be implemented. But employees should know their concerns were considered, what will happen next, and why a decision was made.

“Thank you for your feedback” is not transparency when nothing follows it.

Leaders should also pay attention to what happens to the person who spoke up. Are they suddenly being excluded? Is their performance being evaluated differently? Are they being called difficult because they raised something other people wanted to avoid? Are opportunities disappearing after they questioned someone with more power?

A company cannot claim to protect honest communication while ignoring the consequences experienced by the people who communicate honestly.

In a high-stakes meeting overlooking the cityscape, two leaders express frustration as the recruitingSHEro highlights challenges in their employee engagement strategies and the lack of trust they've fostered.

Before asking employees for more feedback, leaders may need to ask themselves a few questions. When was the last time someone directly disagreed with me? How did I respond? What happened to that person afterward? When someone raises a concern, do I examine the issue or immediately evaluate their attitude? Do employees tell me what they actually think, or have they learned to tell me what I respond to well?

Most importantly, have I created a workplace where honesty is safe, or one where people have to calculate whether telling the truth is worth what it may cost them?

If the answer is unclear, the organization probably does not need another survey yet. It needs to look honestly at what happened the last time someone spoke up.

We say we want honesty at work. We can write it into our values, ask for it in surveys, and talk about it in leadership meetings. Employees find out whether we mean it when someone brings forward a concern leadership would rather avoid.

What happens to that person afterward tells everyone else whether it is safe to speak up.