Why employee voice matters for performance and trust at work

Article Summary

• What speaking up can reveal about psychological safety, trust and employee voice
• How employee silence hides the information leaders need to improve performance
• What organisations can do to turn employee voice into learning, innovation and continuous improvement

Around two-thirds of employees have avoided raising or speaking openly about something at work in the last six months, according to Investors in People’s The Trust Paradox research.

For any organisation trying to improve performance this should be a worrying statistic. Silence at work often means someone has made a judgement about the likely consequences of speaking. Employees notice how challenge is received or how managers respond when difficult issues are raised. Over time they become skilled at deciding what is safe to say and who should hear it.

Employee voice gives leaders evidence about the conditions in which people are working. It may reveal whether employees experience psychological safety in particular teams and situations, whether they trust specific people with difficult information and whether they believe the organisation will respond fairly.

Our research found that employees most avoided speaking openly about workload or burnout, manager behaviour, disagreement with decisions, ideas that challenge current ways of working and organisational change. These are not peripheral issues. They sit right at the heart of productivity, wellbeing, leadership, innovation and delivery.

What employee voice means in the workplace

Employee voice is often discussed through mechanisms such as surveys, forums, listening groups, employee representatives and feedback platforms. These have a role, especially in larger organisations where leaders need structured ways to hear from people across different teams and locations.

But voice is most revealing while work is still happening. A survey may tell leaders what people are prepared to report afterwards. Psychological safety is tested earlier, in the meeting where someone decides whether it feels safe to challenge a decision or admit a mistake.

Employee voice is one source of evidence about whether people believe it is safe and worthwhile to contribute. Speaking up may be influenced by psychological safety in the immediate situation, trust in particular people and confidence that the organisation will respond fairly.

Megan Reitz, associate fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University, puts this clearly in The Trust Paradox whitepaper:

“Trust enables people to speak up with things that matter, and to listen when people have spoken up.”

Why employees stay silent at work

Imagine someone in a meeting who can see a problem with a proposed decision. Before speaking up they make a calculation. Sometimes it is conscious and explicit but more often it is instinctive, shaped by what they have seen happen before.

If the organisation has a strong record of listening and acting fairly this risk feels manageable but, if it does not, silence becomes a form of self-protection.

The CIPD’s evidence review on psychological safety helps explain this. Drawing on the work of Edgar Schein, Warren Bennis and Amy Edmondson it shows that people need to feel secure enough to ask questions, seek help, report mistakes, raise concerns and offer suggestions without fear of negative consequences.

This is closely connected to trust but it is not the same thing. Trust is often described as a willingness to be vulnerable to others. Psychological safety is more about whether people believe others will give them the benefit of the doubt when they take an interpersonal risk.

Someone may trust their colleagues and still decide that speaking up feels too risky in a particular meeting or team. Employee silence does not tell leaders exactly what is wrong but it does tell them where they may need to look more closely.

Reitz’s and John Higgins’ work on speaking truth to power notes how senior leaders often overestimate how easy it is for people to be honest with them. Good intentions, open-door messages and listening events can all help but they do not remove the realities of hierarchy. The more senior someone becomes the more likely it is that information reaches them stripped of the challenge that made it important in the first place.

How employee voice contributes to learning and performance

Employee voice is relevant to performance because it gives organisations access to information they may otherwise miss. Formal performance data may show absence, turnover, customer outcomes or productivity trends but what it cannot always show is the lived explanation behind those patterns. By the time problems appear in formal metrics the organisation may already be dealing with the consequences.

Edmondson’s work shows that psychologically safe teams are more able to learn because people feel able to speak openly, admit mistakes and challenge assumptions. More recent research has associated psychological safety with stronger performance, often through team learning behaviour: the way people share knowledge, reflect together and adapt how they solve problems.

In other words, voice does not create value simply because someone has said something. It creates value when the organisation can hear it, make sense of it and use it to improve the work.

The Trust Paradox research shows that HR leaders already connect low trust with risks to productivity, engagement, accountability and innovation. Employee silence may make emerging problems in these areas harder to identify and address.

How employee voice supports continuous improvement

Continuous improvement depends on people being willing to share what they know. The best ideas for improving work often come from those closest to it, like the people who see where processes slow down or where customers are frustrated.

The We invest in people framework describes continuous improvement as a culture where people develop new ideas, try new ways of working and learn from their efforts, mistakes and successes. The same logic runs through empowering and involving people, creating transparency and trust, and living the organisation’s values.

Together, these capabilities show how employee voice becomes part of trust at work in practice. It is not confined to an annual survey or a feedback channel but runs through how decisions are made, how mistakes are handled, how values are lived and how improvement happens.

At social housing property services company Fortem employee voice has become part of the way the organisation works day to day. It created a central Blue Book of standardised processes, allowing people doing the work day-to-day to update how work gets done and share lessons learned. The company has made 200 changes and improvements through this approach, improving efficiency and supporting high-quality service delivery. It also created a trades group to hear directly from frontline workers about what was not working, then focused on quick fixes to show that leadership was listening.

This is the difference between collecting employee voice and using it. It is a point IIP CEO Katherine Chapman made at the Make Work Better Conference when she talked about the Improving principle: listening needs to be followed by doing something with what you hear. People need to know that raising an issue or offering an idea was worthwhile, even when the eventual answer is no. Explaining what happened and why shows that speaking up is taken seriously.

Employee voice checklist: are people speaking up where it matters?

Check out the questions below to explore whether employee voice is supporting performance and improvement.

• Early warnings: Do people raise workload, burnout or operational concerns before they escalate?
• Challenge: Are employees able to question decisions constructively while there is still time to influence them?
• Follow-through: When people give feedback, do leaders explain what happened as a result?
• Managers: Are line managers trained to listen without defensiveness and respond constructively?
• Improvement: Are employee ideas captured, tested and shared across teams?
• Mistakes: Are errors used to improve systems and processes, or treated mainly as individual failures?
• Inclusion: Are quieter groups, frontline teams and remote workers able to influence decisions that affect their work?
• Evidence: Are leaders tracking speaking-up behaviours alongside engagement and sentiment data?

Employee voice is one of the clearest ways leaders can assess whether people experience speaking up as safe and worthwhile. When people speak openly leaders gain access to the knowledge they need to improve performance. When people stay silent decisions are made with less insight than leaders realise.

When people believe it is safe and worthwhile to speak employee voice can give organisations access to knowledge that would otherwise remain hidden. What leaders do with that knowledge determines whether voice becomes learning and improvement. For leaders trying to improve performance it is information they cannot afford to miss.

Related conference session: Watch Jason Fox on fairness, equity and employee voice: the foundations of trust at Make Work Better 2026.

Sources

1. 1.CIPD, Psychological safety: An evidence review. https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/evidence-reviews/2024-pdfs/8550-psychological-safety-scientific-summary.pdf
2. 2.Megan Reitz and John Higgins, Speaking truth to power: why leaders cannot hear what they need to hear. https://doi.org/10.1136/leader-2020-000394
3. 3.Amy Edmondson, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jun., 1999). http://www.jstor.org/stable/2666999
4. 4.Edmondson and Lei, Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275070993_Psychological_Safety_The_History_Renaissance_and_Future_of_an_Interpersonal_Construct