Employee disengagement can sometimes be a response to the working environment.
Explore what silence and withdrawal may be telling leaders.
By Ify Bamigboye, BACP Integrative Psychotherapist & Certified Executive Coach
Something changes in a team.
Meetings become quieter. Fewer people question decisions. Ideas stop coming. People who previously volunteered begin doing exactly what their roles require and little more.
Eventually someone says: “The team has become disengaged.”
Perhaps they have. But disengagement describes what we can observe. It doesn’t necessarily explain why it is happening.
A room in which nobody challenges a decision might represent complete alignment. It may also mean people have decided that challenging the decision isn’t worth it.
Recent CIPD evidence on employee voice suggests workplace silence remains a meaningful organisational issue.
And silence matters commercially because organisations rely on information moving. The employee closest to a process may spot a problem before leadership does. Someone implementing a transformation may recognise an unintended consequence. A junior member of a project team may know that an assumption no longer holds. A customer-facing employee may see a pattern long before it appears in management reporting.
If those observations don’t travel, leaders make decisions with incomplete information.
Imagine repeatedly raising concerns and seeing nothing change. Eventually, you may stop raising them.
Suggest ideas that are routinely dismissed. Eventually, you may stop suggesting them.
Watch someone challenge a senior colleague and experience negative consequences afterwards. You learn something: be careful.
Nobody has to formally tell a team not to speak. People observe. What happens to difficult information? How do leaders respond to disagreement? Who gets heard? What happens when someone admits an error? Is bad news welcomed early — or questioned until people learn to bring it late?
Teams are continually gathering information about what happens when someone takes an interpersonal risk.
Research on psychological safety has developed substantially over the past three decades. At its core is a relatively practical organisational question: do people believe they can take interpersonal risks here?
Can they say: “I don’t know.” “I think we’re getting this wrong.” “I need help.” “I disagree.” “We’ve made a mistake.”
Psychological safety does not guarantee that people will always be right. It increases the likelihood that useful information has an opportunity to surface.
Surveys have their place. So does observation.
Who participates in meetings? Who used to participate but no longer does? What happens immediately after somebody disagrees? Do the most senior voices dominate? How are mistakes discussed? What happens when difficult information moves upwards? Do employees believe feedback leads anywhere? Does challenge genuinely influence decisions or is it welcomed only when it confirms the preferred answer?
None of those observations provides a diagnosis on its own. Together, they tell you something about the environment in which the team is working.
When organisations identify disengagement, the instinct is understandably: how do we get people to engage again?
Try another question first: what might our people have learned about engaging here?
If employees believe speaking creates risk, another instruction to “speak up” is unlikely to solve it. If feedback repeatedly disappears into a void, another listening exercise may increase cynicism rather than reduce it. If leaders invite challenge but respond defensively when challenge arrives, employees will learn from the response — not the invitation.
Trust develops through experience. So does withdrawal. Before labelling a quiet team disengaged, therefore, pay attention to the silence. It may contain information you need.
MindPath Perspective
Behaviour that looks unhelpful often makes more sense when we understand the environment in which it developed.
Don’t only ask: “Why have people stopped speaking?” Ask: “What happened when they spoke before?”
Further Reading & Research
Start with a conversation.
