Organisations have become much better at asking employees what they think.
We run engagement surveys, pulse surveys and listening sessions. We create employee forums, feedback channels and opportunities to speak directly to leaders. We ask people what is working, what isn’t and what they would change.
And then, quite understandably, we focus our attention on what people tell us.
But what about the things they don’t?
Because one of the most important signals about employee experience might not be the feedback we’re receiving. It might be the feedback people have stopped giving us.
Silence doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing to say
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in Psychology & Health brings together 84 studies involving almost 35,000 people to examine the relationship between burnout, employee voice and employee silence.
The findings are interesting. Greater employee silence and lower levels of voice were both associated with higher burnout. But the relationship between silence and burnout was stronger than the relationship between voice and lower burnout.
In other words, understanding why people aren’t speaking may tell us something that simply encouraging more people to speak does not.
That’s an important distinction.
When participation in a survey falls, fewer people contribute ideas in meetings or the same handful of employees dominate listening sessions, there can be a temptation to treat it as an engagement problem. Perhaps we need to remind people to complete the survey. Make the session more interactive. Create another channel. Ask managers to encourage participation.
Sometimes those things will help.
But perhaps the more useful question is: what have employees learned about what happens when they speak?
When silence becomes a rational response
Another 2026 study involving UK employees explored something researchers call “acquiescent silence”.
It describes a situation where employees withhold ideas, information or concerns because they have come to believe that speaking up is unlikely to make a difference.
The study found links between this kind of silence and emotional exhaustion, negative workplace gossip about supervisors and intention to leave.
It isn’t difficult to imagine how that pattern develops.
Perhaps employees have raised the same issue several times and nothing has changed. Maybe they contributed to the last survey but never heard what happened as a result. Perhaps ideas disappear into a suggestion box with no explanation. Or people have watched colleagues challenge something, only to be labelled difficult or negative.
Eventually, silence can become a perfectly understandable response to experience.
That’s what makes it so important from an employee experience perspective. Employees aren’t necessarily disengaging from feedback because they don’t care. They may be disengaging because they’ve learned that contributing isn’t worth the effort.
We need to look beyond the volume of employee voice
This changes how we think about listening.
It’s easy to measure how much voice we’re generating. Survey response rates. Attendance at listening sessions. Numbers of ideas submitted. Questions asked at town halls.
But a high volume of feedback doesn’t automatically mean employees believe their voice has influence. And low levels of feedback don’t necessarily mean everything is fine.
Perhaps we need to pay more attention to the patterns around silence.
Which groups rarely contribute? What subjects generate very little discussion? Where have response rates changed over time? Do people raise concerns informally with colleagues that they won’t raise through formal channels? Are managers hearing things that never reach senior leaders? Have employees stopped talking about an issue they used to raise regularly, even though nothing has actually changed?
None of these things proves there is a problem. But they are signals worth being curious about.
Closing the loop matters more than opening another channel
We’ve written before about the importance of moving beyond simply collecting employee feedback. This research reinforces why.
If employees don’t believe speaking will lead anywhere, creating more opportunities to speak isn’t necessarily the answer.
What matters is what happens next.
That means being clear about what you’ve heard, what you’re going to do, what you’re not going to do and why. It means showing employees where their input has influenced decisions. It also means creating environments where challenge is genuinely welcomed, particularly when what people have to say is uncomfortable.
Because every interaction teaches employees something about whether speaking up is worthwhile.
Over time, those experiences shape whether people continue contributing or quietly decide there is little point.
So perhaps when we’re trying to understand employee experience, we shouldn’t only ask “What are our people telling us?”
We should also be curious about what they’ve stopped telling us, and why.
At People Lab, we help organisations build listening approaches that go beyond collecting feedback to understanding what’s really happening in the employee experience. If you’d like help turning employee insight into meaningful action, get in touch.
