Just speak up? Not that easy – but far from impossible

If you’ve ever spoken up at work, even when it felt unsafe to do so, what was the deciding factor that overrode your fear?

My choice always comes down to whether silence requires me to betray certain values I abide by. When immediate action isn’t necessary, I take the time to assess if my personal discomfort reflects a bigger, ingrained pattern of scant workplace psychological safety. And if so, whether I am willing to let that fear hold me hostage. 

Mostly, it hasn’t. But I am likely to be in the minority.

Leadership consultant Crystal Lim-Lange recently observed at a wellness event that Singaporeans don’t speak up at work, not because they are disengaged or have nothing to say, but because they are “damn smart”. 

Employees constantly suss out whether they will be rewarded or punished by seeing what happens to those who take risks, and many conclude that their workplaces may not be psychologically safe. Various commenters echoed her sentiment.

Psychological safety, a term coined by Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, is a shared belief among team members that the group is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In such settings, individuals feel confident that they won’t be embarrassed, rejected or punished for speaking up, asking questions, admitting mistakes or offering dissenting ideas. 

Many say that it’s up to the organisations, specifically senior management, to make employees feel psychologically safe at work through both structural incentives and modelled behaviour. Rightfully so.

There are, of course, some managers who erode the collective culture through toxic behaviours ranging from bullying to mood-driven whims. These figures often have power over your job and performance reviews and can create a very real climate of fear at work.

But this doesn’t mean employees have zero agency, or that they just have to suck it up and accept any culture they’re handed, even if it might feel that way. 

The bystander who looks away

Having worked at various organisations and with different bosses in Singapore, I’ve come to see that the biggest hurdle to psychological safety isn’t solely toxic leaders, though they may be the initial spark. 

A far more insidious threat is the bystander. This is the colleague who witnesses dysfunction, feels the injustice and opts for silence, often rationalising their inaction with the immutable belief that “this is just the way things are”. 

As clinical therapist Elise Dyer realised from responses to her LinkedIn posts about toxic workplace culture, the silence of the many who witness the harmful behaviour of the few and choose not to say anything is “its own kind of participation”. 

Many people stay quiet for entirely valid and understandable reasons. The problem is, that silence has hidden costs that few of them realise they’re paying. By assuming a workplace is unsafe without testing that belief or judging a culture by one negative event, employees avoid taking the risks needed to make the environment better. This collective hesitation reinforces the very lack of safety they struggle to endure.

Robust company policy, while crucial, may not resolve the informal consequences of speaking up either. This includes being labelled “difficult” or losing good assignments – the calculations you make before deciding whether to protest or stay silent.

A better solution starts with employees recognising their own agency in co-creating safety. The caveat is that shared responsibility doesn’t mean symmetrical responsibility. Even among employees, someone in a junior position or still on probation may face greater risk of speaking up than someone five years in.

That said, every action – big or small, public or private – shapes another person’s experience of the workplace. And their experience, in turn, shapes the culture that affects yours.

Do unto others...

Individuals have agency. Relationship networks have the highest impact on psychological safety in Singapore, more so than the behavioural integrity of management and organisational support, according to a 2018 study by the Great Place to Work Institute and Singapore Management University. 

In the long term, strong relationship networks build a team climate of trust and mutual respect, where people are comfortable being themselves and speaking up. 

And this climate is formed through accumulated micro-experiences: whether the person who raised a concern six months ago is still in the same good graces, or how your manager reacted the last time you flagged something yourself. Sometimes it’s a risk you observed someone taking; other times, one you took personally. Regardless, it starts from the individual.

The key here is skill.

Some might argue that speaking up is solely a matter of guts, but how you raise something affects whether it lands – and, in turn, affects whether the outcome confirms or challenges your fears. Mastering good technique, like framing and timing, won’t always trump a horrible environment, but it does help you tell the difference between a lack of results due to craft or one that comes down to culture. 

In my experience, a risk doesn’t have to be a grand gesture, but just a simple one visible enough to the right people.

Disagree with the consensus in a meeting, but don’t want to speak up? Raise your concerns privately, and let colleagues with similarly dissenting views know they have an ally even if they aren’t comfortable airing their views in public. Alternatively, if someone else speaks up, thank them privately to let them know that the risk they took didn’t go unnoticed.

These are small, low-risk ways to fight a Singaporean workplace culture of suck-thumb silence, which includes self-censorship, while providing a template for others to follow.

Feeling uncomfortable versus feeling unsafe

Of course, strengthening this muscle requires patience and practice.

A particularly overlooked obstacle, I feel, is the inability to distinguish between the natural friction of discomfort and a truly unsafe environment when we do choose to speak.

You can be uneasy because you feel vulnerable, whether it involves challenging a senior figure or proposing a potentially flawed idea. You can call it a lack of safety, but sometimes speaking up is simply the price you pay for any meaningful growth. And sometimes, you may feel anxious because your views are coloured by your experiences from a previous workplace.

So cultivate self-awareness to figure out whether your current perceptions are tethered to hearsay, past scars, or the social trope that the management is fundamentally malicious, instead of what the reality is.

When I say you have a role in creating psychological safety, I am not giving organisations a free pass or blaming employees for institutional decay. Rather, I see it as a way to take ownership of your own career and snuffing out that sense of helplessness before it sets in.

Because if you’ve ever been in a psychologically unsafe workplace, you know that ultimately what leadership strategy says matters less than what everyone else tolerates – including what they don’t do, don’t say and don’t contest, even when they have the chance to.

Each team member, intentionally or not, creates an environment they either benefit or suffer from. And if culture is a shared responsibility, then so is the power to transform it, however unevenly held. In the end, “this is just the way things are” until someone decides it isn’t.