Given the choice, most managers would take a quiet week over a week full of complaints. A quiet team feels like a team that’s working. Nobody is upset, nobody is pushing back, and you can get on with the job.
Suzi Wear sees that quiet a bit differently. She leads Learning and Development at Xenium HR and has more than 20 years of experience in HR and leadership roles. When she joined me on Transform Your Workplace, she pushed back on the idea that a quiet team is a healthy one.
“If you’re not hearing from employees in terms of suggestions, constructive feedback, or even complaints, then you’re probably not getting the full picture,” she said. “There’s some barrier to people feeling like they can be open and honest with you or leadership.”
Every workplace has friction. Things don’t always go smoothly, and people sometimes need something they aren’t getting. If none of that reaches you, it’s still happening somewhere. That puts a lot of weight on the moment someone finally does bring a complaint to your door, and on what you do next.
What Employee Silence Tells You About Your Team
Suzi was careful not to treat every quiet person as a warning sign. Some people are naturally reserved. If you know your team members and how they tend to communicate, you have a baseline to work from.
The concern is a pattern. You hold one-on-ones, ask what’s going well and what isn’t, and you get very little back. Over long stretches, that silence is telling you something.
She also pointed out that organizations often reward certain behaviors without meaning to. People who bring ideas and stay positive tend to get opportunities and promotions. People who keep their heads down and work behind the scenes get rewarded too, often on the assumption that quiet means everything is fine. Suzi doesn’t think most of this is intentional, and some of it is entirely subconscious.
The Most Common Reactions to Employee Complaints
Complaints rarely arrive in neat, well-articulated form. As Suzi put it, “No one wakes up in the morning and is thinking, ‘Oh gosh, I hope I get some employee complaints today.’” When a concern shows up with real emotion behind it, the instinct is to make the discomfort go away as fast as possible.
She sees leaders reach for one of three reactions.
The first is to calm things down and placate. The manager offers reassurance or a quick fix before understanding the problem.
The second is avoidance. The conversation happens, but the issue is never fully addressed.
The third is defensiveness. The manager starts explaining or defending the decision that caused the frustration in the first place.
Each one is understandable. What they share is that they skip the part where the manager is present with the person and listens to learn something.
Why Emotional Complaints Get Shut Down at Work
Suzi sees a low tolerance for heightened emotion in workplaces right now. Excitement is welcome. Frustration is a different story. “Passion is appreciated as long as it’s convenient,” she said.
The trouble is that frustration often comes from the same place as enthusiasm. Someone who cares about their work and runs into a block that keeps them from having an impact may show up angry or intense. Suzi made it clear she isn’t talking about attacks or conduct that nobody should have to tolerate. She means heightened energy from someone who cares.
“If someone is expressing emotion, there is a level of trust right there that they have, and you have the opportunity in that moment to either build that trust or shut that down by how you react.”
In her view, there are no good or bad emotions, and people don’t check their humanity at the door when they come to work. The emotion is part of the information. A manager who can sit with it long enough to ask what’s driving it has a chance to learn something they didn’t know.
What to Say When an Employee Complains
Some of the most common responses make things worse. “Let’s be constructive here” is one. “You need to calm down” is another.
Suzi said that a line like “let’s be constructive” comes across as criticism of the person and is likely to escalate their emotions. The power dynamic adds to it. When you already hold authority through your title or your influence, telling someone to calm down won’t build any safety into that conversation.
What works better is acknowledging the person without judging how they showed up. Suzi suggests opening with something like this: “I’m so glad you came to me. Thanks for coming to me. I can see you’re really upset. Let’s talk about this.”
That opening helps the person settle enough to have a real conversation. From there, you can go deeper: “I can see this is really important to you. I want to understand what’s underneath this.”
Boundaries still matter. Suzi’s point is that you can set them in a calm, productive way. If someone comes in hot, the goal is to help bring the temperature down and keep your attention on what’s going on for them, rather than treating their frustration as a verdict on you.
How a Manager’s Reaction Shapes Psychological Safety
Suzi shared a story an HR manager had told her. A high-performing, dedicated employee, usually reserved, came into her supervisor’s office visibly frustrated. Leadership had made decisions that directly affected her and her team, and nobody had asked for input from the people closest to the work.
The supervisor went straight to defending the process. Leadership had been fair, they had taken time, and they couldn’t get everyone’s input on every decision.
What got skipped was the signal. This was a strong performer reacting in a way the supervisor hadn’t seen before, and that alone suggested something important was going on.
She felt defeated and got quiet. Suzi was clear that it wasn’t because she agreed. She had tried being direct and open about how she felt, but it didn’t help, and she decided to keep her mouth shut.
The same dynamic plays out in meetings, where there’s an audience. When someone takes the risk of asking a hard question or offering a different view, the way a leader responds signals to everyone there whether that’s okay. Suzi connected this to what happens when people stop engaging altogether: “At least when people are fighting, they’re engaged. But when people totally withdraw and stop talking, the relationship is over.”
That’s why she puts so much weight on leaders doing their own work first. Managers need to recognize what they’re feeling in the moment and know how to regulate it, so they can think clearly and respond with intention. A leader who gets activated and defensive in that moment usually makes it worse.
How to Handle Chronic Complainers at Work
I raised the obvious objection with Suzi. Some people complain about everything, and not every complaint is a real signal.
She agreed that patterns matter. Say you’ve listened, gathered the facts, understood how the person feels, and worked with them on next steps, and nothing ever seems to resolve. Or the person isn’t reflecting or following through on what you agreed to. That calls for a different conversation.
It starts with what you’ve observed. You’ve raised a number of concerns; here’s what they’ve been about, we’ve worked through them, and here’s what I’m seeing. Is something else going on?
Sometimes the answer is fit. Suzi has seen people take a job that looked right and then realize it doesn’t work for their life at that point. Those conversations can be positive. She has told people, “Life is too short for you to feel stuck or be unhappy. And if you feel like this isn’t the right place for you, I will support you.” If the pattern is affecting the person’s or the team’s performance, a manager also needs to be direct about expectations.
A Three-Step Process for Handling Employee Complaints
When I asked what a manager should do with a complaint that lands on their desk tomorrow, Suzi offered a simple framework.
- Reward it. This may sound counterintuitive, but Suzi says it’s especially important if you want trust and psychological safety in your workplace. Thank the person for raising the issue and for having the courage to come to you. You can admit it isn’t easy to hear and still tell them you’re glad they did. “It’s better to know than not know,” she said.
- Mine it. Ask genuinely curious questions to find out what’s actually happening. “Say more about what’s going on” is a good start. So is “Let’s talk this through so I can understand what’s actually happening.”
- Close the loop. Tell the person what happens next and why. Be honest about what you can do and what you may not be able to do. If resolving it means gathering more information or bringing other people in, take thorough steps, and then follow up with the person.
Suzi put real emphasis on that follow-through. It’s what tells an employee that coming to you was worth it, and that’s the lesson you want the rest of the team to learn, too. A team that has seen complaints handled this way has a reason to keep bringing them, which is exactly the kind of noise a manager should want.
Brandon Laws is the host of Transform Your Workplace and the VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR, an outsourced HR and payroll partner for small and mid-sized businesses in Portland, Oregon.