As the UK marks National Inclusion Week 2026 from 14–20 September, organisations are being encouraged to build trust. But psychological safety isn’t created through a week long campaign, it’s built every day, writes Javed Thomas.
Imagine your soup arrives cold in a restaurant. Would you send it back, or quietly eat it to avoid making a fuss? Now ask yourself something harder. If your manager ignored inappropriate behaviour, if your workload became unmanageable, or if you experienced discrimination, would you feel comfortable speaking up at work?
If the answer is “probably not”, your organisation doesn’t have a feedback problem. It has a trust problem. Many organisations invest significant time in employee engagement surveys, pulse checks and listening exercises. Yet how honest are the responses? Do people genuinely say what they think? Do they feel comfortable disclosing their protected characteristics? Or do they tell employers what feels safest?
Whether employees speak up about bullying, discrimination, wellbeing, workload or simple mistakes, the underlying question is the same. Will they be listened to without fear of negative consequences? That question sits at the heart of psychological safety and increasingly, organisational performance.
Too often, silence is mistaken for satisfaction. In reality, it can signal fear – fear of negative consequences, fear that nothing will change, or simply uncertainty about how information will be used. When trust is low, people don’t stop noticing problems. They simply stop talking about them. That’s when issues remain hidden until they become grievances, resignations or tribunal claims.
WHY WORKPLACE SILENCE IS COSTING UK EMPLOYERS MILLIONS
Trust has become one of the defining workplace issues of 2026. Rising employment tribunal claims, new legal duties on employers, AI-driven workplace change and growing concerns around employee wellbeing mean organisations are under increasing pressure to create cultures where people feel safe to speak up.
The financial cost of a culture where people don’t feel safe to speak up is substantial. Research by ACAS estimates that workplace conflict costs UK employers around £100,313 per 100 employees every year through sickness absence, reduced productivity, resignations and disciplinary processes. That figure doesn’t even include legal fees or employment tribunal costs.
Separate research from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimates disengagement and presenteeism cost employers around £3,029 per employee each year. While these studies measure different things and shouldn’t be added together, they point to the same conclusion – organisations pay a significant price when employees stop speaking up.
The problem is that these costs rarely appear in one place. HR absorbs recruitment costs, managers deal with absence, Legal manages disputes and Finance signs off the invoices. Few organisations connect those costs back to the workplace culture that created them.
TRUST CAN’T BE BUILT IN A WEEK
This year’s National Inclusion Week theme – Build Trust. Navigate Change – is timely and important. But trust cannot be built during one week in September if it has been missing throughout the other 51 weeks of the year.
This is one of the challenges with awareness days and inclusion campaigns. They can spark valuable conversations, but they cannot replace consistent leadership behaviours. Employees judge organisations less by what appears in an all-staff email and more by what happens after someone raises a difficult issue.
Were they listened to? Were they supported? Did anything actually change? Those moments shape culture far more than any campaign ever will.
HOW PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY IMPROVES PERFORMANCE
Professor Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard Business School uncovered a surprising finding. The highest-performing hospital teams appeared to report more mistakes than poorer-performing teams. The difference wasn’t that they made more errors, they simply felt safe enough to admit them, allowing problems to be addressed before they escalated.
Google reached a remarkably similar conclusion through Project Aristotle, identifying psychological safety as the single most important factor underpinning successful teams. Meanwhile, the CIPD’s Health and Wellbeing at Work report found sickness absence has risen to its highest level in more than a decade, with mental ill health now the leading cause of long-term absence.
Yet fewer than one in three organisations provide line managers with training to support employees’ mental wellbeing. When people don’t feel safe speaking up, valuable information stops flowing to those who need it most. These findings suggest that equipping managers with the skills to create psychologically safe teams may be one of the most valuable investments organisations can make.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING INCLUSIVE CULTURES?
In many organisations, the responsibility for creating inclusive cultures falls disproportionately on the people with the least organisational power. Employee network members organise events alongside their day jobs, often without additional recognition. Disabled, neurodivergent and ethnically diverse colleagues are repeatedly asked to educate others by sharing deeply personal experiences.
Cassi Mecchi, Vice President of People Growth & Belonging at the Wikimedia Foundation, described this as an “extractive mindset” at a global inclusion conference this year, expecting underrepresented groups to carry the emotional labour of fixing organisational culture. Trust cannot flourish where inclusion depends on unpaid goodwill.
EMBEDDING TRUST INTO EVERYDAY PRACTICE
Trust is no longer simply a cultural aspiration, it’s increasingly a legal expectation. Since October 2024, employers have had a proactive duty to prevent sexual harassment under the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023. Employment tribunals can increase compensation by up to 25% where employers cannot demonstrate they took reasonable preventative steps.
From 1 January 2027, the Employment Rights Act 2025 will remove the statutory cap on compensatory awards for ordinary unfair dismissal claims and reduce the qualifying period for unfair dismissal protection to six months. While these reforms do not change the legal test for fairness, they increase the importance of effective people management, well-documented decision-making and addressing workplace concerns before they escalate into formal disputes.
At the same time, Employment Tribunal claims are rising sharply. According to the Ministry of Justice, single Employment Tribunal claim receipts increased by 39% in 2025/26, while the outstanding caseload grew by 55%, highlighting the increasing pressure on the tribunal system. While there are many reasons behind the increase, it reinforces the importance of identifying and resolving workplace issues before they escalate into formal disputes. An Inclusion Week email or a one-off awareness session will not, on its own, demonstrate that an organisation has embedded trust into its everyday culture.
WHY MANAGERS ARE ESSENTIAL TO BUILDING WORKPLACE TRUST
Perhaps the most important finding comes from the Chartered Management Institute. Its research found that 82% of UK managers enter management without any formal leadership training. The findings reinforce similar research from the American Management Association (AMA), which found that 51% of managers were promoted into people management without formal leadership training. So most simply manage others in the way they themselves were managed.
Yet managers shape the conversations employees remember. They determine whether people feel comfortable challenging ideas, admitting mistakes or raising concerns.
Psychological safety isn’t built by HR. It is built, or undermined in thousands of everyday conversations between managers and their teams.
GUIDANCE FOR EMPLOYERS
So what should employers do? National Inclusion Week should be viewed as a catalyst, not the strategy itself. Three practical actions can help build trust all year round:
- Make culture conversations part of existing meetings. Small, regular discussions are more effective than annual campaigns. As James Clear explains in his book Atomic Habits, new behaviours are more likely to stick when attached to routines that already exist.
- Equip managers with practical tools. Managers don’t need to become experts in every inclusion topic, but they do need the confidence and language to navigate difficult conversations.
- Measure what happens after someone speaks up. Listening is only the first step. Employees notice whether concerns are acknowledged, acted upon and followed up. Those experiences determine whether they’ll speak up again.
A sensible place to start this September during National Inclusion Week is by asking a simple question: How Psychologically Safe is your organisation really? Not how safe we assume it is, but how safe employees actually experience it to be.
You’ll know you’ve built trust when employees feel just as comfortable challenging poor workplace behaviour as they do returning cold soup in a restaurant. Until then, silence isn’t agreement. It’s hidden cost, hidden risk and information that your organisation never hears.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Javed Thomas is Founder of The Collaboratory Ltd, creator of the Culture Accelerator and founder of Race Equality Week. He also created the Green Ribbon Campaign for the City’s This is Me programme. For more information about The Collaboratory and its Culture Accelerator, click here.
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