“Don’t Make a Big Deal of It” — When Overtime Becomes the Norm

Evening in the office after another long day. Nia notices that the team’s extra hours have once again gone unrecorded.

— These extra hours still aren’t being accounted for.
— Nia, don’t make a big deal of it. Everyone has to do it.

Nia hears a reason to name an unfair situation. Part of the team hears a risk to the unwritten rule that has kept everyone from standing out.

What really happened

Nia notices that extra working hours are again going unaccounted for. Other people on the team know this too, but they have developed a different strategy: keep your head down, because “everyone has to do it” and silence seems better for peace and relationships. Nia names the problem and raises it with Zofia. The issue itself is corrected, but afterwards Nia feels distance from some colleagues. From the organization’s perspective, she helped remove a problem. From the perspective of the group’s informal norm, she did something risky: she was the first person to stop staying silent. The story shows that the cost of speaking up does not end when a manager agrees that the issue was real.

What the research says

Organizational research has long shown that employees can collectively know about a problem and still not discuss it because they conclude that speaking up is risky or unlikely to change anything — organizational silence (Morrison & Milliken, 2000). Raising a problem, idea, or uncomfortable fact to someone with the power to act is itself a social behavior, not simply the transfer of information — employee voice (Morrison, 2014, 2023). Groups can also develop a feedback loop: each person sees everyone else staying quiet and takes that silence as evidence that silence is the sensible choice. That does not mean everyone accepts the situation. They may simply be making a similar calculation about the cost of being first.

How to handle it

An organization needs to handle two things separately: fix the issue that was raised, and protect the possibility of future issues being raised. Zofia can correct the overtime process and also tell the team explicitly: “This was a real problem, and it was right to raise it. Speaking up is not an act against the team.” Multiple reporting channels, regular questions about risks, and a consistent response to retaliation or social exclusion also help. The general rule is: if you want to hear about problems early, telling people to “speak up” is not enough; they need evidence that the first person who does so will not pay a social price.

How Empatyzer and Em can help

Empatyzer can help the team see that silence around a problem does not always mean agreement or lack of courage. Sometimes it protects belonging, status, and relationships. Nia has a strong impulse to name unfairness; others may calculate the social cost of standing out much more heavily. Team-level data are especially useful here: instead of focusing only on a “difficult person,” they can reveal whether the group tends to avoid issues that everybody can already see. Em can help a leader ask questions in ways that do not force one person to carry all the risk alone — for example, by gathering signals earlier and separating the issue from a judgment of the person raising it. Micro-lessons strengthen responses to employee voice that do not punish people with coldness or labels. Over time, Empatyzer helps create conditions where a problem can be named before it grows, without someone having to become “the person who makes trouble.”