The Junior-Senior Speak-Up Divide: What the Data Reveals About Hierarchy and Silence

Speaking up about workplace misconduct shouldn’t depend on where someone sits in the organisational chart. But as shown in The Culture Shifters Annual Report 26/27, it does. Junior employees are twice as likely as senior leaders to believe that speaking up is "pointless," with 54% holding this view compared to just 27% of senior leaders.

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This points to a structural problem in how organisations build trust in their reporting processes, and it has direct implications as the Employment Rights Act tightens what employers are legally expected to do.

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A confidence gap built on different vantage points

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The gap makes sense once you consider what junior and senior employees actually experience when misconduct occurs. Senior leaders are more likely to see reports through to resolution, sit in the meetings where action gets discussed, and have some influence over outcomes. Junior employees rarely get that visibility. They raise a concern and then wait, often with no clear sense of what happens next.

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Our report's wider findings support this. Only 36% of employees who experienced conflict felt it was fully resolved, and just 58% of organisations consistently monitor what happens to employees after they report a concern. For a junior employee with limited organisational power, silence after a report can look identical to inaction. Over time, that experience hardens into the belief that speaking up changes nothing.

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Christine Bonney, Head of Culture Transformation at Culture Shift, points to a related dynamic. Reporting behaviour, she notes, "is shaped less by the formal channels available and more by how 'safe' those channels are perceived to be within the organisational hierarchy." Junior staff are making constant, quiet judgments about who will see a report, how far it will travel, and how close it might get to the people involved. Where trust in that hierarchy is low, the decision not to report is made before a single word is written down.

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Dr Anna Bull, Director at The 1752 Group, adds a further layer to this. Junior employees are also more likely to experience harassment in the first place, with the risk heightened further for women and LGBTQ+ staff. Those who do report, Dr Anna notes, often only do so once the harm has become severe enough that they have no choice. The pointlessness junior staff describe is a rational response to watching how the system behaves.

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Why the junior-senior speak-up divide matters more now

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From October 2026, the Employment Rights Act requires employers to take "all reasonable steps" to protect their people from harassment, extending duties introduced under the Worker Protection Act in 2024. The Act also introduces significant new protections against third-party harassment, making employers potentially liable for harassment from clients, suppliers, patients, contractors, or members of the public, unless they can evidence that all reasonable steps were taken.

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This raises the stakes on exactly the gap this data exposes. An organisation cannot demonstrate that it is taking all reasonable steps if a large proportion of its workforce, disproportionately its junior staff, already thinks that reporting is not worth the risk. The Hunter v Lidl GB case demonstrates this. The tribunal found no risk assessment had been conducted, store managers were unaware of the company's own anti-harassment policy, and the organisation had relied entirely on employees coming forward before acting. Lidl is a large, well-resourced organisation with a legal and compliance function. The failure was a culture in which policies existed on paper but were not lived, understood, or trusted at the level where misconduct was actually occurring.

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Confidence at board level does not always reflect this. The report found 91% of HR leaders are confident they could evidence all reasonable steps if challenged today, yet only half of organisations have clear reporting processes in place and just 38% have completed comprehensive risk assessments. Confidence and capability are not the same thing, and the junior-senior speak-up divide is precisely where that gap tends to surface.

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What employers can do about the junior-senior speak-up divide

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Closing this divide requires action at both a structural and a cultural level.

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1. Give junior staff a reporting route that does not run through the hierarchy they distrust. Almost half of organisations now offer anonymous reporting, but the most common channels, HR-led, email, and line manager routes, all carry an element of non-anonymity. For a junior employee reporting a manager or someone more senior, that alone can be enough to silence them. Anonymous, two-way reporting routes remove that barrier by letting employees raise a concern without exposing their identity, while still allowing an organisation to ask follow-up questions and provide updates as a case progresses. This is precisely the kind of two-way channel that Report + Support™ is built to provide, giving employees a safe way to speak up and stay informed without ever having to reveal who they are.
2. Close the loop on what happens after a report. Junior employees do not need every detail of an investigation. They need to see that raising a concern leads somewhere. Sharing aggregated, anonymised outcomes with the wider workforce, and communicating clearly with the individual who reported, directly addresses the pointless perception that drives non-reporting.
3. Train managers specifically on how power dynamics shape reporting behaviour. Just 46% of organisations currently provide training for managers on creating psychological safety. Managers are often the first point of contact when something goes wrong, and how they respond in that moment either reinforces or dismantles a junior employee's willingness to come forward again. Structured, role-specific training, of the kind delivered through our Training Academy, gives managers the practical skills to respond well in that first conversation rather than relying on instinct.
4. Measure psychological safety rather than assuming it. Only 1 in 5 organisations actively measure psychological safety. Without that data, organisations are relying on the same confirmation bias Dr Chloë Gough describes among HR leaders who assume their people feel safe because no one has told them otherwise.

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The junior-senior speak-up divide is a trust problem, built from lived experience of what happens after someone reports. Closing it means giving junior employees reporting routes they actually believe in, and giving them proof, not just policy, that speaking up leads somewhere.

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Download and read The Culture Shifters Annual Report 26-27 for the full picture, as well as detailed insights to improve your organisation’s speak-up culture.