It Is a Truth Universally Unacknowledged
Most workplaces don't have a communication problem. They have an employee who's finally clocked it, and isn't allowed to say so.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
That's Jane Austen, not me. Here's my version, two hundred years later.
It is a truth universally unacknowledged, that most organisations in possession of unhappy employees, must be in want of better communication.
I say unacknowledged on purpose. Ask most companies if they have a communication problem and they'll tell you no. They'll point to the training. The workshops. The tools they rolled out last quarter so managers could communicate more effectively. Ask the employees on the receiving end of that communication, though, and you'll get a very different answer.
There's a pattern I keep hearing about, and noticing myself, and it's depressingly consistent. Praise shows up in the middle of a project. Praise shows up again near the end. Then the monthly evaluation rolls around, or a promotion becomes a real possibility, or a bonus is due, and suddenly the language changes. The same work that was “great,” “exactly what we needed,” “really appreciated” a few weeks ago quietly becomes “needs improvement.”
Ask yourself why. There tend to be two honest answers, and neither has much to do with what the employee actually did.
Sometimes a promotion was promised somewhere along the way, informally or otherwise, but the role or the budget for it was never really there. Rather than admit that, it's easier to make the employee feel like they've fallen short, so the absence of the promotion looks like a consequence of their performance rather than a decision the company made.
Sometimes it's the bonus. Mentioned, implied, maybe outright promised, but the money isn't there when the time comes. So the story quietly shifts. It's easier to make someone feel they didn't quite earn it than to admit it was never really coming.
Either way, the employee is left holding a version of themselves they don't recognise. What's the point of going above and beyond, if the story gets rewritten the moment it's inconvenient to reward you for it?
This is where Jane Austen, of all people, comes in.
Austen has a phrase for this, or at least I've borrowed one and bent it into a phrase of my own: improper propriety. It's what happens when someone's completely valid reaction to a real situation gets rebranded as bad manners, so nobody has to deal with the actual situation.
When Mr Collins proposes to Elizabeth Bennet, she says no. Clearly, immediately, for entirely reasonable reasons. She doesn't love him, she finds him ridiculous, and she'd rather not spend her life pretending otherwise. Her family's response is not “fair enough.” Her mother is horrified. She's called headstrong, foolish, ungrateful, and threatened with being cut off entirely if she doesn't reconsider. Elizabeth's feelings aren't wrong. They're inconvenient. So the household reframes them as improper.
That's the whole trick, isn't it? You don't have to prove someone's feelings are wrong. You just need enough people around them, with enough authority, to insist that having those feelings out loud is somehow the real offence.
You don't have to prove someone's feelings are wrong. You just need enough people around them, with enough authority, to insist that having those feelings out loud is somehow the real offence.
Even Mr Darcy does it. When he proposes to Elizabeth the first time, he manages to insult her family in the same breath as declaring his love, and when she responds with exactly the anger any reasonable person would feel, he's genuinely stunned. Not because she's wrong. Because in his world, a woman is supposed to receive an offer like that gratefully, regardless of how it was delivered. Her anger wasn't improper. His delivery was. Guess who gets called difficult first.
Swap the drawing room for a performance review and you've got most workplace communication cultures.
An employee raises something reasonable. A promise that quietly vanished. A piece of feedback that arrived suspiciously on time to justify a decision that was already made. And the response isn't “that's fair.” It's “let's not make this bigger than it needs to be.” Or “I think you're reading into this a bit.” Or, my personal favourite, “let's keep things professional.” As though naming the problem is what broke the professionalism, and not the thing that caused it.
That's exactly why so many employees now quietly keep their own records. Time stamped emails. Screenshots. A paper trail nobody asked them to build but everybody ends up needing eventually. Not because they're planning to sue their employer for fun, but because they've learned, the hard way, that their version of events won't be believed unless they can prove it. There's a small community online now, people who've actually been through it, sharing what they wish they'd known and warning others before it happens to them too. That's not a coincidence. That's a whole workforce quietly gathering evidence for a story their employer insists doesn't exist.
And even the one place that was supposedly built for this doesn't feel safe anymore either. Glassdoor still says its reviews are anonymous, but since folding in Fishbowl, it now requires your real name and email just to verify an account. Enough people have flagged the discomfort with that, some leaving the platform altogether, that the promise of anonymity doesn't land the way it used to. So where do people actually go, when the internal route feels rigged and the supposedly anonymous external one doesn't feel anonymous either?
I didn't build Tonely to fix broken systems. Even a visible nudge on your phone, your desktop, or your browser, right there before you hit send, can't do that on its own. I built it because awareness has to start somewhere, and it might as well start with the person about to hit send. If leadership had to sit with their own tone before a piece of feedback went out, instead of only after an employee flagged it, I wonder how many of these conversations would look different.
So no, most workplaces probably don't have a communication problem. According to them. Their employees would beg to differ.
They're just not always in a position to say so, out loud, and keep their job.