Article 4: Your open-door policy doesn't mean people feel able to walk through it

Open-door policies are one of those workplace ideas that are difficult to disagree with. A manager tells their team, “My door is always open.” A senior leader encourages employees to come and talk to them if something is worrying them. Organisations create speak-up channels, wellbeing conversations, employee forums, surveys and opportunities for people to raise concerns. The intention is usually good: we want people to know that communication is welcomed.

But I think we sometimes confuse making ourselves available with making ourselves approachable.

They are not quite the same thing.

My research into difficult workplace conversations has made me increasingly interested in the gap between an opportunity technically existing and somebody feeling able to use it. An employee can know that their manager's door is open, know that they are permitted to raise an issue and even believe that their manager genuinely wants them to do so, while still deciding that walking through that door with this particular conversation does not feel possible.

That distinction matters because when employees do not use the opportunities we provide, we can be remarkably quick to conclude that they simply chose not to speak.

An open door looks different from either side

Imagine you are a manager and you genuinely care about your team. You regularly tell people that they can come to you with problems, you make time when somebody asks to speak and you would be horrified to discover that an employee had been struggling for months because they felt unable to tell you.

From your perspective, the door really is open.

Now imagine the experience from the other side. The employee considering walking through that door may not be asking themselves whether you have said they can talk to you. They may be thinking about how you respond when somebody disagrees with you, whether you become uncomfortable when conversations become emotional, what happened the last time someone raised a concern, or whether telling you something personal might subtly change the way you see them. They may also be thinking about the fact that you allocate their work, assess their performance, influence their progression or have relationships with people elsewhere in the organisation.

None of that means you are a bad manager. It means that the relationship contains power whether either person particularly wants it to or not.

This is one of the difficulties with conversations at work. We experience the same relationship from different positions. A manager may experience themselves as supportive and approachable while an employee simultaneously experiences the conversation as risky. Both perceptions can be genuine because the consequences of the interaction are not necessarily distributed equally between them.

Opportunity is not the same as usability

This distinction becomes particularly important when we think about psychological safety. Organisations sometimes treat psychological safety as though it can be created by providing opportunities for people to contribute: inviting questions, running listening sessions, creating employee networks or encouraging managers to check in with their teams.

Those things can help, but the existence of an opportunity tells us very little about whether somebody believes they can safely use it.

Think about the familiar end of a meeting: “Any questions?”

Technically, everyone in the room has just been given an opportunity to speak. Yet whether somebody actually asks the uncomfortable question may depend on considerably more than the invitation. They may be assessing who is present, how committed the leader appears to the decision, whether anyone else seems concerned, whether there is enough time for a meaningful discussion and how challenge has been received previously.

The same applies to much more personal conversations. An employee may know perfectly well that they can request a meeting with their manager to discuss their health. The barrier may not be access to the meeting. It may be uncertainty about what happens after they disclose something they cannot take back.

This is why I think we need to distinguish much more clearly between providing access to a conversation and creating conditions in which that access feels genuinely usable.

Approachability is something other people experience

There is another uncomfortable part of this: we do not get to decide entirely for ourselves whether we are approachable.

We can intend to be. We can describe ourselves that way. We can tell people repeatedly that they can speak to us. But ultimately, approachability is experienced by the other person, and that experience is shaped less by what we say about ourselves than by what happens when people bring us things we would rather not hear.

It is relatively easy to be approachable when somebody wants advice, needs clarification or brings us a problem we can solve. The more revealing moments are when somebody tells us that we are part of the problem, challenges a decision we strongly support, gives feedback we disagree with, raises an issue we cannot easily resolve or shares something personal that makes us uncomfortable.

What happens then?

Do we listen, or immediately explain? Do we become curious, or start defending our intentions? Do we ask questions to understand the person's experience, or questions designed to demonstrate that their interpretation is wrong? Do we thank someone for raising a concern and then describe them elsewhere as difficult, negative or overly sensitive?

Most of us probably like to imagine that we respond well. I am not sure any of us can know that simply from our own perspective.

The better evidence may be what people have learned from actually talking to us.

Good intentions do not cancel power

I think this is particularly important for managers and leaders because good intentions can sometimes obscure the power embedded within workplace relationships.

A manager might think, “I would never treat somebody differently for disagreeing with me.” An employee cannot necessarily know that before taking the risk. They have to make a judgement based on previous interactions, what they have observed and how secure they feel within the relationship.

The same applies to disclosure. A manager may genuinely want employees to tell them when health, disability or personal circumstances are affecting their work. For the employee, however, disclosure can carry questions that extend well beyond whether their manager is a kind person. Will this affect how capable I am perceived to be? Will I still be considered for that opportunity? Who else will know? Will people start monitoring me differently? Will asking for an adjustment make me seem demanding? Will I regret telling them?

An open-door policy cannot answer those questions by itself.

This is where workplace conversations become more complex than simple communication exchanges. The person initiating the conversation may be exposing something about themselves while the person receiving it may have organisational authority, resources or influence over what happens next. If we ignore that imbalance, we risk expecting people to behave as though both sides enter the conversation with the same degree of security.

They often do not.

People pay attention to what happens afterwards

Perhaps the most powerful way organisations demonstrate whether speaking is genuinely welcomed is not what happens when they invite conversation, but what happens after somebody accepts the invitation.

Employees notice whether concerns disappear into a process and are never mentioned again. They notice whether someone who challenges a decision continues to be invited into important discussions. They notice whether a colleague who disclosed a health condition starts being treated as fragile, whether somebody who raised a workload issue becomes labelled as unable to cope, or whether a person who questioned something ethically uncomfortable is subsequently described as not being a team player.

They also notice the positive examples. They notice when somebody says something difficult and a leader responds thoughtfully rather than defensively. They notice when feedback results in visible change, when somebody can admit a mistake without being humiliated and when a personal disclosure is handled with discretion and respect.

Those moments teach far more about organisational openness than any policy statement.

This is why trust around difficult conversations is cumulative. Each interaction becomes evidence that informs the next person's decision. The organisation may believe it has created multiple channels for voice, but employees are also constantly evaluating whether using those channels has proved worthwhile.

Perhaps leaders need to stop asking whether their door is open

There is nothing wrong with telling people that your door is open. I would much rather work with a manager who explicitly welcomes conversation than one who makes themselves inaccessible.

But perhaps that should be the beginning rather than the evidence that the work has been done.

A more useful question might be whether people bring you things that are genuinely difficult to hear. Not just questions, requests and manageable problems, but disagreement, criticism, vulnerability, uncertainty and experiences that challenge your own understanding of what is happening.

Even then, absence of those conversations does not automatically tell us why. A team may genuinely be functioning brilliantly. But if a leader repeatedly says, “I don't understand why they didn't just come and talk to me”, I think that deserves curiosity rather than frustration.

What did the person believe would happen if they did? What had they observed previously? What power existed within the relationship? What did they stand to lose? What signals had they received, intentionally or otherwise, about the kinds of conversations that were genuinely welcome?

Because an open door is ultimately only an opportunity.

Whether somebody feels able to walk through it is shaped by everything that has happened around that door before.

And perhaps the real test of an open culture is not how often leaders tell people they can speak, but what people have learned will happen when they actually do