What’s haunting your workplace?

Tuesday 28th Oct 2025

Every team has ghosts. Unspoken conflicts. Forgotten promises. Legacies of past leaders that still impact upon behaviour. These hauntings linger in workplace culture, influencing how people think, interact and perform.

They don’t appear on engagement surveys, but you can feel them, in low trust, cautious communication or that sense that something happened here once.

Let’s name the main ghosts that still walk the corridors of many organisations.

1. The Ghost of Poor Leadership

When leadership fails, the effects outlast the leaders themselves. A manager who ruled through fear or favouritism leaves behind habits that persist:

People hesitate to speak up.
Decisions get made quietly, behind closed doors.
Compliance replaces initiative.

Even when a new leader arrives with good intentions, the team’s memory of past treatment can keep them guarded. You can’t change that with values or vision statements. You change it through consistency by showing, not telling, that the new norm is safe, fair and accountable.

2. The Ghost of Bullying

Bullying leaves emotional residue. When it’s minimised or ignored, it becomes part of the workplace culture. People remember who got away with it, who looked away and who paid the price.

These ghosts whisper: “Don’t complain. It won’t change anything.” That message spreads faster than any official values statement.

To exorcise this one, you need visible accountability. Address past harm where possible, rebuild confidence in reporting channels and make sure your HR team has the credibility to act independently of hierarchy.

3. The Ghost of Broken Trust

After redundancies, restructures or leadership scandals, trust rarely vanishes overnight, it just fractures. Then it haunts every new initiative. You hear:

“We’ve been promised this before.”
“They’ll change direction again in six months.”
“It’s safer to stay quiet.”

When trust breaks, employees protect themselves by withdrawing emotionally. Repairing it means recognising the breach openly, not pretending it didn’t happen. Small, reliable actions matter more than big gestures.

4. The Ghost of Silence

Some workplaces are haunted not by conflict but by the absence of honest conversation. People stay polite on the surface but disengaged underneath. Meetings are calm but empty. Everyone agrees and nothing changes.

Silence is usually fear in disguise. Fear of conflict, of losing face, of being labelled difficult. It thrives where psychological safety is low. You banish it by rewarding constructive dissent, by treating challenge as contribution, not threat.

Bringing the hauntings into daylight

These ghosts don’t disappear by themselves. They fade when leaders and teams bring issues into daylight through honest dialogue and psychological safety.

That means:

Talking about past pain without blame.
Re-establishing fairness and clarity in decision-making.
Giving HR and OD functions the autonomy to challenge and support.
Modelling accountability at every level.

Every workplace has a history. The question is whether it haunts your culture or becomes a source of learning and renewal.