With decades of experience helping organizations navigate change, HRTech expert Ling-Yi Tsai joins us to discuss a deeply concerning trend that’s resonating from a remote Canadian broadcaster’s office all the way to Asia’s high-pressure corporate hubs. A recent lawsuit involving an alleged unofficial “crying room” serves as a stark warning sign for leaders everywhere. Today, we’ll explore what these informal coping mechanisms reveal about a company’s culture, how the erosion of psychological safety becomes a tangible business risk, and what practical steps HR leaders must take to move from a reactive stance to proactively building healthier, more resilient workplaces.
When employees create an unofficial ‘crying room,’ what does this signal about a company’s psychological safety? Beyond being a curiosity, how should HR leaders interpret this as a business risk and what are the immediate first steps they should take to investigate the root causes?
It’s a five-alarm fire for the company’s culture. The moment an unofficial “crying room” becomes a known entity, it means employee distress has become so routine that it’s been integrated into the physical workspace. It’s a powerful, tangible symbol that psychological safety has completely broken down. People feel they have nowhere to turn and no voice to use, so they retreat into isolation. The most dangerous mindset for HR to adopt here is to dismiss this as employees not being “tough enough.” That’s a path to avoiding accountability for real harm. This isn’t about ordinary stress; it’s a sign that the workplace is creating conditions that are chronically harmful. The immediate first step is to treat this as a critical incident. You have to launch a discreet but urgent investigation, not just a broad survey. This means analyzing turnover data, absenteeism records, and disability claims, looking for patterns in specific teams or departments. It’s about triangulating the data to pinpoint the source of the distress before it leads to a full-blown crisis.
The need for such a space suggests responsibility for coping has shifted from the organization to the individual. How does this erosion of psychological safety impact business results, and what specific metrics can HR use to prove this connection to senior leadership?
That shift in responsibility is precisely where the business risk crystallizes. When an organization implicitly tells its people, “Your distress is your problem to manage,” you see a direct and measurable impact on performance. Innovation grinds to a halt because no one is willing to take a risk and fail. Collaboration suffers because trust has evaporated. People stop offering creative solutions and focus solely on protecting themselves. To prove this to leadership, you have to speak their language: data and financial impact. You can present a dashboard that connects rising sick leave and disability claims directly to a decline in that team’s productivity. You can show how a spike in turnover in a specific department costs the company hundreds of thousands in recruitment and training fees. We can even use sentiment analysis from engagement surveys, looking beyond the overall score to focus on comments related to workload, respect, and fairness, and then overlay that with performance metrics. The connection is undeniable: a psychologically unsafe environment is an inefficient and unprofitable one.
Satellite offices or remote teams can develop cultures distinct from headquarters. What subtle, informal signals—like jokes about crying or high turnover in one team—should HR look for to detect fraying psychological safety, and how can they intervene effectively from a distance?
This is one of the biggest challenges in a globalized workforce. The distance, both geographical and cultural, can obscure serious problems until they explode. The signals are often informal and subtle, hiding in plain sight. It’s the dark humor on a team’s chat channel about needing a moment in the bathroom to cry. It’s the recurring “joke” about a particular manager’s intensity. It’s when you see a consistent pattern of high turnover or repeated medical leaves in a single team that gets written off with excuses like, “they just can’t handle the pace.” These are not isolated incidents; they are data points indicating a systemic issue. To intervene from a distance, you must combine technology with a human touch. Use your HR analytics tools to flag these anomalies automatically. But an email won’t solve it. The next step has to be a targeted, high-touch intervention, like having a trusted senior HR partner conduct confidential “stay interviews” with the team, not just exit interviews after they’ve already decided to leave.
Allegations of discriminatory hiring practices or pressuring employees to return early from medical leave often point to deeper cultural issues. How can HR leaders move beyond reacting to individual complaints and proactively dismantle the systemic issues that allow such a toxic culture to persist?
Reacting to individual complaints is like playing whack-a-mole; you might solve one problem, but you’re not addressing the system that allows them to pop up in the first place. These behaviors, like keeping a secret “do not hire” list or pressuring someone on disability, thrive in cultures where hierarchy is rigid and accountability is weak. To dismantle this, HR must shift from being a reactive mediator to a proactive architect of the system. This means conducting a full audit of your hiring, promotion, and performance management processes to identify points where bias can creep in. It means implementing robust, anonymous reporting channels that employees actually trust. Most importantly, it requires training managers not just on the letter of the law but on how to lead psychologically safe teams—giving them the tools, coaching, and accountability to foster an environment where people feel safe to speak up without fear of retaliation.
To elevate mental health as a core business risk, what specific data points—beyond engagement surveys—should HR present to the board? How can they frame this not just as a ‘people issue’ but as a direct threat to performance, attrition, and potential legal exposure?
To get the board’s attention, you have to frame psychological health with the same rigor as you would financial results or operational efficiency. Move beyond engagement scores and present a consolidated risk dashboard. This should include hard data like trends in burnout-related sick leave, the costs of disability claims for mental health, and turnover rates broken down by department, showing the direct financial hit from attrition. You must explicitly connect these metrics to the organization’s legal duty of care and the rising threat of litigation, as seen in the CBC North case. Frame it this way: “Our high-pressure sales team has seen a 20% increase in stress-related leave and a 15% drop in performance over the last two quarters, creating a direct revenue risk and a potential legal liability.” This reframes the conversation from a soft “people issue” to a hard-edged business imperative that directly threatens profitability and reputation.
Do you have any advice for our readers?
My advice is to stop waiting for the formal complaint or the damning exit interview. Start listening to the informal signals your organization is sending you every single day. The jokes that aren’t really jokes, the hushed conversations, the teams with inexplicably high turnover—these are your early warning systems. Treat these subtle markers with the seriousness they deserve. Don’t just collect data; investigate the human stories behind the numbers. When your employees are forced to create their own coping mechanisms, like a “crying room,” the problem isn’t with their resilience. The problem is a system that is fundamentally broken, and it is your responsibility as a leader to fix it before it breaks your business.