Oct 26, 2026 · Comments ↓

Why nobody queues at the door marked help at work

Criticising and gossiping cost nothing at work. Helping costs time and nerve, and it usually isn't counted. Why the help door stays empty, and what changes that.

Pim de Morree of Corporate Rebels shared a simple drawing called “The lines of life”. Five doors in a row, labelled to criticise, to gossip, to get involved, to encourage, and to help.

The queue for criticising runs off the bottom of the picture. Gossip isn’t far behind. A handful of people wait to get involved, and a couple to encourage. At the door marked “to help” there’s one person, and nobody behind them.

It’s a drawing about life. It works just as well for work.

Why the queues look like that

Criticising is free. So is gossip. You can do both between meetings without changing anything about your day, and nobody expects you to follow through.

Helping costs something. Time you probably haven’t got. The worry of saying the wrong thing. And the chance that once you’ve asked, you’ll be the one they come to next time, on top of everything else you’re already carrying.

So people stay in the easier queues. Not because they don’t care, but because the help door asks more of them, and work rarely gives them anything back for it.

The help door is staffed by the same few people

Often, somebody is already standing at that door. The one who checks in on everyone. The one who covers when a colleague is struggling. The one who sorts the collection, the card and the new starter.

Through October, people who’ve trained with us talked, in our WhatsApp group, about being the strong one everyone relies on. When we asked what would actually help that person, the top answer was simply someone asking them, “what can I take off you?”

Earlier in the month, one of the top answers to what being the strong one looks like was “checking in on everyone, but nobody checks in on them”. The person at the help door doesn’t often get helped themselves. And most of what they do never shows up anywhere. We pay for the shift and take the caring for free.

Training can get people to the door

This is what mental health first aid training is for. It teaches people to notice, to ask, and to stay with someone while they answer.

It’s also where people tell us about the nerves. One learner from the third sector, with many years of frontline work behind them, wrote:

“I know that I am [an] empathic person who knows how to listen, but that doesn’t always mean that I feel confident in my responses.”

What they took from the course was “not to be scared to ask the questions” and “don’t be scared to go there”.

If someone with that much experience feels the hesitation, it’s no surprise others do too. Training helps with that. What it can’t do is give people the time, or the backing, to keep doing it. That part is down to the workplace, and it’s why mental health first aiders can’t be the whole answer.

What would put more people in the help queue

Time. A check-in rarely happens between back-to-back meetings. If you want people to help each other, leave room in the day for it.
Credit. If helping never shows up in how someone’s work is seen, people learn that it doesn’t count.
Backup. Whoever helps needs somewhere to take what they hear, and someone who has their back.
Sharing it out. If it’s always the same name at the help door, ask who else could stand there, and give them the time to do it.

None of this happens without leadership

Every one of those comes down to leadership. Time, credit, backup and sharing the load are all decided by the people who set the conditions everyone else works in. Without that, the help door stays empty however good the training is.

And the people at the top are often the furthest from what’s going on. On our courses we use Corporate Rebels’ drawing of the “iceberg of ignorance”, from a 1989 study by Sidney Yoshida. Frontline workers knew about all of the problems. Supervisors knew about three-quarters of them. Middle managers knew about fewer than one in ten, and senior leaders about 4 in 100.

It’s an old study, and the figures get shared more often than they get checked. The shape of it is why we still use it. Managers sit in the middle, often seeing the strain without the power to change what’s causing it.

That doesn’t mean it’s down to people on the frontline to go to the top and spell out what they need. The accountability sits with leadership. If leaders want people helping each other, they have to make the room for it.

The criticism queue is long because criticising is easy, and a lot of workplaces make it easier than helping. The help door doesn’t need another poster. It needs time, credit and backup for the people standing at it, and leaders who make sure they get them.

If you'd like to support this blog, you can buy me a coffee.

Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi

Comments

Loading comments…

Comments appear once I've read them. I'll put up the ones that are about the post and are useful, interesting, supportive or constructive. Anything else won't go up. Your email is never shown or shared.