How much does human behaviour cost your business?

Layer one: the individual.

Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2026 Report

Gallup's most recent global workplace data confirms that 16% of employees worldwide are actively disengaged. A further 64% are not engaged. Only 20% of the global workforce is performing at full capacity.

Gallup puts the cost of a single actively disengaged employee at 34% of their annual salary. Not their total package. Their salary — making this a conservative baseline.

The workings:

• Average annual salary: $70,000 (mid-range, applicable across professional and corporate environments globally)

• Cost per actively disengaged employee: $70,000 × 34% = $23,800 per year

• Actively disengaged in a 1,000-person organisation: 1,000 × 16% = 160 people

• Layer one total: 160 × $23,800 = $3.8M per year

What this excludes: the cost of the 64% who are present but not fully performing. That figure is not included in this model. The real number is higher.

Layer two: the team.

Sources: Crucial Learning, Costly Conversations, 2021 / Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Harvard Business School Press, 2009

To understand why silence is so prevalent, you first need to understand what produces it.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey — researchers at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education — spent decades studying why organisations fail to change. Their conclusion: most employees and leaders are not making decisions in service of the business. They are making decisions that remove their own fear. What they call immunity to change — a hidden competing commitment that quietly overrides the stated one.

It shows up as the performance conversation that keeps getting rescheduled. The strategic risk nobody raises in the room. The peer feedback softened to the point of uselessness.

The result is silence. And silence has a price.

The $1,500 figure — source and corroboration:

Crucial Learning's published research states directly that organisations save approximately $1,500 plus one full working day for every crucial conversation held rather than avoided. This is the primary citation.

It is independently corroborated by derivation. The same Crucial Learning 2021 study of 1,100 employees found that one in three employees estimates their silence has cost their organisation at least $25,000. The documented average duration of an avoided conversation is 15 working days.

$25,000 ÷ 15 working days = $1,667 per day.

Rounded conservatively: $1,500.

Two independent routes to the same number. The citation leads. The derivation confirms.

The scale of avoidance — Crucial Learning, 2021 study of 1,100 employees:

• 91% of employees are carrying at least one unresolved crucial conversation right now

• 93% work daily alongside someone nobody holds accountable

• 51% report avoiding a crucial conversation for at least two weeks

• 27% for a month or more

• 68% stay silent when someone is not pulling their weight

• 66% when someone performs below expectations

• 57% around disrespect in the workplace

This is not episodic. It is the permanent background condition of most organisations.

The workings:

• Daily drag cost per avoided conversation: $1,500 (Crucial Learning, direct citation; independently corroborated by derivation above)

• Conservative duration: 10 working days (against a documented average of 14+)

• People carrying at least one avoided conversation: 1,000 × 91% = 910

• Cost per episode: $1,500 × 10 days = $15,000

• Subtotal, one conversation: 910 × $15,000 = $13.6M

• Additional: conservative 30% carrying two or more simultaneously: 300 × $15,000 = $4.5M

• Layer two total: $18.1M per year

What this excludes: episodes lasting longer than 10 days (the documented average is 14+), and the compounding effect of teams where multiple people are simultaneously avoiding the same conversation.

Layer three: the organisation.

Source: McKinsey & Company, Some Employees Are Destroying Value, Others Are Building It, 2023

McKinsey research found that disengagement and attrition costs a median S&P 500 company between $228 million and $355 million every year in lost productivity. Over five years: at least $1.1 billion. Per company.

These are not broken organisations. These are the median.

The number on the P&L that isn't there.

For a 1,000-person organisation generating $350M in annual revenue:

Cost driverSourceAssumptionAnnual costActive disengagementGallup 2026160 people × $23,800$3.8MCost of silenceCrucial Learning 2021910 people × $1,500 × 10 days$13.6MConcurrent avoidanceCrucial Learning 2021300 people × $1,500 × 10 days$4.5MTotal invisible costConservative estimate$21.9M

$21.9M. That is 6.3% of revenue. Unmeasured. Unmanaged. Not on the P&L.

To be explicit about what this model does not include:

• The 64% of employees who are not engaged but not yet actively disengaged

• Attrition costs triggered by unresolved behavioural patterns

• Decisions made defensively rather than strategically

• Quality and innovation drag from teams operating in low-trust environments

• Conversations avoided for longer than the conservative 10-day assumption

The $21.9M is the floor. The actual cost is higher.

Most organisations would restructure entire divisions to recover 6% of revenue.

This one is hiding in plain sight.

What the three sources are actually describing.

Gallup, Crucial Learning, and McKinsey are measuring the same phenomenon from different angles.

What Kegan identifies as immunity to change — the psychological mechanism that makes silence feel safer than directness — Gallup measures as disengagement, and Crucial Learning traces through the cost of conversations that never happen. McKinsey aggregates the result at organisational scale.

They are not three separate problems. They are one problem, measured three ways.

The behaviour that produces defensive decisions, withheld feedback, and avoided conversations is the same behaviour that drives the disengagement that produces the McKinsey number. It compounds through every layer of the organisation — invisibly, because nobody has ever been asked to calculate it.

Why it stays off the P&L.

The reason this cost remains unmeasured is not ignorance. Most leaders are acutely aware that their organisations contain unresolved tensions, underperformers nobody has addressed, and strategic risks nobody is naming.

The reason is that measuring it requires admitting it. And admitting it raises a question organisations have not historically known how to answer: if the problem is not a skills gap, not a process failure, not a structural deficiency — but the behaviour of the people themselves — what do you actually do about it?

The organisations that address it do not do so by asking people to be more open or more accountable. They invest in the conditions and skills that make directness feel safe and worthwhile.

The question is not whether this is happening in your organisation.

You already know it is.

Statistically, it is happening right now. In multiple conversations. Across multiple teams. Carried by 91% of your people into every meeting they walked into this morning.

This is the single largest recoverable cost available to most organisations today. It should be the first line on the P&L — not the line that never appears.