Mikki Forbes

Employees offer input based on what prior experience has taught them. When feedback is mishandled or ignored, they adjust. Silence becomes rational. Silence itself is data. It signals breakdowns in accountability, credibility, or follow-through. HR leaders who want honest feedback must create the conditions that sustain it.

Culture fit persists because it is easy. Clear expectations require effort, discipline, and consistency. But ease is not the same as effectiveness. When organizations rely on vague notions of fit, they trade clarity for comfort and pay the price in disengagement, mistrust, and missed talent.

Engagement does not deteriorate slowly at the beginning of the year. It declines quickly and often quietly. By the end of February, HR teams are already seeing signs of disengagement that leadership did not anticipate. The issue is not that employees resist change or lack motivation. The problem is that January does not erase their memory. Employees carry the prior year with them, and they evaluate early leadership behavior through that lens. For HR, January is not a launching season. It is a credibility audit.

As the year turns, HR is expected to help every department reset by realigning priorities, stabilizing teams, and guiding leaders into the new year. Yet while HR supports the organization’s transition, its own systems, workflows, and unresolved inefficiencies are often carried straight into January.

December is often framed as a natural slowdown, yet for HR, it is rarely quiet. What actually happens is more subtle. Non-urgent work is deferred, difficult decisions are postponed, and unresolved issues are quietly carried into the new year. By January, HR is expected to implement new strategies while continuing to clean up unfinished business from the prior year. This accumulation of unresolved work becomes a silent backlog, one that undermines stability before the first quarter is even underway.

Most employees who resign in Q1 began detaching long before their resignation date. HR can help managers see the patterns and give them tools to intervene while it still matters.

Many workplace traditions often reflect the culture of the dominant group, without questioning whether that culture represents everyone at the table. What is presented as festive can unintentionally alienate. What is framed as inclusive may, in practice, be anything but.

Annual reviews feel outdated because they are. They delay feedback instead of driving it and feel more like paperwork than performance management. Performance management should not be a formality scheduled once a year and ignored the rest of the time. In modern organizations, it must be agile, responsive, and aligned with how teams actually work.