There’s a moment in most corporate careers where an employee unexpectedly feels a knife in their back. The attack can be small, like a trusted colleague putting down your idea in a meeting. Or the betrayal can grow surreptitiously large, through whispered bitching, misplaced blame, robbed ideas, intentionally miscommunicated deadlines – or just general shafting. And, before you know it, you’re under the fluorescent office lighting looking for an easy escape.
It’s a scenario that rings true for former chief of staff Sue Gray, who in an interview with the Political Currency podcast claimed that, under Keir Starmer’s governance, Downing Street was awash with leaks about her to the media. After conferring with the then-prime minister on the matter, Gray added she was “disappointed” by Starmer’s lack of action over members of staff gathering intel and briefing journalists against her.
“I had always taken a view as a civil servant and actually as a special adviser that you should be able to speak freely in rooms,” Gray told the podcast’s interviewer Ed Balls. “It just got to the point where you know everything you say, you feel somebody is recording it,” she said.
“I think it was very difficult, and it was just affecting me and my life,” Gray added of the mutiny’s impact. “It was a very, very, very difficult period.”
The constant pulling down associated with being in public office is something few will ever experience; but that sense of office paranoia is more familiar. This June, workplace culture and performance specialist Investors in People published research that found there to be a “workplace trust gap”, where HR leaders appear to overestimate levels of trust inside their organisations.
According to the survey, 61 per cent of employees regularly kept emails and screenshots to “cover themselves” at work. Meanwhile, 65 per cent said they avoided raising or speaking openly about something at work in the past half a year. Simultaneously, one in five admitted their trust in the office heavily relied upon who their manager is.
“When employees are keeping evidence trails, avoiding difficult conversations or trying to fix mistakes quietly before telling anyone, that tells HR something important,” Eddie Salmon, the service’s chief operating officer, concluded. “It suggests people are managing risk around themselves, even in organisations where leaders may believe trust is strong.”
So, why are workers acting like they’re about to be put on trial? In some instances, it comes down to necessity. According to career coach and former recruiter Hannah Salton, backstabbing or individualistic behaviours are more likely to take place among businesses that are struggling, where risk of redundancy is rife. If the latest research is to be believed, one in three employers are set to make staff redundancies by early 2027.
“That fear and panic can lead people to look after number one,” says Salton. “If the environment feels less collaborative, then individuals are more likely to want to look out for themselves.”
Salton notes that, when it comes to survival, one of the best tools to combat cloak-and-dagger behaviour is direct communication – just because someone is shifty towards you, doesn’t mean you have to be shifty back.
“You’d be surprised how many conflicts can be moved towards a resolution with that kind of honest two-way conversation that’s done in a collaborative rather than confidential way,” she says.
“It is best to try and approach the issue, rather than let it fester. If you brush it under the carpet, resentment can build.”
Obviously, broaching something directly is quite often easier said than done, particularly if an employee is in a minority position. While an accomplished senior civil servant, Gray was also one of the few women in a No 10 environment that she has dubbed a “boy’s club”.
“That's where it comes down to kind of making a personal judgement, which is hard to do,” says Salton. “I think sometimes if you don't feel safe enough to raise it, that's understandable. You have to work out the risk of saying something vs the risk of not saying something.”
There is, however, something to be said for fact-checking your own concerns. Although instances of workplace skulduggery are seemingly on the up, employees too can be guilty of bringing their own insecurities to work: “Sometimes, people feel really paranoid and that’s valid,” says Salton. “But other times, when people feel like they need to walk on eggshells, that might just be more to do with a lack of confidence or a sense of failure.”
Ultimately, feeling fear or suspicion at the office hurts morale and productivity. Investors in People found that almost half (48 per cent) of HR leaders said they feared that performance would go down in line with the levels of trust among teams.
“If there is a toxic culture, that can really get in your head and cause you to overthink everything and almost be in fight or flight mode at work,” says Salton.
Gray stepped down as Starmer’s chief of staff in October 2024 after being caught up in rows over pay, when the press revealed her salary was higher than Starmer’s, and donations from Lord Waheed Alli. “It has become clear to me that intense commentary around my position risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change,” she said.
On an wider level, Salton says that if employees have raised concerns in a workplace over duplicitous behaviour and nothing changes, there’s no shame in heading for the door. Especially, if that workplace feels unhealthy and unsafe.
“I would personally always try and work on a situation before leaving, whether that’s a conversation with your manager or HR,” she says of the next best move.
“But if it is a toxic environment, we shouldn’t feel like we have to stay for the sake of it – you have to put your wellbeing first.”
