Every Employee has a Story

Every employee has a story. We say that as if it’s simple, but the truth is, most stories are not neat or easy. They’re jagged, heavy, and often hidden beneath the surface where no one at work bothers to look.

Think about the woman who shows up on time every single morning, her hair done, her smile rehearsed. No one knows she cried in the bathroom before her shift because her eviction notice came last week and she doesn’t know where her children will sleep. Her timecard won’t reflect that. Her personnel file won’t hold the sound of her sobbing, muffled so her kids wouldn’t hear. To her employer, she’s just “dependable.” To herself, she’s barely hanging on.

Think about the man who’s been labeled “unreliable.” He misses shifts sometimes. What no one knows is that he spends nights sitting in an ER waiting room with his sick father. He doesn’t talk about it because he doesn’t want pity. The only story his boss knows is the absence, not the love, not the fear, not the quiet endurance of a son who refuses to leave his father alone in the dark.

Think about the young employee who flinches when someone raises their voice. Everyone says she’s “too sensitive.” What they don’t know is that she grew up in a house where shouting always came before violence. Every time a manager yells, she feels her body return to that place, no matter how hard she tries to outgrow it. Her coworkers see a weakness. What I see is survival.

And what about the ones who don’t even make it into the story? The ones who leave quietly, whose desks are cleared out before anyone bothers to ask why. People assume they “found a better opportunity.” But the truth is often darker: they were broken down by neglect, crushed by indifference, silenced by a culture that made them feel like nothing they said would matter. Their stories end in silence, erased from the workplace the way people erase words from a page.

I can’t pretend I don’t carry my own story into this. I know what it’s like to feel unseen, to feel dismissed, to fight against powerful people who thought they could define me. I know the weight of discrimination. I know the anger of watching injustice be brushed aside as if it were nothing. I know the exhaustion of trying to hold on to your dignity when people in power treat you like you don’t matter. Those moments carve themselves into you. They never really leave.

And once you’ve lived that, you can never again look at another person as just “an employee.” You start to notice the cracks in their voices. The way someone’s eyes glaze over in meetings because they’re somewhere else in their head, maybe replaying a fight with their spouse or worrying about how to pay the next bill. You start to see that most of the people around you are carrying heartbreak that never makes it into polite conversation. And you wonder how much of it will ever be acknowledged before it’s too late.

We talk about “compliance,” about “policies” and “procedures,” but what we’re really talking about, or should be talking about, are people’s lives. Behind every handbook is a human being who once lost something because protections weren’t there. Behind every regulation is a memory of someone who was mistreated, overlooked, or left vulnerable. These rules exist because someone suffered, and someone finally said, never again. But still, too often, we forget.

I think of the quiet tragedies that play out in workplaces every day. The mother who loses her job because she needed too much time off for chemo appointments. The young man who quits after a racist comment was brushed aside as “just a joke.” The employee who takes their life because the weight of humiliation, silence, and pressure became unbearable. Their names are not remembered at board meetings. Their stories aren’t told in quarterly reports. They vanish, except for the ripples of grief left behind in their families, in their communities, in the hearts of the people who loved them.

And maybe that’s what devastates me most is how easy it is to erase someone’s story when it becomes inconvenient. How easy it is for a leader to say “we had to let them go” without ever saying why, without ever admitting what really broke that person down. How easy it is to treat people as numbers, forgetting that each one of them carries a history filled with scars and fragile hopes.

Every employee has a story. Some are stories of resilience, of people who keep going no matter what. Some are stories of deep hurt, of people who gave everything and were left with nothing. Most are a mixture of both. But what’s gut-wrenching is how many of those stories never get seen, never get honored, never get protected.

I don’t have the answers for all of it. But I do know this: if we want workplaces, and lives, to mean something, then we have to start looking deeper. We have to start listening. We have to stop labeling people as “lazy” or “difficult” and start asking what they’re carrying. We have to remember that humanity doesn’t stop when the workday starts.

Because in the end, a job is not just a job. It’s the place where people spend most of their waking hours. It’s where they carry their grief, their exhaustion, their love, their dreams. It’s where their stories unfold in real time, whether anyone notices or not.

And I can’t stop asking myself: how many of those stories are breaking right now while nobody sees? How many people are walking into work today smiling on the outside and dying on the inside? How many tragedies will be disguised as “performance issues,” how many heartbreaks will be written off as “bad fit,” how many lives will be dismissed as replaceable?

Every employee has a story. And some of those stories will break your heart if you let yourself truly hear them. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe we need our hearts broken, over and over again, until we remember that people are not disposable. Maybe the only way to build a world worth working in is to never forget that every person we pass has a story, fragile, painful, resilient, and real.

The only question is whether we choose to see it.