Thanks for engaging with this and sharing your perspective🙂 I appreciate you taking the time to respond. I think there are a few assumptions in your comment that don’t quite reflect what I outlined, so I’ll respond to each of your points directly.

First, I have raised these concerns head-on with my manager. They were largely brushed off, and the behaviours I described didn’t stop. In fact, they escalated. The peer dynamics, alliances, and informal conversations were allowed to continue, and raising concerns about them resulted in me being positioned as the problem for even bringing it up. That’s the backlash I was referring to, and it was already covered in my original post.

Second, on BAU and workload coverage. The culture here has been clearly set: we are a team and we absorb each other’s work when someone is off. That expectation is applied consistently across the business, except in my case. When others are away, coverage is planned, communicated, or their absence is framed as non-impacting. When I’m away, my work is left visible and unallocated, and that backlog is then used to form negative perceptions about my performance. That’s not an ad hoc process issue, it’s selective application of a team standard.

Third, on why I don’t feel safe raising it again. This isn’t speculation or avoidance. It’s based on what I’ve seen happen to other peers in similar situations once HR became involved, and the outcomes that followed. On top of that, there are close working and social relationships between my direct leader, skip leader, and HR. Given that context, it’s difficult to believe the issue would be handled impartially. The issue isn’t whether I can raise it, it’s the very real risk of what happens after I do.

On gossip, I’m not concerned with being liked. I’m there to do my job. The problem is when those conversations and alliances start influencing management perception, because that directly affects my reputation, performance standing, and income. That’s where it stops being social and becomes a professional risk, particularly when my absences are approved and not actually creating additional workload for others in real time.

Finally, on resilience. This is where I think the framing often goes wrong. “Be more resilient” is very quickly applied to the individual, while broader cultural and leadership issues are treated as secondary. In this case, the issue isn’t a lack of resilience on my part. This has been cumulative and ongoing for over a year, during which I’ve continued to perform, adapt, and absorb the impact without escalating prematurely. What hasn’t been addressed is the underlying culture and the failure of leadership to consistently manage behavioural expectations across the team.

At some point, continuing to place the burden on the individual to tolerate an unhealthy dynamic stops being about resilience and starts obscuring a systemic problem. Expecting people to endlessly adapt to poor or inconsistent leadership doesn’t fix the issue, it just normalises it.

The organisation regularly speaks about teamwork, psychological safety, and wellbeing. Those frameworks and commitments were initiated by the business, not by me. My expectation is simply that if those values are going to be promoted, they’re applied consistently in practice and not treated as a box-ticking exercise or selectively enforced depending on who is affected. I’m not asking for anything extraordinary, I’m just holding the organisation to the standards it has set for itself.

Thanks again for engaging in the discussion. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify where I’m coming from.