Ontario Municipal Human Resources Association

We tend to notice the people who make things look hard. The ones who make things look easy, we underestimate – and in most organizations, they are the ones quietly holding everything together.

I think about an HR analyst I came to know through this work. On paper, her role looked straightforward: pull the reports, keep the data clean, run the numbers each cycle. What the org chart did not capture was that she understood how every system connected to every other one – how a change in one place would ripple into payroll, into reporting, into three downstream processes nobody else was thinking about. When someone proposed a “small” adjustment, she was the person who knew, without checking, what it would quietly break two steps later.

Her organization did not see that. They saw a competent analyst doing a contained job. Because she made the complexity look effortless, they read the role as simple – and when budgets tightened and priorities shifted, they treated it accordingly. She was underestimated, and I suspect she felt it long before she left. People usually do.

Then she left. And it became a scramble.

Not a tidy transition – a scramble. Reports that had always simply appeared now broke in ways no one could diagnose. The knowledge that kept it all running turned out to live almost entirely in her head – and it left with her. What her organization had labelled a simple role revealed itself, in her absence, to be a keystone.

I share this because it is one of the clearest windows into workplace culture I know – and it has nothing to do with values posters or engagement scores.

Culture is revealed in who we notice and who we overlook. It is easy to value the people whose contributions are loud and legible. The harder, truer test is whether an organization can see the quiet competence – the person who prevents problems so effectively that leadership forgets the problems were ever possible. When we mistake “makes it look easy” for “easy,” we are not just making a staffing error. We are telling that person, and everyone watching, exactly how much their expertise is valued. And the people watching are often the very ones we can least afford to lose.

This is also, at its core, an employee experience story. Being underestimated is its own kind of erosion. The analyst who is treated as interchangeable while carrying irreplaceable knowledge does not usually make a scene. She updates her resume. The experience of being unseen is quietly one of the most common reasons skilled people leave – and it tends to claim exactly the people whose knowledge is hardest to replace.

For municipalities, the stakes are rising fast. A significant share of the workforce is heading toward retirement, and much of what they know has never been written down – it lives in judgment, in relationships, in the instinct for how things actually work here. When they go, they take it with them. The organizations that will weather this well are not the ones with the biggest training budgets. They are the ones whose culture has learned to see this knowledge before it walks out the door.

That shift is not expensive, but it does require attention. It means noticing the people who make complexity look simple, and getting curious about what they actually hold. It means asking a blunt question about the roles we have quietly oversimplified: what would genuinely break if this person left in three months – and how much of what they know exists anywhere but in their head? It means treating the transfer of hard-won knowledge as real work worth planning for, not something we hope happens informally before someone’s last day.

Mostly, it means valuing people while they are still here to feel valued – which is both the decent thing and the strategic one.

We could not fully replace that analyst. Her successors rebuilt what they could and relearned the rest the hard way. But the lesson was never really about one role. It was about what our organizations choose to see. The knowledge that keeps the place running is often invisible – right up until the moment it is gone.

The question worth sitting with is whether we will notice it any sooner next time.

Written by: Paola Accettola, CHRE, True North HR Consulting