Crying at work: are employees too soft?

When tears start flowing, it can make some people uncomfortable or uncertain of what to do. If those tears are coming at work, that uncertainty could be magnified. 

And it's not that uncommon: A recent survey found that 39 per cent of US employees have cried at work at least once — and of those who haven’t, one in five have felt close to tears in the workplace, according to Resume Now.

For Canadian HR leaders, the question isn’t whether emotions belong at work — it’s whether crying is a potential sign of a mental health crisis from emotional strain, or a moment leaders can move past without treating it as an organizational failure.  

A personality issue or organization-wide problem? 

Organizational leaders shouldn’t read workplace tears as just employees being too soft or a one-off embarrassment to be ignored, says Parbudyal Singh, a professor in York University’s School of HR Management. He also suggests that the survey might be overestimating things: “If four of 10 people cry every day at work, I'm concerned, but I don't think that's the case — crying at work isn’t a common phenomena."

A single incident can reflect a life event, a stressful moment, or a person reaching a breaking point. But when crying becomes visible, recurring, or concentrated in one team, it can be an early indicator that pressure is spilling into performance and culture, he says. 

“With an employee that's crying, essentially, they're throwing up their hands in frustration saying, 'I can't deal with this anymore,'” says Singh. “Apart from the immediate feelings that something is wrong, for that employee, as well as any observers, we have issues related to productivity that come into focus — employees become disengaged or engagement levels go down, people start to actively look for other jobs, at the workplace, people quit, and people become tardy.” 

Singh believes that dynamic matters for HR leaders because it can change how safe people feel speaking up.

A 2025 report found that four in 10 Canadian employees feel burnt out, up from 35 per cent two years earlier. And while more than half of employees said they have faced mental health challenges that affected their work, only one in three disclosed it.

In the Mental Health Research Canada’s (MHRC) 2025 report, only 59 per cent of employees said their workplace is psychologically safe. Just over half said their employer would support them if they were psychologically distressed, while only 44 per cent said their employer helps employees cope with workplace stress. 

When a workforce stays silent 

In many workplaces, crying is one of the few visible signals managers might see. Half of respondents to the MHRC survey said mental health challenges have affected their work, but only one-third disclosed it to their manager. For Singh, tears are a release point, not the root issue. “Crying isn’t an emotion, it's a manifestation of an underlying emotion,” he says. 

For HR leaders, that framing can help separate the visible moment from the underlying driver. The Canadian report points to workload as a central stressor: 55 per cent of working Canadians find their workplace stressful and 74 per cent say stress comes from workload. 

“[Crying] may result from more than just organizational-based issues — it could be personal, it could be physiological, it could be psychological, based on one's own mental health — but often, it’s an indication that we have an issue that we have to deal with, and it's not just from the crier's perspective,” says Singh. “Because that employee is important to our organization and it's also important from the observer's position — when people cry, it sends a message that someone has done something wrong, and that has implications for organizational culture.” 

What leaders can do in the moment and what to track later 

Crying isn’t a measurable metric, but it can be a prompt to measure the conditions around it, according to Singh. The Resume Now survey frames workplace tears as part of a broader pattern of emotional strain and uncertainty for employers.  

“There might be underlying issues such as overload, fear, insecurity, incapabilities, a sense that I'm not capable of this, and it leads to frustration,” says Singh. “We manage workload and we manage employees' communication in the workplace — it might be gossip that's gotten to employees, but we are responsible for informal and formal communication to some extent, so it's an issue for HR and it's an issue for the leadership because it will affect culture.” 

In practice, that means leaders responding in a way that contains the moment without treating it as misconduct or drama. Singh also cautions against a common leadership error: assuming the employee is the problem. 

“There are so many counterproductive workplace behaviours that could be associated with this phenomena, all with financial implications in terms of how productive not only the employee, but the observers become,” he says. “They get the message ‘This isn’t a good place to work,’ and it destroys a lot of progressive steps that HR has made over the past few decades in moving to a more strategic position — because it's an indictment, in some ways, that we haven’t done our work properly."

A former employee of CBC North recently alleged in a lawsuit against his former employer that the workplace was so toxic, employees had a "crying room" for emotional venting.

Culture, productivity cost regardless of trigger 

While something like an emotional breakdown at work can have different triggers, the organization can take action regardless of the source — while protecting culture and productivity, according to Singh. “If it's an organizational issue, we can fix that, if it's a personal issue, we can address that with counselling or ensuring safe work environments, and if it's a leadership or management issue, we can address it through training.” 

Singh believes that empathy and action from leadership towards emotional vents or outbursts in the workplace, rather than dismissing someone as being “soft,” has greater benefits for the organization culturally and financially. 

“Dismissing it as being something particular to a specific employee is a misstep because the same situation might be affecting other employees, but they're dealing with it differently,” he says. “We have to deal with it, we can't just push it under the carpet because we’re not just dealing with one crier, we're dealing with all the observers and all the implications that come with that.”

This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in March focuses on mental health. Full coverage can be found here.