> Allowing reported issues to result in zero action is the quickest way to convert your employees, especially your engineers, from enthusiastic company-first workers into "clock in, clock out, it’s not my problem" workers. Most employees, again especially engineers, want to improve the company and themselves… until you prove that their thoughts do not matter.
The flip side of this, which I have also experienced, is that the entire company simply accepts the issue as "normal" and stops trying to deal with it. Generally this happens when people have tried many times to solve it and the team has lost a lot of time. People get annoyed when you bring it up because everyone is dealing with it all the time and if you really brought it up every time you saw it, every sentence would reference it. In a healthy company this is the behavior you expect around "the problem" the company is working on: everyone efficiently and implicitly references the problem in their work. There's a thin line between nibbling around the edges of a problem and biting the same spot without effect.
The flip side of this, which I have also experienced, is that the entire company simply accepts the issue as "normal" and stops trying to deal with it. Generally this happens when people have tried many times to solve it and the team has lost a lot of time. People get annoyed when you bring it up because everyone is dealing with it all the time and if you really brought it up every time you saw it, every sentence would reference it. In a healthy company this is the behavior you expect around "the problem" the company is working on: everyone efficiently and implicitly references the problem in their work. There's a thin line between nibbling around the edges of a problem and biting the same spot without effect.