There isn’t a single answer to the question “What should employees do if managers ignore their complaints?” because the response depends on what you mean by ignoring and what you mean by a complaint. You can use four types of common employee complaints to respond to these questions.

If you go to your boss and you say, “The process we use to track inventory is outdated and unusable,” and your boss mumbles something and doesn’t do anything to fix the inventory process, that’s ignoring you.

But, if you make the same complaint, and she responds, “I know, but in order to update the system we need $200,000 and finance won’t authorize that,” she’s not ignoring you. She’s not changing anything as you requested, but she’s not ignoring you. In fact, she responded—maybe…