The office’s quietest desk may be solving the problems everyone else keeps generating.

Noise and contribution are unrelated. Somewhere in most organisations there is a person who says little and spends their week absorbing the consequences of decisions made loudly elsewhere, correcting records, catching errors, smoothing what would otherwise reach a customer. Their reward for competence is usually more of it. Because nothing visibly goes wrong, nobody connects the calm to the person maintaining it.

Find that person where you work and ask what they spent this week on. Then consider whether the loud part of the system should be generating less for them to absorb.