There is a video making the rounds that is difficult to watch without feeling something loosen inside your chest. A school held a “dress as your hero” day—the kind of event where you expect a parade of astronauts, firefighters, and athletes. And those were there, certainly. But one child, four years old, showed up in a red t-shirt, blue jeans, and a miniature utility belt. On his name tag—the kind that most of us yawn at during a working seminar with strangers, carefully written: “Mr. Bubba”. Not a fictional character. Not a celebrity. The person who emptied the wastebaskets, scrubbed the bathroom tiles, and waved good morning in the hallway every single day. The person most adults in that building had probably never looked in the eye.
That four-year-old understood something profound—something that many of us with years of professional experience have somehow unlearned along the way. They understood that value is not the same thing as visibility.
This post is about our custodial team. It is also about something larger: the quiet moral architecture of a functional organization, and what happens when we let people become invisible.
The Security Angle Nobody Talks About
In information security, we spend enormous time thinking about threat surfaces, attack vectors, and the human element of risk. We run phishing simulations. We train employees to recognize social engineering. We talk endlessly about how attackers exploit trust, access, and overlooked details.
But here is a question most security programs never think to ask: What kind of culture are we actually building—and does it make us more or less resilient as a result?
Consider what it takes for an organization to stay genuinely secure. It is not just firewalls and multi-factor authentication. It is people who notice when something is off. It is a culture where employees are alert, engaged, and invested in the health of the environment around them. Security researchers have a term for the alert, observant bystander who says something when they see something. They call it the “human sensor.” And here is the uncomfortable truth: you cannot build a culture of human sensors while simultaneously training your people to walk past other human beings without acknowledgment.
The custodial staff in our building are not peripheral to our security posture. They are often among the first people in the building and the last to leave. They have access to nearly every space. They observe what employees leave on their desks, what gets thrown in the trash rather than the shred bin, which doors get propped open, which visitors linger too long. If you wanted a genuinely human sensor in your building—someone whose regular presence makes them uniquely positioned to notice anomalies—you would design a role that looked a lot like a custodian.
And yet, most organizations barely know their names.
The Weight of Being Unseen
Try to sit with this for a moment. Imagine arriving at work before the sun is fully up. You move through the building while it is still quiet, restocking supplies, mopping floors, resetting spaces so that when your colleagues arrive, everything looks effortless. Then those colleagues arrive. They walk past you. Not rudely, most of them—they are not being intentionally cruel. They are simply on their phones, in their heads, focused on the day ahead. The work you just completed is invisible to them precisely because you did it well.
Then the workday unfolds. Someone gets promoted and the whole floor applauds. A team ships a project and there is a celebratory announcement in the all-hands meeting. The sales team closes a deal and there are congratulatory emails. You clean up the conference room where that celebration happened, replace the coffee pods, take out the trash. No one sends an email about that.
You do this five days a week, fifty weeks a year. You know the names of almost every person in the building because you have been watching them, quietly, the entire time. Most of them do not know yours.
This is not a hypothetical. For many custodial workers, this is Tuesday.
Psychologists who study workplace belonging describe a concept called mattering—the felt sense that one’s presence makes a difference, that one is noticed and valued by the people around them. Research on mattering consistently shows it is not just a “nice to have.” Employees who feel like they matter demonstrate lower rates of burnout, higher engagement, greater commitment to organizational goals, and—critically—better safety behavior. They are more likely to speak up when something goes wrong. More likely to flag concerns. More likely to care about the institution they work within.
The inverse is also true. People who feel invisible begin to disengage. And in a world where security depends on engaged, alert, invested human beings—disengagement is a liability every bit as real as an unpatched server.
What the Four-Year-Old Knew
Children are not yet sophisticated enough to perform the social sorting that adults do automatically. They have not yet learned which contributions are “impressive” and which are merely functional. They judge by a simpler and more honest metric: Who has been kind to me? Who shows up? Who makes this place feel safe and cared for?
By that measure, the school janitor—the one who knew the child’s name, who fixed the thing that was broken, who was simply and reliably there—was an obvious hero. No four-year-old needs a PowerPoint presentation to understand that.
Somewhere between kindergarten and adulthood, we absorb a different framework. We start sorting people by job title, salary band, and organizational chart placement. We learn to give our attention to whoever has institutional power, and to extend our courtesy in proportion to perceived status. We do not do this consciously. We do it because it is modeled everywhere—in how meetings are run, in who gets introduced at company events, in whose birthday gets announced in the team Slack.
The result is that we build organizations full of people who have been quietly trained to look through certain other people as if they were furniture. And then we wonder why those organizations struggle to build genuine trust, authentic communication, and a culture where people bring their full selves to work.
Being a Good Human Being Is Not Soft Skills
There is a tired but persistent idea in certain professional circles that soft skills are the opposite of hard skills—that caring about people and their feelings is somehow in tension with rigorous, results-driven work. This framing is not just wrong. In security, it is actively dangerous.
The most catastrophic security failures in recent history have almost never been purely technical. They have been failures of culture: environments where someone knew something was wrong but did not feel safe saying so; organizations where contractors and service workers were treated as invisible and therefore handed access far beyond what they needed; institutions where the pressure to look successful overwhelmed the willingness to admit to a mistake.
Being a good human being—noticing the people around you, learning their names, acknowledging their labor—is not a distraction from the serious work of security. It is the foundation on which real security culture is built. You cannot compartmentalize basic human dignity. Either you are the kind of person who sees the people around you, or you are the kind of person who misses things. There is no version where the inattention stops at the edges of the custodial closet and does not bleed into everything else.
The security professionals I most admire are not just technically brilliant. They are observant. They are curious about people. They believe that context and human behavior matter. Those qualities do not develop in a vacuum—they are practiced in ten thousand small moments, including the moment you decide whether to make eye contact with the person pushing a mop cart past your desk.
To Our Custodial Team — Directly
I want to say something plainly, in writing, where it cannot be confused for a performance or a formality.
I see you. I see the work that happens before most of us arrive and after most of us leave. I see the bathrooms that are somehow always clean, the parking lot that is cleared before we have to think about it, the break rooms that are reset quietly between uses. I see the work that, by definition, only truly shows up when it has not been done—and I want to name it out loud before it gets to that point.
I know that many of us have walked past you without a word. Some of us probably still do not know your names, even now, and we should be embarrassed by that. You have been here, showing up reliably, caring for a space that many of us treat as simply the backdrop to our own work. You are not the backdrop. You are as much a part of this place as anyone who has ever given a presentation or closed a contract.
To whoever reads this who works in custodial services—whether in our building or anywhere else—I want you to know that a five-year-old somewhere saw you clearly. They saw what you do, they thought about what it means, and they decided you were worth dressing up as. They decided you were a hero. And they were right.
The Practice of Noticing
Security culture, like any culture, is built in the aggregate of small decisions. Every day, in dozens of unremarkable moments, we are either building the habit of noticing or reinforcing the habit of looking away. We are either practicing the kind of attentiveness that makes organizations resilient, or we are practicing a comfortable blindness that will cost us eventually—in morale, in retention, in the kind of subtle disengagement that no audit will ever catch.
The good news is that the corrective is genuinely simple. Not easy—simple. It requires only the willingness to treat the people around us as worthy of our attention, regardless of what their badge says or what floor they are assigned to.
Learn the names. Say good morning. Say thank you. Mean it.
That four-year-old did not have a security certification or a management degree. They had not read a single paper on organizational culture or human risk. But they understood, with the clarity that children sometimes have before the world teaches them otherwise, that the person who shows up every day and takes care of the place deserves to be seen.
They were right then. We would all do well to catch up.
