A lack of psychological safety in organizations is one of the main reasons for high employee turnover, reduced team dynamics, lack of productivity, and poor performance.
Yet despite this, many organizations still don’t prioritize it. Nor do they equip their managers with the tools and knowledge to improve it.
So, how exactly do you create psychological safety in the workplace? How do you ensure that your employees feel comfortable bringing their full selves to work every day, and how do you ensure that they’re empowered to asks questions and challenge the status quo?
Ultimately, how do you make sure there is enough trust amongst team members for them to have the conversations that drive higher performance outcomes?
Throughout this article, we’ll not only answer these questions, but we’ll also discuss the management behaviors that help can help boost psychological safety in your company.
What is psychological safety?
Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization, defines psychological safety as the understanding that you won’t be punished or ridiculed for speaking up, for asking questions, challenging ideas, voicing concerns, or admitting mistakes.
Psychological safety in the workplace, more specifically, is a shared belief by members of the same team that others on the team won’t reject you, punish you or humiliate you for speaking up.
When you have psychological safety in the workplace, people feel confident and comfortable bringing their whole selves to work.
According to Marianne Hynes, Founder and CEO of Quantum Leap Global:
"Psychological safety, in simple terms, is where team members feel safe to engage in interpersonal risk‐taking behaviours in the workplace. These behaviours involve feeling safe to challenge the status quo, speaking up, and constructively disagreeing with others.
When team members feel psychologically safe, they communicate more openly and speak more freely within the team environment. Additionally, they feel that they will not be shamed if mistakes are made, creating an open and thriving environment for performance, growth, creativity, and innovation."
How psychological safety affects team performance
If you want to improve team performance, you need the team to have total trust and belief that they won’t be punished if they make a mistake.
Having psychological safety in your workplace allows teams to take moderate risks where they otherwise might not. It gives them courage to speak their mind, to be more creative, to be more vulnerable, to stick their neck out without fear of repercussions. And these are all behaviors that lead to market breakthroughs.
Both Amy Edmondson and Google found in their separate studies into what makes a great team, isn’t that the most successful teams had more senior people, or that they had the highest IQs or that they made the least number of mistakes. In fact, the most successful teams made the most mistakes.
Why?
Because a workplace with psychological safety at its heart has an environment where people don’t feel afraid to take risks, and taking risks leads to innovation.
Psychological safety is the gateway to high performing teams.
Amy Edmondson's work
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, is an expert in teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning. Amy researches organizational behaviour, and for the last 25 years has been teaching MBA students how to engage and inspire people to bring their full self to work.
Psychological safety isn’t a one and done practice. According to Amy, you need to put in work before, during and after to build psychological safety.
- Before. Before you begin building psychological safety, you need to set the scene. This is where you inform team members that what you’re about to do has never been done before. By doing this, you’re explicitly stating you don’t have a pre-existing formula to fall back on. You’re framing what you’re about to do as ‘whatever happens, we need your input and there are no wrong answers’. This is where you’re letting people know that there are high stakes and all input is gladly received.
- During. While you’re actively in the building psychological safety stage, says Amy, you need to proactively ask questions. And keep asking questions. You need to continuously ask questions while encouraging team members to also ask questions. Lead the way in being curious, advises Amy. In the workplace there are too few genuine questions asked. You need your teams to treat meetings like the opportunities for learning they are. Meetings are the perfect platform to learn from one another and ask for clarification about anything they don’t understand.
- After. ‘After’ isn’t actually after, says Amy, because you shouldn’t ever stop working on building psychological safety in the workplace. You don’t want to lose ground you’ve made, and so while you’re ‘maintaining’ your gains, you should try and respond positively and productively, even if you don’t like what has been said, or you don’t agree with it, to everything team members say. If you don’t, you won’t hear from them again. Your responses have to be two things: appreciative and forward looking - i.e. where can you go from there.
Google's Project Aristotle
Codenamed Project Aristotle in tribute to Aristotle’s quote, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" (Google researchers believed employees can do more working together than alone), Google wanted to know: “What makes a team effective at Google?”
Using input from across the globe, the research team selected 180 teams to study, (115 project teams in engineering and 65 pods in sales), with a mix of both high and low performing teams. For 2 years the study looked at how team composition and team dynamics impacted team effectiveness.
The results revealed that team effectiveness is less about who is on the team, and more about how the team works together.
Out of the 5 key dynamics that high performing teams had, psychological safety was the number one factor (followed by dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact).
The 4 stages of psychological safety at work
Psychological safety at work begins with a feeling of belonging.
Employees need to feel they’re accepted before they can begin improving their organization.
According to Dr. Timothy Clark, author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, there are 4 stages employees have to pass through before they feel confident enough to speak up at work or challenge what’s been said.
- Stage 1 – Inclusion Safety: this satisfies the basic human need to feel connected and to belong. In this stage, employees feel safe to be themselves and are accepted for who they are. All of who they are, including unique attributes and defining characteristics.
- Stage 2 – Learner Safety: this satisfies our need to learn and grow. In this stage, employees feel safe exchanging in the learning process. They feel confident asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, experimenting, and making mistakes, safe that they aren’t going to be punished or humiliated.
- Stage 3 – Contributor Safety: this satisfies our need to make a difference. This is when employees feel safe using their skills and abilities to make a meaningful contribution at work.
- Stage 4 – Challenger Safety: this satisfies our need to make things better. It’s when employees feel safe speaking up and challenging the status quo when they believe there’s an opportunity to change or improve the situation.
How to create psychological safety in the workplace
Have a two-way dialogue
Create a liberal pathway that enables conversation between leadership and employees. Provide channels for feedback and encourage employees to freely speak their mind.
In fact, it can help if both your managers and employees are trained on how to deliver constructive feedback.
Feedback shouldn’t be a one way affair though, it should be a two way dialogue where employees understand that speaking up, identifying problems and challenging the status quo benefits the organization as a whole.
You can learn more about creating this type of workplace culture here.
Show frequent appreciation
If you want your teams to frequently share their thoughts and ideas, encourage managers to show them frequent appreciation when they do so. Even when they don’t agree with what’s being said, suspend judgement.
Managers don’t need to act on every suggestion though, so thank people for contributing and encourage further contributions.
Establish and build trust
Trust, like respect, is not a given, it’s earned. Managers should therefore work to establish trust in their team, and both HR and the leadership team should work to establish it in the workplace as a whole.
Employees who trust one another and the leadership team are more likely to be open, honest, collaborative and constructive, all of which feeds innovation and productivity.
They're also more likely to be honest about their challenges in their one-to-one meetings with their manager—assuming that these managers are having these continuous performance discussions with them.
Show empathy
One of the most effective skills your managers can possess is in fact empathy.
Why?
Because when employees feel genuinely cared for and valued, they perform better. Which means that the team performs better.
If your managers aren't empathetic—and there's a strong chance they're not given that only 40% of all leaders are either strong or proficient in this trait—it's important that you're doing all you can in HR to help them demonstrate empathy.
But what does an empathetic leader look like?
- Someone that considers the perspectives of others—in this case their team members
- Someone that is demonstrably considerate
- Someone that practices random acts of kindness
- Someone that ensure equal participation in group conversations
- Someone that gives their full attention and practices active listening
- Someone that avoids passing judgment too quickly
- Someone that doesn't try to simply 'fix feelings'
Encourage managers to include their teams in decision making
Actively solicit feedback and welcome questions when you’re making a decision. Ask for different viewpoints, ask people to be Devil’s advocates, ask them to voice considerations you might not have thought of. Pause and give people space and time to think and answer before you move on. And be open to the feedback you receive. Be appreciative of what is said.
Approach creativity differently
Rather than have team members present their finished ideas, build up a culture where employees feel comfortable sharing half baked, incomplete work that comes together and grows through collaborative development.
The creative process is one built on trust and openness, where team members don’t feel ashamed with unfinished work, rather it’s viewed as a jumping off point.
Promote healthy conflict
Conflict shouldn’t be avoided in the workplace. If you create psychological safety it forms an environment where team members feel safe debating ideas, rather than judging one another.
One of the most effective ways to ensure this within a team is by establishing agreed behaviors. In other words, team norms.
Treat others as they want to be treated
When it comes to creating psychological safety, managers should treat others how they want to be treated, and create an environment in which they can thrive.
The only way they can do that though is by getting to know them on a personal level, and by taking the time to check in, find out how they prefer to communicate, and how they respond to feedback.
Promote self-awareness
To begin building psychological safety in the workplace, team members need to be self aware. But in order to feel safe being self aware at work, they need to see leadership being self aware first.
By recognizing how you think and behave as a leader, and acknowledging that it might be different from other people, you can uncover biases that might prevent team members from speaking up.
When you’re self aware, it empowers you to adjust your emotional responses, allowing you to react in a positive and productive way that encourages more open discussion.
Own up to mistakes
Failure is frightening whoever it happens to, but people managers are uniquely positioned to help eliminate their team's fears by being the first to own up to their mistakes.
In fact, great leaders celebrate their failures as learning experiences. They facilitate team reflections, and encourage employees to share what isn't working as well as what is.
They also reinforce the message that no one will be punished for making a mistake, and help team members feel confident taking risks, and speaking out.
Model the right behaviors
According to Marianne Hynes, CEO at Quantum Leap Global, psychological safety starts with leaders modelling the behaviours needed to build the right environment. This includes:
- Replacing hierarchical/transactional leadership with a values-led, open, and authentic approach. Don't underestimate the power of essential (soft) skills such as deep listening, presence and empathy.
- Embracing mistakes as learning opportunities. Mistakes enable teams to be more creative, learn, innovate, and develop better outcomes. Noting that mistakes are different from underperformance, which needs to be addressed quickly.
- Leaning into tough conversations and replacing blaming and shaming with curiosity. This will go a long way in building trust.
- Developing a shared vision and goals, and discuss them regularly as a team.
- Creating a culture of accountability, feedback, and continuous growth.
How Saberr supports psychological safety
A lack of psychological safety has huge ramifications for businesses. Low psychological safety is detrimental to team performance, innovation, learning, and individual success.
But your leaders have the power to enable employee success. When you build psychological safety in the workplace you encourage employees to take risks, to speak up, to share their learnings, to spark their team’s innovation and creativity, and to push boundaries.
At Saberr, we provide managers with the training, guidance and resources to achieve all of this and more.
How?
Through a combination of experiential and digital coaching.
While our masterclasses, live sessions and coaching options seek to motivate, educate, and help change the mindsets of your managers, the Saberr Platform reinforces their learning, helping them to become better leaders in the flow of their day-to-day work.
That's not all our software does though. It also provides them with meeting templates, exercises, courses, and techniques, delivered at the precise moments they're needed, helping them build trust and become a more inclusive leader.
All of which plays a key role in helping to create psychological safety.
What's more, we also provide you with the insights to track just how much psychological safety there is across your teams.
If you’d like more information about how Saberr can help you build psychological safety in your workplace, take a look at this. Alternatively, schedule a call to chat through your needs.
