How to Create Psychological Safety at Work
Introduction: What is Psychological Safety?
The definition of psychological safety is the feeling of being able to take risks and make mistakes without fear of negative consequences. These negative consequences include being embarrassed, rejected, or even reprimanded.
The concept was first introduced in the middle of the 20th century but was recently made famous and codified by Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School. She noticed that some teams were better at creating psychological safety than others. These teams had more innovation and better performance outcomes than their counterparts, leading her to conclude that psychological safety has a positive effect on process outcomes.
Why is Psychological Safety Important?
Psychological safety is the degree to which people feel secure in their work environment. It is a sense of trust and confidence that the workplace will not cause emotional or physical harm. Having a workplace that allows for the free-flowing exchange of ideas without fear of repercussions enables employees to be more productive and satisfied.
Allowing for more innovation and ensuring that a workplace is fostering a positive environment is incredibly important – we talk about the effects of this in our blogs about company culture and employee experience. Not only is it a moral duty as an employer, but the benefits impact your productivity and revenue. It’s simple – happier, psychologically safe employees are better for your business.
Psychological Safety and Risk Management
Risk is such a tricky thing to measure. Measuring the success of a risky venture, and conversely, the avoidance of a risk that didn’t eventually precipitate, are significantly affected by hindsight bias. Humans are not good at assessing risk – read a book like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow for more on that.
Having a lack of psychological safety at work can make this even worse – the energy that should be going into innovating, creating, and problem-solving is going towards self-preservation and designing strategies to avoid being reprimanded.
To succeed and thrive, companies and their employees need to be comfortable with an element of risk. But just verbalizing this isn’t enough. The people you work with have lives to consider, rent or mortgages to pay, careers to think about, and egos to manage. At the end of the day, they will always do what is best for them. If they perceive a risk to their livelihood or emotional well-being, then they aren’t going to speak up, make risky decisions, or innovate.
How can you ensure that your workplace is psychologically safe?
A psychologically safe work environment is created when all employees feel free to communicate and have a sense of belonging. Psychological safety is a feeling that people can take risks without the fear of negative consequences – it is a key factor in your organization’s culture. Transforming this culture is difficult, and should be tackled with a methodical, analytical approach to avoid having to repeat the process further down the line.
So, what goes into making people feel psychologically safe at work, and how can you show that an employee can speak up, take risks, and function properly in their job without negative consequences? A huge part of this is communication and demonstration. But first, you need to look at the facts.
Examine how you approach risk
How accurate are these fears? Examine how you have reacted to employees in the past. Perhaps look at the surveys that you may have sent out to measure employee experience and look at some of the indicators that suggest a lack of psychological safety. Is there some truth to any of these comments?
Perhaps you don’t even realize it, but you and your managers may have been the direct source of this unsteadiness. How often have you overreacted to an idea, dismissed a comment, or punished a risky decision with the benefit of hindsight? These are uncomfortable questions to ask and answer.
Understand your tolerance levels, how you react to new thoughts and ideas, and if you want people to speak up and contribute. And make a commitment to changing your company culture to foster a more psychologically safe environment.
Create Failure Protocols
This sounds like robot speak – but it can be an incredibly valuable process. How DO you negotiate failure? Put some thought into what happens when things don’t work out. We are hardwired to look at the cause of the failure and immediately assign an “obvious” blame, but this isn’t always the right approach.
Let’s take an example of a risk – opening a new store in a risky location. When approaching the idea for the first time, the team responsible for the project identified a 20% risk of failure due to lack of foot traffic, but an 80% chance of making a very successful branch and generating significant profits.
If the venture fails, we often focus and put the blame on that 20% failure, and only look towards the negative. Why didn’t we stop this due to the giant risk factor? But this is entirely the wrong way to analyze the risk. It puts an emphasis on the bad, which will have a ripple effect on any future decisions.
Creating a methodical, analytical way of looking at risk and sharing this with employees can demonstrate an atmosphere of psychological safety. Failure in this environment is not the be-all and end-all. If the people you work with see this, then they will recalculate that risk/reward formula in their heads and feel much safer when putting forward ideas.
Foster Communication
Communication, communication, communication. And communication. Make sure people can express ideas and speak up. Even better, foster an environment where people actually want to express ideas and speak up.
Think about how you can create an environment of openness and honesty. Listen to what people have to say, and create dialogues that attack the problem, rather than the messenger. Conflict is often seen as a dirty word, but in it is not always the case. Productive conflict, which can explore the risks, rewards, and approaches to a problem is the lifeblood of decision-making.
In Conclusion: Psychological Safety is Financial Safety
Imagine a situation where almost everyone in your company overlooks a massive issue with an upcoming project, such as a product launch. There is one person in the office who sees the problem, but they don’t have the psychological safety to express their ideas. Perhaps they have had terrible experiences at a previous company, or a lack of self-confidence which skews the risk/reward calculation.
I don’t need to play out the rest of the example above, short of saying that it is bad for the company, bad for the employee, and bad for you as a manager or human resource professional. By putting a little more thought into psychological safety, and thinking about how your organization approaches real or perceived negative consequences, you can increase productivity, efficiency, happiness, and revenue.
Uncharted Way can help with measuring and improving the employee experience at your organization. We have a three-step process that puts an emphasis on data and actionable strategies to help you create the company culture that works for you and your bottom line. Schedule a 15-minute introductory call today.
Meridith Marshall is the CEO and Founder of Uncharted Way and has seen firsthand how people and organizations can navigate the most difficult of circumstances with clarity and openness to improve employee experience and culture in their workplace. She is an industry-recognized expert in using a data-driven approach, and is an Interaction Associates trained facilitator and certified Co-Active coach.