Psychological safety in the workplace

Fostering Psychological Safety at Work

We are most effective and creative when we feel safe and experience psychological comfort. The confidence that we won’t be humiliated for expressing ideas empowers us. The sense of psychological safety is important for individuals in personal relationships, social interactions, and workplace comfort. Read about the importance of psychological safety in the workplace in this article.

• What Is Psychological Safety at Work?
• The Importance of Psychological Safety at Work
• 8 Steps Toward Creating More Psychological Safety at Work
• What leadership skills are important for psychological safety?
• 6 signs your workplace is psychologically unsafe 
• How can leaders create an environment of psychological safety?
• What qualities do leaders need to best support their teams during challenging times at work?
• The Benefits of Psychological Safety

What Is Psychological Safety at Work?

Psychological safety is the feeling that team members have when they know that they can speak their minds freely, make mistakes, and take risks without worrying about negative consequences like punishment or humiliation. The term “psychological safety” was first used by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson. Over 25 years ago, while studying the activities of medical teams, Edmondson noticed a link between the number of errors made by a team and its level of productivity.

Interestingly, the teams with the highest productivity levels were also the ones that made the most mistakes. On the other hand, the fewer mistakes the employees made, the less productive they seemed from the outside. The companies that did the best were the ones that openly acknowledged their mistakes. Others, who weren’t perfect either, tended to hide their mistakes.

Psychological Safety: A Basic Need

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs says that people don’t need a lot of their needs to be met to stay alive, contribute to the world, and reach their potential. Sociologists say that psychological safety is one of the basic needs. They believe it’s essential for success in all areas of life, including home, school, and work.

A workplace where everyone feels psychologically safe is one where you can speak up about problems or concerns without worrying about being punished. Psychological safety lets people speak their minds, challenge the status quo, share feedback, and work through disagreements together. It also shows that management appreciates honesty and openness, and that colleagues are ready to support each other. If you’re on a team with high emotional safety, you can expect others to respond well to new ideas, questions, or mistakes.

Psychological Safety and Trust

It’s not just about trusting your team when it comes to psychological safety. The main difference between these concepts is that psychological safety is about how you think the norms of a group should be followed and what it means to be a member of that group. Trust, on the other hand, is about how one person views another. Psychological safety is about how team members think others see them, while trust is about how one person views another.

Psychological Safety and Mental Health

It’s also important to remember that psychological safety and mental health are two different things. These concepts are pretty similar, but they’re not the same. They have different ideas and ways of measuring things. Mental health is about how well you feel overall, how you handle your emotions, your self-esteem, your flexibility, and how you deal with stress and challenges.

The Importance of Psychological Safety at Work

Psychological safety isn’t a perk, it’s a basic requirement for running a successful business. If employees don’t feel safe, they won’t be confident that their actions won’t have a negative impact on the whole company.

If there’s a lack of psychological safety, it can make it harder to get new projects, processes, and procedures off the ground. Workers are afraid of everything from getting a hard time for not meeting expectations to getting fired for trying new things.

Those who are most affected by a lack of psychological safety are members of vulnerable social groups. For instance, a study by Catalyst found that almost half of female business managers find it tough to speak up during virtual meetings. One in five women said they felt ignored or undervalued during video calls.

A team with a high level of psychological safety can express their thoughts freely and speak up on various issues. It also helps balance work and personal life.

8 Steps Toward Creating More Psychological Safety at Work

When employees feel safe in their jobs, they’re more effective and productive. Here are the steps to create a psychologically safe environment in the workplace.

Step 1: Make Psychological Safety a Priority

It’s important to talk to your team about why it’s important to create a psychologically safe work environment. Make the case for why it’s important with bigger picture goals like boosting organizational innovation, increasing team engagement, and fostering inclusiveness. Use inclusive leadership practices, set an example for employees, and show you’re ready to help.

Step 2: Encourage Everyone to Speak Up

Promote directness and openness. Be open and show genuine interest in new ideas. Your employees need to know that if someone dares to express an opinion that’s different from the majority, they won’t be judged. Make sure everyone is free from harassment and bullying. Leaders who really care about creating a psychologically safe atmosphere make sure there are clear rules and policies in place to guarantee safety and protection from negative behavior. When you encourage open communication and the exchange of opinions, you create a space where employees feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and suggestions.

Step 3: Set Some Ground Rules for How We Handle Mistakes

No punishments for experiments, and let’s encourage some reasonable risks. Your employees need to know that you see mistakes as chances to learn and grow. Let your employees know what you learned from your own mistakes. Be open and honest with your employees. Let them know you’re disappointed but also admire their efforts. This approach really helps to create a culture of psychological safety in the workplace.

Step 4: Make Room for New Ideas

When new challenges arise, be there with resources, rewards, and help. Think about what’s more important to you in ideas: reliability and tried-and-true methods or new ideas and creativity. Asking tough questions is totally normal, but don’t lose that supportive tone.

Step 5: Encourage Productive Conflict

It’s important to make sure that everyone can contribute to open dialogue and constructive debates. As a leader, your job isn’t to avoid conflicts — it’s to work on resolving them in a way that benefits everyone. Start building a foundation for gradual changes by getting colleagues’ opinions on what affects psychological safety. Here are some questions to get the conversation going with your team:

— How will team members share their thoughts on processes that aren’t working or aren’t getting the results they should be?

— How should we share concerns and objections in a respectful way?

— What norms should we set for resolving conflicts between different viewpoints?

Keep an eye on how you’re handling workplace conflicts and make any necessary changes to create the best possible psychological safety in the office.

Step 6: Keep an Eye on Processes and Look for Patterns

It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on how colleagues feel about each other. Do you see that some feel much safer than others, or are all employees on roughly the same level? Make sure everyone on the team feels safe all the time. It’s a basic part of being on a team, not something that only a few get to enjoy. When you’re putting together a plan to boost psychological safety, think about what the team currently believes and remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

Give your employees some training and skill development to boost their confidence and competence. This can be both personal and collective.

Use visuals to show everyone why psychological safety is important and why it’s important to address it now.

Step 7: Promote Two-Way Communication

Make sure people can speak up if they have any concerns. Ask your colleagues open-ended questions to get them to give detailed answers. Make sure you really listen to what they’re saying and try to understand their feelings and values. Think about how you can contribute to making conversations in the organization better. Good, informative dialogues help build a better corporate culture. If you give people good feedback and make them feel safe, they’ll be more likely to share what they’ve been keeping to themselves. This will help you find more reliable solutions.

Step 8: Celebrate Successes

Building trust and mutual respect among team members is key to fostering positive interactions and conversations. Don’t play favorites and give praise to everyone who did a great job on a particular process. And don’t forget to celebrate even the smallest victories. Let people know that you appreciate their efforts. Giving encouragement and expressing gratitude helps team members feel good about themselves.

Following these steps is key to creating a psychologically safe environment, enhancing information processing, and boosting employee productivity. It’s important to remember that to make new inclusivity work, you need to strike a good balance between your professional and personal lives. Give your employees the chance to keep their work and personal lives in balance and use techniques to help them stay mentally comfortable.

What leadership skills are important for psychological safety?

Some leaders are just born for the job. But most people need to get trained, which helps them and the companies they work for.

Investing in the development of company representatives at all levels helps create a culture of leadership that makes it easier for employees to feel safe at work. If employees know that their company is investing a lot in leadership development, they’re 64% more likely to think that their senior management is more inclusive.

Not every company is the same, and not every team is the same either. So, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to making a team psychologically safe. However, there are a few skills that managers can work on to influence the culture of psychological safety within their team. Here they are:

• Open dialogue skills: These skills help managers to talk through disagreements and have discussions even when things are tense in the team.
• Sponsorship and Support: In other words, leaders need to be able to put others’ success before their own.
• Humility in Certain Situations. Sometimes, it’s important to be humble. This teaches leaders to be curious and to think in a way that encourages personal growth.

6 signs your workplace is psychologically unsafe

In his book, “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety,” In his book, “Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation,” Dr. Timothy Clark talks about four key factors of psychological safety in the workplace.

1. Inclusion Safety: This is about the basic human need to belong and be accepted by the community. At this stage, people feel comfortable being themselves, knowing that others will accept their unique traits and differences.
2. Learner Safety: This helps people learn and grow. At this stage, participants feel comfortable asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, experimenting, and making mistakes.
3. Contributor Safety: This helps people to make changes. Employees feel like they can use their skills and abilities to make a real impact on the company’s growth.
4. Challenger Safety: This helps us to make things better. Participants know they can speak up and challenge the status quo when they see an opportunity to change or improve something.

These stages can be applied to the workplace, and employees can move between them as they work on new projects. If a leader is unsure whether the company environment is psychologically safe, there are a few ways to assess the extent of the issue.

Markers of Low Psychological Safety

Here are some signs that your team isn’t feeling safe to take risks.

1. Projects get significantly delayed 

Projects get significantly delayed because there’s a lack of psychological safety, which makes things slower and less agile for everyone involved. Instead of giving feedback, employees get suspicious of new processes and avoid them. Instead of asking for help or explaining what they don’t understand, employees just stay silent.

2. Not enough questions and ideas

Not many people speak up in meetings, if at all. Management always presents new ideas as mandatory, without room for questions or disagreements. If employees feel like their ideas are valued, they’re more likely to share them without hesitation.

3. There’s a lot of gossip going around

Instead of talking to management about issues, employees tend to share their concerns with their trusted colleagues. People start to wonder why new initiatives are introduced and how they work.

4. High Presenteeism

Presenteeism is when people come to work when they’re not fully ready to work. These workaholics don’t let illness, injury, or personal tragedy get in the way of their work. Another thing is digital presenteeism, where employees feel like they have to stay connected even outside of work hours, like checking emails and responding to messages late at night. If people are working long hours, it can mean that they don’t feel comfortable taking breaks when they need them.

5. Frequent Absenteeism

Basically, it’s the opposite of presenteeism. Absenteeism is when you ignore your work duties. For instance, employees might take unscheduled leave or sick days to dodge a micromanaging boss, racial slights, or overwhelming workloads, even if they’re healthy. If there’s a lack of psychological safety, it can lead to low employee engagement, where workers feel unmotivated to be at work.

6. High Turnover Rates

This is one of the indicators of high employee turnover, which is known as a high “revolving door” index. It seems like workers just up and quit without saying why, and they change jobs a lot, which just adds to the rumors.

How can leaders create an environment of psychological safety?

Here are five ways managers can create a psychologically safe environment at each stage:

Don’t be afraid to show your vulnerability

Managers are just like the rest of us. A manager who’s open about making mistakes and admitting they don’t know everything creates a more psychologically safe space than one who hides their flaws and acts like they’re always right.

Be Transparent

It’s important to be open and honest with your employees so they can trust you and feel safe. Keep the lines of communication open and honest. Make sure your actions match your words. This one goes hand-in-hand with the first one: you don’t have to know everything. If you don’t know the answer to a question, don’t be afraid to admit it. Just make sure you let the team know you’ll find out what they need to know.

Be Fair

Take a look at how fair your employees’ experiences are and make sure they’re as fair as they can be. What are the paths to promotion? Are there differences in pay between employees with similar responsibilities? Are the right kind of bonuses and benefits in place? Are workers getting a fair shake when it comes to rewards for their work?

Fairness can be tough in hybrid teams, where remote workers might feel forgotten or overlooked because they don’t get enough face-to-face time. Make sure they feel like they’re being heard and supported by the team as a whole.

Be curious

Great leaders set an example by showing they’re interested in what’s going on. They ask questions and don’t assume that a closed, established order is the only correct way. If anything comes up that you’re not sure about, don’t be afraid to ask questions and encourage everyone to keep learning and problem-solving. Don’t just blindly follow the norms.

Be Realistic

Setting the bar too high can make people feel unsafe. This also includes expectations about how much work you can get done each day and when you’ll be available.

Julian Lute, a senior manager at Great Place To Work, says that unrealistic expectations can really affect people with less flexible schedules or schedules that are only known a few weeks in advance, like healthcare or retail workers. He says that people with changing schedules might have trouble keeping a good work-life balance, which could make them feel less connected to the company.

This can also be an issue for remote or hybrid teams, especially when there are time zone differences. It’s not uncommon for workers to be active while management is asleep, and vice versa. Show your employees that you trust them to get their work done without hovering over them.

What qualities do leaders need to best support their teams during challenging times at work

Leaders who are compassionate tend to get their employees to stick around and be engaged, which makes for more productive teams. When things get tough, being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is really important. Being in tune with employees and understanding their personal fears and anxieties helps the business become more resilient, no matter what crisis it faces.

This task might seem simple at first glance, but it’s not. When things get uncertain, it’s natural to want to make a quick decision and take control. But crises call for a different kind of leadership. In the book “How to Achieve Deliberate Calm” by Jacqueline Brassey, Aaron de Smet, and Michael Kruyt, they go into detail about the concept of “deliberate calm.” This quality helps leaders adapt to changing situations when it’s most challenging and crucial. To develop deliberate calm, leaders need to build skills in areas that were once seen as “soft,” like self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness.

Four Qualities That Help Leaders Stay in Control and Curb Fear

Awareness

Leaders need to understand and accept that they and others might have reactive tendencies. Take a moment to connect with your thoughts and remember to breathe deeply.

Vulnerability

A compassionate leader should be a good role model during crises. By taking off the mask of invulnerability and talking about what’s going on, leaders can help their employees feel like they’re not alone.

Empathy

Leaders should try to put themselves in their employees’ shoes and understand what they’re feeling. This helps to create a supportive environment.

Compassion

When leaders show they care by reinforcing actions and words with compassion, it makes people feel like they’re being genuinely cared for. It’s also important for leaders to be open to others’ care and empathy. These practices help leaders build a support system that can help them through tough times.

Embracing these qualities helps leaders to effectively navigate crises, keep their teams safe, and make sure their employees are doing OK.

The Benefits of Psychological Safety

There’s no doubt that implementing the principles of psychological safety has benefits. Here are the most important ones:

— It also increases the likelihood of successful innovations. This makes it easier to develop new products.

— You’ll also be better at learning from your mistakes. This means better quality work and better quality control.

— More people are reporting various concerns. This helps to cut down on incidents related to safety, health, and reliability.

— It also gets employees more involved and engaged. This means fewer customers leaving and less money spent on hiring new employees and sick days.

— Improved Reputation: This makes it more likely that you’ll be able to hire top talent.

— Growing Profitability: All of this adds up to some pretty great benefits.

Building psychological safety is just one thing you can do for your team members, but it’s a big step toward making your organization more successful.