Psychological Safety In The Workplace

In today's fast-paced and competitive business landscape, fostering a collaborative work environment is crucial for the success of any organization. One essential aspect of a thriving workplace is ensuring psychological safety for all employees. This article delves into the concept of psychological safety, its significance, and the impact it can have on employee well-being and performance.

a. Definition and Importance

We define psychological safety as a work environment where employees feel safe to express their questions, concerns, ideas, and mistakes. 

Psychological safety is the key aspect of high-performing teams. Leaders/managers play a crucial role in creating psychological safety. At the same time, it is the responsibility of all employees to contribute to a psychologically safe workplace.

Below you can see two other definitions of psychological safety.

Prof Amy Edmonson from Harvard Business School defines psychological safety as “a belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking where employees can speak up with ideas, questions or concerns.”

According to Dr. Timothy Clark, “Psychological safety is a condition in which you feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized or punished in some way.”

These definitions are similar. The main point is to create a work environment where employees feel safe to express their questions, concerns, ideas, and mistakes.

b. Impact on Employee Well-being and Performance

If employees feel their opinions matter, we have the following benefits:

• 27% reduction in employee turnover

• 40% reduction in safety incidents

• 12% in employee productivity 

This information is based on the Gallup Report 2017. For employees to feel their opinions count, having a psychologically safe workplace is crucial.

Moreover, organizations with high levels of psychological safety are more likely to be high-performing and excel in innovation and employee engagement.

Identifying the Challenges

While psychological safety is a critical aspect of a healthy work environment, several challenges may hinder its establishment and maintenance.

a. Common Signs and Symptoms

There are many signs when a workplace lacks psychological safety. Below you can see some of them.

Meetings: In case no one asks questions in meetings, it can be a sign that employees do not feel safe to do so.

Feedback: Giving negative feedback always without appreciating employees is also a red flag.

Command and control management style: It damages psychological safety because employees do not feel included in decision-making, such as how to do their work. 

Relationship among employees: If employees do not know one another at a personal level, do not enjoy spending time with each other, and their relationship lacks trust and respect, this is another sign of a very low level of psychological safety.

Blame culture: In such a culture, employees are blamed and punished in the first place whenever mistakes are detected. This creates fear for employees, who can be less likely to report a mistake in the future. So, psychological safety is damaged in such a work culture.

Factors Contributing to Lack of Psychological Safety

In organizations, there are mainly three barriers to psychological safety. These are culture, power, and strategic design.

Culture: It is about values, mindset, and behaviors. If an organization’s values are not aligned with psychological safety, creating a psychologically safe workplace becomes difficult. In case employees are not encouraged to have mindsets and behaviors that foster psychological safety at work, that organization is likely to lack psychological safety.

Power: This concerns leadership. Suppose leaders/managers in an organization are not trained on psychological safety-related concepts (inclusive leadership, humility, curiosity, etc.) and are not given opportunities to show inclusive leadership behaviors at work. In that case, this becomes a barrier to creating psychological safety in the workplace.

Strategic design: It includes team structures, processes, tools, and systems. To build psychological safety, it is essential to have team structures, processes, tools, and systems that allow employees to share information with one another quickly, clearly, and transparently. Without such structures, processes, and tools, it is very challenging to create psychological safety in the workplace.

The Business Case for Psychological Safety: Bräunlin & Kolb

Creating a safe workplace is not just a matter of employee well-being; it also makes sound business sense. Organizations that prioritize psychological safety can reap numerous benefits that contribute to their overall success. Here is an interesting example from the company Bräunlin & Kolb.

Linking Psychological Safety to Organizational Success

Bräunlin & Kolb is an engineering and architecture company headquartered in Germany and Switzerland. The company started a practice called “Mistake Breakfast” which has contributed greatly to creating a psychologically safe workplace.

“Mistake Breakfast” is a quarterly breakfast where an employee with the biggest mistake and the biggest learning shares their insights with all employees while they have breakfast. After doing this practice for some months, the organization saw the following benefits:

• Stronger learning culture 

• Increased trust among employees

• Fewer mistakes in total  

The “Mistake Breakfast” approach was so successful in the company that it won the best practice award from the German People Management Association.

Benefits of a Psychologically Safe Work Culture

• Successful cultural transformation: Especially during corporate culture transformation, it is crucial to create an environment where employees feel safe to speak up. This allows employees to express their concerns and increase their ownership of the cultural transformation.

• Improved trust: Once teams have psychological safety, this contributes to improving trust in the team. With increased levels of trust, teams and organizations can boost their performance.

• Enhanced innovation: Innovation involves taking risks, making mistakes, learning from them, and improving. Organizations with high levels of psychological safety are more likely to innovate.

• More inclusive work culture: One crucial aspect of psychological safety is creating an inclusive work culture. Once participants implement their learnings from effective psychological safety training sessions, they are more likely to involve employees in different aspects of the work, including decision-making. Research shows diverse teams with high psychological safety perform better than diverse teams with low levels of psychological safety.

Creating a Foundation

Establishing psychological safety requires strong leadership and a commitment from all employees to creating a psychologically safe environment.

Leadership's Role in Fostering Safety

Leaders play a pivotal role in shaping the culture of an organization. They can set the tone for psychological safety by:

• Leading by example: Demonstrating openness to feedback and constructive criticism.

• Building trust and transparency: Creating an environment of trust and transparency that encourages open communication.

• Communicating openly and effectively: Ensuring that communication channels are accessible and ideas are valued and acknowledged.

• Showing vulnerability: Admitting that they do not know everything and sharing their mistakes and learnings with employees.

While leaders/managers play a crucial role in creating psychological safety, it is the responsibility of all employees to contribute to a psychologically safe workplace. 

Establishing an Inclusive Work Culture

Creating an inclusive work culture helps us increase psychological safety in our organization. Below you can see four ways to foster an inclusive work culture.

PROVIDING ACCESS TO DECISION-MAKING

When we enable our employees to make their own decisions in certain aspects of their work, they feel more included. For instance, we share the expected outcome of a task or a project with our employees, we allow them to make their own decisions about how to reach to that outcome.

Access to opportunities

Employees from underrepresented groups may not feel included at work. This can be related to three levels of opportunities.

Level 1: not having an opportunity to work because of being eliminated in the recruitment process.

Level 2: not having an opportunity for promotion.

Level 3: not having an opportunity to have a senior management position. 

It is essential that we create access to opportunities for employees from underrepresented groups to get the job, to be promoted, and to have a senior management-level position.

Bringing our whole selves to work

Every team members are unique and each team member brings their own skills and competencies. We need to know our team members personally and help them use their unique skills at work. To do that, we need to ensure that our team members work in projects aligned with their strengths.

Encouraging dissenting views

One of the ways to encourage dissenting views is to have a green card in team meetings. A team member who has a green card will play devil’s advocate, indicate risks in a project, and express dissenting views in that meeting. This way, we can actively assist employees in expressing their differing viewpoints.

It can take some time to create an inclusive work culture. It is essential that employees at all levels (from the C-level to middle managers and front-line employees) are empowered, supported, and involved in showing inclusive behaviors at work.

Building Trust Among Team Members

Previously, I worked at one organization. Once I dared to ask a question to a senior manager. His reply was: “This is a stupid question!” At that moment, I did not know how to react. I felt powerless.

He gave that reply not only to me but to other employees. What is worse, employees started to imitate that. Sometimes when you asked a question to a colleague, they replied: “That is a stupid question!” It was a toxic work environment where trust and respect were missing in the workplace.

Without trust among team members, we cannot really talk about psychological safety. Here are five aspects of creating trust.

• Competency: The more competent we are at work, the higher the likelihood of creating trust in our team. Early in my career, I was managing a technical project where I lacked technical skills, and many team members in that project did not trust me unfortunately. We need to take time to improve our competency at work by learning new skills and enhancing our knowledge.

• Openness: When we are open with our employees, we share feedback clearly with them, set the right expectations, and ensure that their goals are clear. This contributes to enhancing trust in the team.

• Honesty: This is about keeping our promises. When we promise something to our colleagues/employees and keep our promises, it has a positive effect on trust.

• Consistency: It means walking the talk. If we talk always about the importance of collaboration and in team meetings shout at our team members, we are not consistent and our team members are less likely to trust us. We need to implement what we talk about so that others can trust us.

• Good intentions: This concerns how others perceive us. If our colleagues/team members perceive us as a good person, they are more likely to trust us. To show good intentions, find ways to support and appreciate employees.

Embracing A Learning Culture

A workplace with a high level of psychological safety embraces a learning culture where employees are encouraged to have a growth mindset, learn from mistakes, and are rewarded for calculated risk-taking.

Encouraging a Growth Mindset: Promoting a growth mindset empowers employees to embrace challenges and view failures as opportunities for learning and growth. This mindset fosters resilience and a willingness to take on new challenges.

Learning from Mistakes and Failures: In a psychologically safe work environment, employees distinguish different mistake types and deal effectively with each mistake.

Below you can see four mistake types, two of which were taken from the work of Amy Edmondson, and the other two were created by Mehmet Baha.

Unacceptable mistakes: Despite all the training, hardware, guidance, support, and resources, if we do not wear a safety helmet in a factory and suffer an injury, this is an unacceptable mistake. Or we work at a bank, for instance, and have access to a large amount of data. We get this data and sell it to a third party. This is gross misconduct. Both of these examples are unacceptable mistakes.

In the case of unacceptable mistakes, we need to warn employees and consider sanctioning them for gross misconduct.

Improvable mistakes: Let’s say we have an unfinished product/service. We present this product/service to customers to get their feedback. Customer feedback reveals that we made some mistakes and have areas for improvement.

Concerning improvable mistakes, use the feedback and learn from the mistakes to improve the product/service.

Complex mistakes: They are caused by unfamiliar factors in a known context. A typical example is a superstorm in New York in the 1990s. Due to the superstorm, one metro station in New York is flooded.

When investigated, complex mistakes are not easy to point to one person. Reasons for complex mistakes can include personal, team, organizational, and systemic factors.

When complex mistakes happen, the right approach is to investigate all possible causes thoroughly to prevent them from happening.

Intelligent mistakes: These mistakes can happen when we aim to create a breakthrough product/service. For instance, we make this very innovative and unique product/service, launch it into the market, and do not have the expected success. Still, we get significant insights from the market that can help us in the future.

Celebrate intelligent mistakes.

Rewarding Innovation and Calculated Risk-Taking: Innovation involves taking risks, making mistakes, learning from them, and improving. Organizations with high levels of psychological safety are more likely to innovate.

Overcoming Resistance to Psychological Safety

It is likely that certain employees can resist the concept of psychological safety. Instead of focusing on the resistors, it is crucial to work with movers.

Movers are employees who are interested in the topic and can move things forward. These employees can be champions of psychological safety in an organization. Once movers attend psychological safety training and implement their learnings, they can present their wins from the training to other employees.

This way, movables, who are neutrals, can join movers and learn more about psychological safety and show behaviors that support psychological safety.

Upon seeing that movers and movables join training programs and have successes at work, it is likely that immovables, who totally resist the psychological safety training, can join other employees on the psychological safety journey. This is the movers-movables-immovables concept of creating momentum.

The main point here is to focus on movers, create small wins, gain movables, and create momentum where immovables can join too.

What is more, leadership buy-in and support can accelerate this momentum.

Measuring Psychological Safety

”The Fearless Organization” book by Prof Amy Edmondson includes a great survey to measure the level of psychological safety in a team or organization. Make sure to have your employees evaluate the following statements anonymously.

Rate each sentence below as: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, or strongly agree.

1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.

2. Members of this team are not able to bring up problems and tough issues.

3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.

4. It is not safe to take a risk on this team.

5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

6. Members of this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills & talents are not valued and utilized.                                                                

Doing this survey will allow a team or an organization to identify its strengths and areas for improvement. To further measure psychological safety and improve it in your organization, you can benefit from effective training programs.

Promoting Remote Team Psychological Safety

Many teams are currently working remotely. Using the right approaches, we can ensure a high level of psychological safety for remote teams. Below are three ways to do it.

a. Silent brainstorming sessions: In many cases, a person or a few people dominate a discussion in online brainstorming sessions, this negatively influences psychological safety. To ensure the inclusion of all ideas, we can do silent brainstorming sessions online where team members have a given amount of time to write their ideas without talking. Padlet is a fantastic tool to do silent brainstorming sessions online.

b. Weekly check-ins and emotions: Sometimes, employees are so focused on their work that they immediately go to work topics in meetings. To build psychological safety in remote teams, it is essential to start virtual meetings with questions such as “How are you feeling today?”. The main idea here is to understand and acknowledge the emotions of our colleagues and not get stuck in negative emotions.

c. New employees: Fostering psychological safety in the workplace begins even before new employees start working remotely. “Buddy” is an effective approach to making new employees feel included. A new employee is assigned a buddy, who is a current employee. This way, the new employee can ask their questions to their buddy about the work, corporate culture, etc. The “Buddy” system creates an opportunity for new employees to express their questions and foster psychological safety in the workplace.

Understanding Psychological Safety at Work

Psychological safety at work is about creating an environment where employees feel safe enough to take interpersonal risks without fear of negative consequences. This concept encourages open dialogue and honest interactions. Understanding how to measure psychological safety in the workplace can guide organizations in implementing the right strategies for improvement.

The Impact of Psychological Safety on Team Performance

Team performance significantly benefits from psychological safety in the workplace. In such environments, team members are more likely to raise concerns, share creative ideas, and engage in problem solving and productive discussions. Building psychological safety fosters a culture where everyone feels valued and heard, directly contributing to enhanced team performance.

Strategies to Create Psychological Safety

To create psychological safety, organizations must focus on fostering trust and respect among team members. This involves encouraging employees to practice active listening, showing empathy, and being open to employee feedback. Ensuring psychological safety is not just about avoiding harm but actively creating a supportive atmosphere.

Maintaining Psychological Safety for Long-Term Benefits

Maintaining psychological safety at work is crucial for sustaining its benefits, such as improved employee retention and a positive work atmosphere. Regularly checking in on the team's psychological safety and adapting strategies as needed is key to keeping this positive momentum.

Overcoming Interpersonal Risks in the Workplace

Interpersonal risks can be a barrier to safety in the workplace. To overcome these, it's important for leaders to lead by example in demonstrating vulnerability and openness. This approach helps in normalizing the expression of doubts and concerns, which is essential for maintaining psychological safety at work.

Frequentely Asked Questions:

Key Insights:

• Highlighted by a Harvard Business School professor, the importance of psychological safety has been underscored by research indicating that teams with higher psychological safety levels, are more successful.

• For leaders, fostering psychological safety goes beyond just being a good listener. It's about acknowledging when they've missed the mark, creating an atmosphere that values diverse insights, and directly linking psychological safety with mental health and overall well-being.

• Creating psychologically safe work environments is not about stifling disagreements but harnessing them for innovation. Encouraging team members to challenge the status quo, while ensuring they feel safe, can lead to breakthroughs.

• Beyond mental well-being, psychologically safe environments directly impact employee retention and turnover. When employees feel they can genuinely be themselves and voice concerns, they're more likely to remain engaged and loyal.

Leadership commitment to these principles sets the tone for the entire organization. Proactively building and maintaining psychological safety in the workplace can become a competitive advantage, driving both innovation and cohesion in teams.