Psychological Safety Training-Fostering A Culture Of High-Performance

Understanding a Psychologically Safe Workplace

Mehmet Baha defines psychological safety as a work environment where employees feel safe expressing their questions, concerns, ideas, and mistakes. 

A psychologically safe working environment is a key aspect of high-performing teams. Leaders and managers play a crucial role in creating psychological safety. At the same time, all employees are responsible for contributing to a safe workplace.

Below, you can see two other definitions of psychological safety. 

Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School Professor, 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.”

Dr. Timothy Clark states, “Psychological safety is a condition in which you feel included, safe to learn, contribute, and 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 people feel safe to express their questions, concerns, ideas, and mistakes.

Importance of Psychological Safety in the Workplace

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. A psychologically safe environment is crucial for employees to feel their opinions count.

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

Identifying Common Challenges

Recognizing the Lack of Psychological Safety:

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

• Meetings: A lack of psychological safety becomes apparent when employees refrain from asking questions during meetings due to the fear of judgment or criticism.

• Feedback: Focusing only on negative feedback without acknowledging employees' positive contributions erodes psychological safety, hindering their ability to innovate and take risks.

• 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.

• Relationships Among Employees: If employees do not know each other personally, lack mutual respect and trust, and don't enjoy spending time together, it signifies a lack of psychological safety in the workplace.

• 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.

Common Barriers to Psychological Safety:

Within organizations, three key barriers impede the development of a psychologically safe environment: 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.

• 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.

By addressing these common challenges and investing in psychological safety training, organizations can create a workplace where employees feel safe to express their thoughts, take risks, and contribute to high-performance teams, fostering a culture of innovation and growth.

Benefits of Implementing Psychological Safety Training

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

Improved trust: Once teams have psychological safety, this improves 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.

Designing an Effective Training Program

Designing an effective psychological safety training program is based on the following four factors:

Data-driven approach: To see improvement in psychological safety, it is recommended to do an anonymous psychological safety survey before training sessions. After a series of training sessions or a learning journey, the same psychological safety survey is done anonymously to see the change. If training participants implement their learnings from the training program, psychological safety will improve in their teams and organizations.

Impactful method: Head, heart, hands (3H) is an impactful training method. Participants learn cutting-edge concepts (head) related to psychological safety, get inspired (heart) by learning best practices from successful leaders and organizations, and put into practice (hands) what they learn.

Customization: Understanding the needs and profile of training participants is critical to creating a customized training program. This way, the training program can resonate with participants, and they can make an impact at work.

Scalability: To ensure that a training program can improve organizational success, we need to include employees at different levels in the training program. Participating senior managers, middle-level managers, C-level executives, team leads, and other employees in the training program can help an organization achieve alignment on psychological safety.

Training Exercises About Psychological Safety

Here is an exercise about speaking up, one of the main elements of psychological safety. 

In your weekly team meeting, bring a green card. Explain to your team that everyone will have a green card at every meeting. Whoever has the green card will play devil’s advocate, indicate risks in a project, and express dissenting views. As a leader or manager, you must encourage and appreciate team members with the green card and play the devil’s advocate. 

Repeat the same process in the next weekly team meetings with other team members. Once team members see that they can express dissenting views and point out risks, it will create a team environment where others feel safe speaking up. 

It can take some time to create a speaking-up culture. It is essential to do this practice consistently.

You can find six more practical training exercises about psychological safety on this page.

Measuring Training Effectiveness

To assess the effectiveness of psychological safety training, we can do surveys or feedback forms right after or sometime after training sessions to measure the following four factors:

Feelings: At the first level, we can survey the learners' feelings about the training session. “Do you feel more confident about creating psychological safety?” and “Do you feel inspired after the training session?” are just some of the questions. Having positive emotions about the training session helps participants implement their insights from the training later.

Knowledge: This includes concepts participants learned about psychological safety, such as dealing effectively with mistakes, failing forward, and habit formation. Additionally, this involves the retention of knowledge. Through surveys, we can measure this. Ideally, we want our participants to learn all the related concepts and retain their knowledge.

Application: It is about applying their knowledge. When participants are motivated, have positive feelings about the training, acquire knowledge, and implement their learnings, it is a good result for an organization.

Impact of learning on the business: This is the most challenging and valuable level of assessment. “What is the impact of the training on the number of incidents in the organization? To what extent did the organization's innovation capability increase due to training programs?” are just some of the questions to quantify the effectiveness of a training program on the business. Once training programs enhance a business at a higher level, this will be an ideal outcome for an organization.

The approach mentioned above is based on the Kirkpatrick model.

FAQ About Psychological Safety Training

FAQ: Unlocking The True Value Of Psychologically Safe Work Environments