A-Gay-Ny Aunt #22

A-Gay-Ny Aunt is a weekly column written by Gina Battye - about navigating work, relationships, family and feelings, your sexuality and gender and being your Authentic Self in a chaotic and often confusing world.

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I am working from home and expected to be in online meetings. What can I do to feel safer online?

Hello there,

Sense of safety is an individualised experience. There are a whole host of different elements that affect your sense of safety - both in person and in an online environment. When you think of safety, your mind is conditioned to think of your physical safety, with psychological safety often overlooked.

People find it difficult to be authentic online. It is a lot easier to hide behind a persona. To NOT be your true self. To hide behind a professional mask.

We are conditioned to think we can only share positive news – just look at Facebook. Peoples news feeds are full of positive things they have done. They don’t talk about their bad days. It is the same on LinkedIn. People tend to share their achievements at work but they don’t talk about their personal lives. They think they need to keep them separate. Censoring. Hiding. Cultivating what they want people to know about them.

But all that does is create distance. Make you feel isolated and lonely. Disconnect you from your workplace, colleagues, family and friends.

Let's look at how you can cultivate psychological safety in an online environment, using the 5 Pillars of Psychological Safety as a framework.

Self.

Your thoughts. What is it about being online that worries you or unsettles you? Think back to a time where you felt unsettled in a meeting. What was it about that situation that put you on edge? Were your family in the room? Were you worried about your colleagues finding out more about your home-life or your relationship status? Were you anxious about your partner walking past to get a cup of tea? When you are aware of what triggers you, you can put strategies in place to make sure they don't knock you off balance in the future.

Boundaries. Consider your boundaries. Do you need to set some? Do you need to communicate them? Out loud, not just in your head...! Be prepared to communicate them.

Questions. Prepare yourself for any questions that tend to come up in social conversations that are classed as 'out of bounds' to you. The usual ones: partner, marriage, kids. Know how you will respond to these. By doing this you will boost your confidence and reduce the anxiety you may be feeling. Be clear with yourself about how much information you want to divulge. Do you really need to go into that much detail about your current dating situation with your boss for instance?

Find your authentic voice online. Experiment to find the right balance of work and play / talking about your life outside of work.

Take responsibility for your behaviour, actions and how they impact on other people.

Be honest about your abilities, knowledge and skill level.

Self-care. Look after yourself. Eat well. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Don't sit up late into the night watching Netflix. Find time to relax and unwind. Create space in your days, to rest your eyes and your mind. Don't stay say in one place all day. Move about. Schedule in social conversations with your colleagues and keep in touch with family and friends.

Your environment. Be aware that you may be on camera during some meetings. Turn your camera on before a meeting and look at what others can see around you. Are you comfortable with them seeing everything? If not, you have a few options. Don't turn your camera on. Choose a background or blur out your background. Clean up the space that people can see.

Your home situation. If you want to keep your home-life private, be sure to put a sign on the door for family, kids and partners, or let them know when not to disturb you.

Prepare. For your meetings and interactions online. What is the purpose of the interaction? Do you want something specific out of the conversation? Make sure you plan ahead and do your homework. There is nothing worse than being caught on the back-foot.

Social.

Social capital. One critical thing that is missing with working from home and in the online environment is that social presence that you get when you are in person with your colleagues. You want to feel like you belong at work and like you are part of a community. Right? I talked about how to create and build more social presence in an online environment in my last column. Take a read of that for some more ideas on this.

Be kind and extend compassion to everyone – more so in those moments where you feel triggered. Everyone is doing the best they can in that moment, with what they have. And you are not alone with feeling knocked off balance with all this online working! Your colleagues are most likely feeling it too.

Communication. Be clear about what it is you want from conversations and meetings - and communicate that. Keep the conversation on track!

Be aware of privilege, stereotyping, assumptions, unconscious biases, discrimination and (fear of) exclusion. Yours and other peoples. This will influence conversations, decisions and agendas.

Collaboration.

Work together to create a safe space for collaboration online.

As a minimum, make sure your safe space has: a conflict resolution in place (sanctions for crossing the line), ground rules and effective communication strategies (how to get the most of communicating online).

Encourage others to find their authentic voice, to speak their truth and express themselves fully.

Find a way to collaborate online, with your colleagues, peers, external stakeholders. I know this can be challenging (and frustrating) with limitations of technology. Experiment with different tools to be able to collaborate effectively. Be clear about what the platform is for. Is it a social platform, a content platform, a storage platform, a professional platform? Then set up ground rules and expectations. Communicate policies/rules for posting, interacting and collaborating.

Stay present. Don’t let your mind wander into things that happened in the past or worry about what the future may hold. Hold your attention on the present moment.

Curiosity.

Be curious and ask questions.

Don't jump in with your thoughts and opinions until you have truly heard the perspective on the table.

Learn from others. Be open to learning and experimenting.

Don't be afraid to reflect publicly.

Creativity.

Encourage input and opinions from everyone in the meeting. Even the quiet ones. The ones with their cameras off. The ones on mute. Include everyone in the conversation.

Create a culture of hearing everyone’s ideas and thoughts. Make sure everyone has a voice and the opportunity to be heard. There are many ways to do this. Use the chat function, hand raised button, emojis, gifs, polls, break-out rooms and private messaging to encourage discussion and to build rapport between team members. Just as you would have conversations in a physical room, you can have those on line. Experiment with, get a bit more creative and use the tools available to you.

Keep in mind the 5 Pillars of Psychological Safety when you are cultivating safety online AND in-person: self, social, collaboration, curiosity and creativity.

Hope that helps,

Gina x

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About Gina Battye

Gina Battye is a world-renowned Authenticity, Psychological Safety and LGBT+ Inclusion Consultant and Trainer for Multinational Corporations, Fortune 500s, TV, Film and the Global Press.

As a media friendly experienced expert, with an acting background, Gina's work has been featured widely in the media, including:

Sky News, BBC Radio, Forbes, Psychologies, Cosmopolitan.

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