How do you ally and advocate for psychological safety in the workplace?

I have not written in a Linkedin article in a long time but I thought this medium was a good way to share some fabulous questions I received on slido from highly engaged audiences in Sydney and Brisbane two weeks ago. There were 26 questions that we did not get to, so warning this is a long read!

These events were hosted by 米高蒲志 and MindTribes Pty Ltd - we are in a strategic partnership to influence more inclusive and respectful decision making from pre-hire to retire. Our hot topic was: #psychologicalsafety and how to #ally and #advocate for this in the workplace. Particularly hot, given health and safety regulations have changed to ensure both physical and psychological safety of people at work are high priority. We were joined by guest speakers, Sarah Abbott and Jane Hansen in Sydney and Catherina Behan in Brisbane. Thank you to Sharmini Wainwright , John Summerhays Leela Jenkins (nee Lewis) and Shaun Cronin for curating, hosting and moderating panels.

I think the questions reflect people’s current thinking and areas of challenge. I have organised them into themes. I thought it would be a good practice to share it with the Linkedin Community so we all move together towards more inclusive and respectful workplaces. The answers below are quick responses, if you want to connect with me in a deeper chat, if you recognise your question, please DM me.

Leadership & Management:

1. Managing Underperformance when creating a safety environment can be a bit tricky, especially to the ones underperforming as they can overreact and speak up against the company. Any thoughts about it?

• I would suggest that underperformance be fully investigated from a work design and diversity perspective. If you put your energy and time into worrying about the risks of brand reputation if someone speaks up rather than uncovering the veracity of the situation, the nature and context of why someone is underperforming, you may end up with a unsatisfactory result, losing a person who has been invested in [recruitment, selection, onboarding, development costs], impacting a person’s life and likely never really addressing the causal factors which may lead to future incidents. Often in cases we see, underperformance is often the first observable change we see in a person, but asking why, when did it start, how did it progress to the current state is crucial. There are a multitude of factors, from poor work design, poor work clarity and measurement of performance, a lack of recognition that for some people the work needs to be adjusted or altered for them to give off their best. So the problem may be masking as under-performance but a thorough investigation might likely reveal a mix of both work system, leader, manager, culture and individual factors. Doing this enquiry well, can help prevent future harm to individuals and manage organisational risks.

2. How do you meet leaders who are reluctant or hesitant where they are, and take them on the journey?

• I often have 15 mins to speak to leaders to build a case for change in their mindsets. I often encounter leaders in the audience will are likely reluctant. I give them choices. I often say, we all have just one life, and if we are in leadership roles, it means we have a fundamental duty of care for people who work for us. Work is a social determinant and our duty is to promise people safety, both physical and psychological, to give people a fair place to feel respected and valued. If we don’t, we harm people’s chances of thriving, being paid and treated fairly, which limits their choices in societies and communities. If you pay people inequitably, have a culture where they feel bullied, harassed for example but are forced to work to pay bills, then this impacts healthy mindsets and lifestyles. If you have the power to change that, then we all need to step into that power. I then give them 3 choices, do it for business and profitability [diversity represented and included, correlates to improved financial performance 15% when gender is included and 35% when cultural diversity is included)]; do it for the social-economic impact [as above] or do it for a personal impact or legacy. E.g. the CEO of Fujitsu addressed the gender pay gap within 6 months of him joining as CEO and women are currently paid 5% higher. You could argue he made all 3 choices all at once. It is a journey, but I am often reluctant to give into someone’s personal power of saying they are not yet ready to make a decision for the lives of others, because they are unsure or hesitant. Just like we acted to keep people safe during the height of the pandemic, we can act quickly to include others with differences meaningfully.

3. How can we help people who maybe lack a bit of diversity (cis NT white men, for example) to champion DEI without them being seen to take up too much space, or take over the conversation?

• Firstly, I believe everyone has diverse attributes, both visible [race, gender, physical attributes, age etc] and invisible differences [past struggles, different ways of thinking and working, sexual orientations, invisible disabilities, chronic illnesses etc.]. Some differences have been unfairly discriminated against historically in our society and workplaces, causing those people disadvantage, often generational disadvantage. Some differences have been positively discriminated creating advantage, accelerated advancement, power and privilege in systems like in politics, in communities, in education, organisations and institutions. I appeal to these people who are in power to use their power to make a difference for those who have been disadvantaged and who are experiencing inequity. It is not taking space or taking over the conversation when you are listening to who needs your support to address unfairness and you are making a positive change with and for them. If people can’t do that, I ask them to defer their power to someone who can.

4. How can I be involved (of help) in peer-to-peer endeavours around women of colour?

• I would advise approaching women of colour in your workplace with care to ask permission to hear of their lived experience at work, across careers. Or ask a woman of colour you know and who trusts you to engage these women across levels in your business. Make change with them, alongside them to improve how they feel valued and respected for their unique differences. You can also sponsor a woman of colour who wants to learn to navigate career biases and barriers with an ally or advocate into our career management program at Monash Business School.

5.?Senior management often get DE&I, but middle management is often the perpetrators or protectors of offenders of racism, bias, micro aggressions. What have your organisations done to address this?

• With middle management, we advise investing in their capability to implement diversity and inclusion into the day to day operations, into coaching and feedback, meetings, projects, development planning, business and workforce planning, leave and flexible working etc. We find a huge gap in organisations having DEI policies, executive promotion and support with the pressure directed to middle management to execute and no capability uplift. At best, middle management get a workshop or two maybe yearly or online on unconscious bias which often does not rigorously support the reduction in bias from prehire to retire when leading and managing people.

6.?What can you do (respectfully and tactfully) if the executive is clearly not an Ally?

• If executives are clearly not allies, I would discover why. Is it because they have positive intent but don't know how to enact being an ally or is it because they fundamentally disagree with diversity and inclusion positions the organisation stands for. Will or skill? It is a fear or concern that it will distract the business or cost too much? Do they need to understand the problem better so they know what and who to ally for? Once you know you can work with someone to move forward if they are willing or if this can't be influenced at least you know where you stand. Passive, false allies, slow change down and move on quickly from them and go towards people who can me make change for others quicker. I don't begrudge or have any ill feelings, I just move on, grateful for this reality and respecting that this movement is not for them.

8.??What is the “C” in the ABCD of advocacy please? Thank you.

• C is for Connect. It is one of the critical steps for an advocate to take. It recognises that someone else needs you as an advocate to connect them to your social-political-professional capital – capital that the person you are sponsoring and advocating for, wouldn’t have access to. This needs to a promise kept. We see many sponsors offering to connect but worried about what this means to their professional brand – they often back down or retreat and don’t follow through on the connection or they connect to networks and stakeholders who are ineffectual in making change for the person, because it is easier than introducing to a high value connection. Read the article by Rosalind Chow.

9.??Hi Div, the word “champion” is often used in DE&I, is this different to “advocate”?

• A champion used to be used quite commonly years ago but has since been dropped in most workplaces especially when referring to executives or senior leaders. Champion is now often used for change agents, people within teams who are helping to promote diversity and inclusion efforts. Senior leaders, executives, board members are now charged with more than championing or promoting diversity and inclusion plans and initiatives, they need to publicly advocate for change in systems and policies and do this consistently until we see real change for those who are facing discrimination and disadvantage.

Case for Change:

10.??Isn’t there a risk that D&I focus distracts from core business success, such as hiring to meet an inclusion KPI but other candidates skills offer a better return on business success.

• This is a risk or deficit mindset, thinking that we would be losing something that makes the business less successful if we choose someone who has differences to the current composition of people. With this mindset etched in the organisation’s culture, if there was a KPI to hire diverse candidates, it is likely that it would be tokenistic hires and these people likely would not feel valued for their difference, but made to feel like outsiders. Diversity truly included returns to the business scorecard, but it requires humanistic and commercial leadership. See the article my Mckinsey here

11.??What are the new legal requirements regarding D&I? And for which size of businesses?

• The legal requirement is a duty of care responsibility in most states that has been there forever, a do-no-harm care responsibility by the employer towards employees. This could be linked to a D&I legal responsibility. The occupational health and safety legislation has changed to include psychological safety and in most states it is 50 or 100 or more employees. Check your state’s legislation and codes of practice for psychological safety.

12.??Question for Div- why do you think people are worried about reporting it? What do they think are the consequences?

• People worry about reporting poor behaviour for a number of reasons, the primary ones we have found in our research is the fear of negative consequences to their job security, brand reputation, immediate professional relationships at work, concern they will not be believed, concerned they will not have the required evidence or anything meaningful will come from it. Mostly people believe that it will not stop the behaviour from continuing and 90% of people want the behaviour stop – the rest want the behaviour to stop and a consequence to the person for enacting the negative behaviour.

13.??What are the key barriers to why men are such low takers of parental leave?

• I learnt recently that 80% of the workforce are fathers in Australia and the fastest growing single parent cohort are fathers. Our consultations with organisations show that the parental leave systems carry structural barriers to inclusion for men and were not co-designed with men. Societally, Australia is a laggard with regards to gender equality in the home, with women still doing most of the unpaid work in the home. This number rose during 2020-2021 during the height of the pandemic and successive lockdowns. We found in a few clients that for all the efforts of gender balanced parental leave messages, men year on year dropped in their uptake of parental leave and continued flexible working, citing career backlash [poorer promotional pathways, career options]. The decision in homes in the face of rising cost of living was to back the male/father’s career which generally had higher pay ranges.

14.??Great advice to include psychological safety as risk to the business; however often we see senior leaders being oblivious to this because they’re sitting in positional power. How can we approach this?

• I often use cases that have been in the media of late, where there has been whistleblowing to the media of bullying, harassment, sexual misconduct, racism there has been subsequent and ongoings organisation brand reputation risks, loss of customers, drops in share prices and in 12-15 months. As a result most of the executive leaders suffered personal brand reputational issues – many chose to leave and some were asked to leave, when investigations were done and they were found to have known but not acted to reduce or eliminate the risks. ?If the senior leaders are oblivious to the psychological risks, bring them the evidence of the psychosocial risks and present them with a choice to act positively.

15.??What recommendations do you have for getting stakeholder (particularly C-Suite) buy-in for DE&I initiatives?

• See answers to question 2 and 10 above.

16.??At times, D&I initiatives feels more like a win to leadership teams than actually a cause to enhance the workplace and improve overall productivity. Especially when LT lacks diversity. Any thoughts?

• Likely because the metrics and measurements are misplaced. I usually measure the impact and outcome of D&I initiatives directly back to people's lived experience of the change [and not in engagement survey results - which sometimes can give a false positive]. If the LT lacks diversity, the quickest way I have found to have a turnaround in mindset is to measure leaders directly for implementing the D&I change. This has to be done with care and capability, so leaders don't feel forced or pressured to meet a goal. I am not necessarily talking about targets which I found to have poor impact, and the unintended consequence of having diversity represented and not included. Talk to us about building metrics that really matter and that pull people along the journey rather than pushing them to act positively - this never ends well.

Voice of People, to Survey or not to Survey:

17.??Do you find exit surveys have same guarded answers?

• Yes, often as people are still worried about the backlash from relationships and voice of people from one organisation to another. At this juncture there is more focus one exiting well and moving forward than having a voice to make the organisation they are leaving, better.?I would suggest conducting ‘stay’ interviews. Talk to us about how to do this interview well.

18.??How can you engage with staff that don’t engage when its all anonymous data set?

• This is a clear sign of a poor psychological safety were people are worried about disclosure and being identified, even if there are communications assuring them it is completely anonymous. I would suggest doing more work to improve safe spaces and do this consistently well for at least a year and then trying to survey again. Many clients who we have suggested this to, i.e. stop engagement and any form of survey for a year has seen improvement in their data collection and disclosure – this is with the proviso that all diversity and inclusion initiatives and promises for action and kept and transparently shared.

19.??Compared to physical injury, how do you measure impact of mental health issue as a result of racism.

• We have an assessment that has a five point indicator. Talk to us.

20.??When resourcing is minimal, and interviewing a large number of employees is not feasible, what mechanisms can you suggest to capture employee sentiment on psych safety other than engagement surveys?

• I would suggest that you embed psychological safety checks into your everyday people rhythms, coaching, feedback, supervision, meetings etc. Wherever there is regular human to human interaction, there can be a continuous assessment.

21.??Apart from survey (oh no another survey) and focus group (people refrain to speak up), what other method do you recommend to run a psychological safety audit?

• I would recommend that you embed a psychological safety audit into everyday people rhythms, equipping people leaders and team members to do this as part of their mainstream activities - we have done this well and we have found it builds a psychological safety culture that is truly embedded.

22.??How would one audit “psychological safety” in an organisation?

• Big question, talk to us or have a look at your states health and safety government websites, there are good explanations of the obligations on employers and how to assess psychological safety harm, hazards and risks.

General questions:

23. Question for Div: How do you manage an investigation which identifies clinically diagnosed anxiety or depression?

• I would immediately offer the person care and support. I would halt the investigation on duty of care grounds, as continuing can cause further harm to the person and worsen their mental health. Pause.?

24. We spoke of programs for minority. What have you implemented for the general public regarding psychological risk?

• Yes we have, we have 6 modules developed for HR people and leaders to improve their capability to embed psychological safety practices for all people. Generally, when you design with a minority or marginalised group in mind, this lifts the positive impact for everyone.?

25. Do you think people with a higher EQ are more likely to be better at psychology safety?

• Yes, generally speaking, as people with higher EQ have more of a self-other orientation, they can see the impact of their actions on someone else and can think from someone else's shoes. However, don't wait to build EQ first and then tackle psychological safety risks. People can still act to improve systems without high EQ's.

26. How do you handle when you are challenged about your views that we should not assign gender to babies as they are not old enough to identify themselves?

• Whenever I hear challenge to views held, I call out Respect for different opinions. As long as you can express your views with respect to others having different views then others need to give respect. It is a reciprocity principle. This is a learned skill to hear and respect different opinions, as long as it does not cause harm to others or feed into biased decision making. E.g. if views on assigning gender to babies caused exclusionary behaviours to let's say new parents who have returned to work and have bought gendered coloured clothing, toys, and named their child typical gendered first names - this means it is impacting behaviour towards another person and may make them feel excluded.