The importance of psychological safety at work

When you think of safety in the workplace what usually comes to mind is high vis jackets, mandatory training, maybe something about using ladders or the correct lifting technique. What we don’t think about is psychological safety.

It’s time that changed.

At its root, psychological safety is about creating an environment that views mistakes as learning opportunities, not as failure.

It’s about people feeling supported, confident and empowered in their decision making. It’s about being able to speak up without fear of punishment.

When put like that it’s obvious why psychological safety at work makes sense, and in our current work from home vs remote vs office based vs hybrid climate, psychological safety is more important than ever.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is a concept coined by Harvard Business School professor Dr Amy C. Edmondson when she was researching the relationship between error making and teamwork in hospitals for her PhD. She found that the most effective teams made more mistakes. After more research into the topic she discovered that it’s because they felt safe reporting these mistakes, unlike the other teams where there was a reluctance to report due to fear of repercussions.

Putting it into a professional services workplace, that means creating a workplace where people feel they can share hard or potentially sensitive things. They can own up to mistakes, admit failures and weaknesses but also challenge leaders and those around them without fear of punishment.

The business (and personal) benefits

Psychological safety sounds lovely, but for businesses to make it a priority there has to be more to it than that. Thankfully there’s a growing body of research that makes the business case for us.

Feeling excluded or marginalised at work is a serious issue for employers.

• Research found that only 3 out of 10 employees felt their opinions count at work .
• When it comes to virtual meetings, 1 in 5 women feel overlooked or ignored .

It’s likely that figure is even higher for other historically underrepresented groups. We can all agree that those employees don’t feel psychologically safe.

But in environments where there are high levels of psychological safety there are higher levels of performance and fewer instances of interpersonal conflict.

From a personal perspective employees are more engaged, more driven, more motivated, and more likely to move jobs. When the personal and business benefits are combined, the business case for psychological safety makes itself.

Why leaders struggle with psychological safety

The environment many of us grew up in is one where we don’t challenge authority, we do as we’re told, and there are direct consequences to errors. In school that might be detentions, in families you might get grounded or have something confiscated. Those in senior positions are hard wired to replicate those environments.

For some the notion of psychological safety flies in the face of their direct experiences. It challenges their deep held bias about what a workplace should look like and how people should act.

That means some leaders, and I stress here not all, some find it challenging to even contemplate creating that sort of working culture. Let alone to be the one who instigates that change.

There are other leaders though who, for whatever personal reasons, are excited by the idea of a place where people can be their true selves, where collaboration and healthy debate can exist within robust teamwork. It’s those leaders who are pushing the boundaries when it comes to creating psychological safe workplaces as the default, not the exception.

Challenging the status quo

The idea of a psychologically safe workplace when everyone’s in the same building and can spend time together works well. But the rise of hybrid and remote working brings a wealth of challenges to that working culture.

When it comes to remote working there can easily be a niggling feeling, on both sides, when it comes to trust.

Employers question an employee's intentions and whether they’re actually doing what they say they are. Employees feel like they’re being checked up on. When it comes to building a psychologically safe remote workplace, that’s far harder to do.

Looking at research undertaken during the pandemic, at the height of remote working, only 26% employees felt psychologically safe.

Now understandably there were other external factors which might have contributed to that, but their experience of burnout, stress and loneliness highlight some of the fundamental challenges to psychological safety.

That’s not to say that hybrid or remote working are fundamentally incompatible with psychological safety, far from it in fact. There may simply be more obstacles which need to be consciously navigated.

For example, building trust and connection virtually is very different to in person. When everyone’s in the office there’s chit chat, there’s camaraderie, there are opportunities for casual interaction.

Virtually - that doesn’t happen. Instead, any interaction is usually task orientated.

It’s down to leadership to address that and create pockets of time for informal conversation. It might be logging onto meetings 5-minutes early, or simply picking up the phone and having a chat.

Psychological safety can absolutely be created in virtual environments, but it won’t happen on its own.

Building psychological safety

Building psychological safety isn’t something that happens overnight, it’s the culmination of thousands of small actions started by senior leaders.

It’s important to show vulnerability as a leader, to share your mistakes and struggles. Only when you start to openly communicate with your employees will you instil the confidence in them to reciprocate. This is absolutely a time when leading by example will start a cascade of change.

Leaders also need to remember that they need to listen to their teams. Most leaders think they’re better listeners than they are. Without listening to what’s being shared by your team you won’t be able to respond and react in a way that truly supports them.

You can make basic changes which will set you on the right path - celebrating success, encouraging everyone to speak up, creating space for new ideas (the crazier the better), creating dialogue around decisions, successes and failures.

If you start doing all of those things with your immediate team, they’ll start to do the same with their peers and teams and slowly a culture of openness, support and safety will establish itself.

We need to broaden our definition of safety. When Maslow included it in his hierarchy of needs the world was a different place. Our fight or flight response was designed to keep us physically safe, but in the modern world physical safety isn’t enough. We need to prioritise our psychological safety and recognise that work plays a big part in that.

Employers need to prioritise psychologically safe workplaces not only from a moral standpoint and to fulfil our duty of care to our employees. If we want productive, motivated, engaged, happy teams who can navigate difficult conversations and collaborate effectively, then psychological safety is the best way to achieve that. Only when we have that in place will we see the kind of truly inclusive workplaces that we all deserve to be a part of.

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