Psychological Safety Post Pandemic

More and more voices are wondering what has happened to Psychological Safety in teams as a result of the pandemic. It’s an ironic consideration when it originates from some who hadn’t encountered the concept before Covid, but it’s a valid concern to those who had. 

In a conversation I had with Prof. Dr Amy Edmondson last summer, we were talking about what is more likely to be the trend - teams that display more or less of the positive behaviours of Psychological Safety as a result of this period? At the time, while we could have speculated that would be the case, we couldn’t have anticipated the amount of burnout that turned out to be the norm. Nor could we quantify the way the sudden shift to remote would have affected the teams for which this was utterly new. Fast forward nearly a year to today, and those considerations are still mired in the unknown as with the best of wills, there are only a handful of studies on the effects of the pandemic on the workforce despite the inflation of articles on the topic.

What we do know now, beyond a shadow of a doubt and irrespective whom you ask, is that this giant “POC of remote” work, -forced and traumatic as it was to some-, was successful enough in proving the possibility and in ushering in a completely new era where it can be made reality. Furthermore, the fact that most people have held firm in their “no, going back to the office full time is out of the question” stance is incredibly positive as there was a period of danger there where the needs and will of the workers -as well as common sense itself!-, could have been overridden by the command and control management of yesteryear. 

So with that, teams everywhere are at the beginning of an unpaved road they have to build for themselves. And they will build on amazing foundations thanks to the POC, that is presuming they are allowed to do so and not thrust into a whirlwind of brand spanking new policies created a priori over the past half a year. Unfortunately, that situation isn’t rare either and in our work with teams, we’ve seen many such policies having just been spawned more concerned with detailing the process of sanitising pens for an eventual return than with redefining work around outcomes, flow and employee’s joy.

How do you know if your organisation is going to be as smart as PWC -who removed not only the office presence requirement but the office hours too, asking their employees to work whenever it is good for them- or as misguided as the ones concerned with detailing whether you’re ok to lean on a colleague’s desk in the 4-days-in-the-office policy they mandated? Here’s a good litmus test: are the terms of “individual/focused/solitary work” versus “group/team/with others work” established? If not, chances are it’s more about the sanitising units. 

Going back to whether we will likely see more or less Psychological Safety, as I was saying, the answer is anyone’s -educated- guess because there isn’t enough data to support a firm stance, no less because to see if you get more of a thing you need to know how much of that thing you had to begin with, and let’s face it, the measurement of Psychological Safety in teams is still absent in most places. 

If I’d have to wager a bet I would say the most accurate answer is “it depends on the team”. On many factors I should expect - longevity, type of project, if the were having a healthy team dynamic to begin with, how comfortable they were with remote, whether or not their work was critical, etc-

Take a long term team that was working together remotely already when the pandemic hit, who was somewhere in either “norming” or “performing” in Lencioni’s view, with a decent amount of engagement, flexibility, willingness to learn and preexistent solid habits around being open and courage. In their case, this period may have well brought them even closer together and may have tested and strengthened their resilience. Those not that fortunate would have suffered even further. For one thing, organising for efficiency remotely and then further functioning productively needed more openness than slouching in a chair and hiding behind impression managing nods and facial expression of interests in a live in-person meeting. In the absence of this openness, things would have been even more difficult and the connection to the team would have been further broken. 

That’s just one of the many aspects that could have gone wrong in the dynamic of teams and when we look at dashboards of the teams using our Psychological Safety Dashboard for Teams solution one of the shocks is when the data uncovers that as a team, they aren’t truly doing great at the things they previously thought they were solid on, such as courage and speaking up. 

On the other hand, one of the arguments which is supposed to show that we must have gotten more Psychological Safety is that teams performed well, and they certainly did, everyone brought their absolute A game,- hence the burnout really - even those that were teaming or had just become a new team during the pandemic but to me, that’s a straw man, in particular in new teams or those which rallied around the common goal of getting critical jobs done due to the extraordinary circumstances, because their main engine was sheer adrenaline and a need to serve and not existent levels of openness or how they were proficient at not impression managing around each other. In other words in those teams, the mission alone would have powered them, not a sustainable state of affairs and not the result of a healthy team dynamic or proof of them being Psychologically Safe and one that huge external stimulus is gone so will be their ability to perform fearlessly at a high level.

In tomorrow’s video, we expound on this with some examples from teams we worked with so be sure to read that and meanwhile let us know what you think, what you see around you in your own team and what you feel? Is the team more or less afraid to be open, authentic, close and growing with each other?

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.