Spending on Psychological Safety Part 2

In the last newsletter, we talked about why organisations would invest their time and money in assessing and improving psychological safety.

We identified four likely reasons:

1. Pressure from within the organisation from those who constantly remind leaders of how important it is to have psychologically safe teams. Often these are D&I leaders who know how important psychological safety is for inclusion and belonging.
2. An incident - caused by low psychological safety - that becomes known outside the organisation and forces the organisation to act in order to resolve “a public relations nightmare.”
3. Specific pain points such as the sudden need to attract and recruit a more diverse set of employees, a desire to appeal to a particular market segment, a requirement for a specific set of non-typical skills, a bad employee engagement report, or more.
4. The Corporate Conscience — most often found in an organisation with a firm commitment to ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) principles.

So what can we do as internal agitators or external consultants to encourage organisations to make the needed investment in psychological safety?

In the interests of improving psychological safety everywhere, we are happy to share our ideas! And we’ve gathered our suggestions under these four headings:

• Find the facts
• Follow the finance
• Face the fear
• Fence the field

An organisation’s commitment to action needs to be based on evidence.

We need to help the leaders uncover what is really going on; to prove that psychological safety needs to be improved. To find evidence, we need to do some research. And this research can be qualitative or quantitative or, preferably, both.

There are several surveys available that will help you measure the level of psychological safety in your teams. These range from a very simple five-question assessment administered via Google Forms, to a sophisticated 25-question survey, administered via a platform that incorporates highly informative statistical analysis and reporting.

These quantitative surveys can be administered across the whole organisation or might be confined to just a single team or other cohorts. The data that is discovered provides powerful evidence of the need to act, and may even enable the organisation to predict quantifiable performance gains when psychological safety is improved.

Qualitative data can be obtained via interviews, or through a free text response as part of one of the surveys above. Leaders might feel that qualitative data lack the “hard numbers” that they need, but the stories and experiences that are uncovered by qualitative data can be extremely powerful in moving the organisation to take action.

Part of the work we do with organisations is to help them obtain this data in an accurate and reliable way, while protecting the anonymity of those who provide it.

Improving psychological safety often seems to leaders like something that’s “nice to have”, but needs that seem more pressing often take priority. That’s why a focus on where money is being spent (or is being lost) can be so helpful.

For example, an organisation might spend heavily to improve the diversity of their workforce, but is not seeing the expected benefits (and may even be seeing a downward trend!) in employee engagement and satisfaction. As money is already being spent in this area, but not producing the desired returns, it might be easier to make a case for diverting some of this spending to testing whether psychological safety would improve the outcomes of increased diversity. (Spoiler alert: It will!)

And if we look at other areas of the business where revenues are not flowing as expected, this could be a straightforward decision if we can make the case for psychological safety improving performance results.

For example, in a retail environment, are some stores outperforming others in sales per square foot? Is there any evidence that this results from low psychological safety in poorly performing teams (see ‘Find the Facts’ above)? A simple comparison between the performance indicators and the levels of psychological safety between teams might give us the evidence we need.

Most times, leaders know about the research that shows psychological safety improves performance across a range of indicators, but still resist investing in improving it. Why?

It’s important to find where this resistance is coming from. Sometimes leaders fear that if their teams feel safe to express themselves honestly, and even challenge the way things are done, they will lose control over their teams. This can be an intense feeling, particularly in cultures and organisations where hierarchies are steep and people expect and accept an unequal distribution of power. No leader wants to invest in what might seem like their own demise!

So it’s important to show that high psychological safety does not mean a lack of respect for leaders. In fact, the evidence shows that leaders who display vulnerability are highly respected by their team, and loyally followed by team members.?

Vulnerability builds trust, and Harvard Business Review published a study that showed when employees trusted their managers, businesses were significantly more profitable. In this study, for every 1 percent improvement in trust, profitability increased by around 20 percent. Results like this should encourage even the most autocratic leaders to take a close look at psychological safety!

And our own framework for psychological safety in the Asia-Pacific region has respect at its heart. It combines this respect with accountability for performance. Reach out if you'd like to know more.

Face this fear and discuss it frankly with leaders who may be reluctant to invest in improving psychological safety.

When it comes to investing time and particularly money, leaders want to be assured that they will get a return on their investment. That’s why we encourage a cautious and measured approach when investing in improving psychological safety.

If the scope of the work is large, leaders might see this as a large investment, with a high risk of not getting the desired results. But that concern can be easily addressed by putting up a “fence”.

By this we mean, keeping the initial field of action small. Restricting the psychological safety improvement project to a pilot phase, with a few participants, and then reassessing the level of both psychological safety and performance can provide a high level of assurance that a larger project will produce a bigger return on investment.

The "fenced" scope might be an organisation unit, teams at a certain level in the hierarchy, or even areas of the organisation that are struggling with performance (See ‘Follow the Finance’ above). Once the evidence of the value is established, then the project can be expanded across more of the organisation. We can take the fence down, and help the whole organisation to benefit from improved psychological safety!

Keep it up!

Large organisations usually make decisions slowly and involve multiple stakeholders. We suggest keep sharing and discuss these four approaches above until the investment is finally made. And as small gains are seen, tell the stories of success as widely as possible!

Once leaders in the organisation start to see the returns, they will be asking why it took so long!

*****

Build highly engaged and high-performing teams by boosting psychological safety in your workplace. BOOK a 30-minute free consulting session with me to find out how I can help.?

(Thank you to the folks at Foster (foster.co), including Leo Ariel, Nick Drage, Anthony Pica, Minnow Park, Joel Christiansen, Edvardo Archer, and Sena Gürdo?an for contributing to this article.)