Use Psychological Safety To Unify Your Wellbeing Programs

Unifying your programs for wellbeing

These days many organisations rightly have an intense and multifaceted focus on employee wellbeing. They encourage their people to take leave regularly, to reach out for mental health support, and maintain what is often referred to as a work-life balance.

Many organisations also support events and commemorations that help diverse employees to feel a greater sense of belonging, such as Pride Day, International Day Against Racial Discrimination, and in Australia, National Sorry Day and Reconciliation Week.

And most organisations take these steps because they have a fundamental commitment to improving wellbeing and supporting diversity, which is commendable. But it’s also good to ask whether these programs are effective in improving wellbeing and increasing a sense of belonging, and whether there is some way to take a more holistic approach to selecting and implementing these programs.

One approach

The giant Indian multinational conglomerate, Reliance Industries, takes a holistic and culturally aligned approach to wellbeing, which rests on two pillars: Swasthya and Sammaan.

Swasthya, which means health in the Hindi language, includes what Reliance calls “the 5 aspects of wellness, namely physical, mental, spiritual, financial and social.” And Sammaan, which carries the thought of the English word respect, encourages all employees to “Praise. Thank. Celebrate.”

I’ve not been able to observe how this works in practice at Reliance, but the approach has a wonderfully broad scope and a holistic orientation. And according to employee review sites such as Glassdoor, Reliance is an excellent place to work, consistently rated in the upper quartile by current and former employees.

Reliance seems to be a particularly good example of an organisation with a cohesive approach to wellbeing, but it is not alone. Forbes speaks highly of the wellbeing programs at Wiley, KPMG, ServiceNow and Monster, and other examples are not too hard to find.

Measuring effectiveness?

Most organisations measure the effectiveness of their wellbeing programs through indicators such as employee engagement, unplanned leave days taken, productivity and employee satisfaction. And in most companies who care about their employees, the annual (or even more frequent) employee engagement survey is seen as the litmus test for the success of these programs.

However, as readers of this newsletter are probably aware, all the above measures are trailing indicators from the level of psychological safety in the organisation. They FOLLOW the level of psychological safety. This means that the level of psychological safety is the real test of the effectiveness of wellbeing programs!

So how can organisations take an approach that recognises this connection, and acknowledges the importance of psychological safety in building wellbeing?

A unifying approach: Psychological safety

Our objective here is to provide an overarching framework that enables an organisation to plan and assess the individual and combined impact of wellbeing initiatives and programs through their impact on psychological safety.

The level of psychological safety in a team can be traced back to the feelings produced in five psychosocial domains: Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness (or belonging), Equity (or fairness) and Significance (or status). We often measure psychological safety in teams (and other cohorts), using a proprietary survey and analysis platform, and uncover the influence that each of these domains has on the overall level of psychological safety.

But how does this help us to plan and assess the impact of wellbeing programs?

The organisation could consider the likely impact that each wellbeing program will have on these five domains.

For example, celebrating Pride week might be expected to improve feelings of belonging and significance amongst certain groups. And giving employees more say in their working environment should improve feelings of autonomy and, if implemented well, fairness.

So, when designing or assessing a program, the initiators could consider any positive or negative effects on these domains. This would not be the only consideration, of course, but it could provide another, useful perspective on these programs, and also helps to harmonise them in their design and purpose.

And as we can measure the level of psychological safety, and the influence that each of these domains has on it, an organisation can take a measurement before a program is implemented, and repeat the measure after it has been running for some time. We can also look at the before and after contribution to other measures of success, such as engagement, key performance indicators, or more.

Conclusion

As Albert Einstein is reputed to have said: Not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. So we don't want to rely on these measurements alone to gauge the effectiveness of wellbeing initiatives. But as a framework and a useful assessment tool for programs, there is nothing that I am aware of that is better than psychological safety!

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