Why are Leaders Prioritizing Employee Psychological Safety?

In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, the catastrophic impact on many families and businesses, the world won’t return to normal for a long time, if ever. But this pandemic also creates opportunities for dramatically improving how we approach different facets of work – from workplace design to employee health and safety and, perhaps most importantly, to workplace leadership.

M Moser Associates’ first response to the pandemic was in China where we have approximately 700 colleagues. As people slowly returned to the office, the firm developed both physical and behavioral solutions to keep our people safe.

• Guidelines for when to wear personal protective gear to protect themselves and others in the workplace.
• Processes that easily and quickly clean the physical environment and the individual’s outerwear, such as shoe soles and external clothing.
• Processes such as temperature monitoring that easily and quickly ensured that those in the office were symptom free.
• Air quality solutions that ensured airborne hazards were captured and eliminated.
• Technical solutions that ensured that work surfaces were safe from hazards.
• Technical solutions that supported collaboration from safe distances, whether those distances were six feet or across the world.

Leadership in a post-pandemic world

In addition to health and safety, leadership will also look very different in a post-pandemic world. Leaders must pave the way for people return to office environments with confidence.

Paul O’Neill’s experience when he took over as CEO of Alcoa in 1987 is an excellent lesson in fostering employee confidence and engagement. Fresh off his tenure as Treasury Secretary in George W. Bush’s administration, Mr. O’Neill took over Alcoa at a time that the aluminum icon was struggling. Mr. O’Neill’s first and primary focus was on employee safety. As Charles Duhigg explained in his book The Power of Habit, the immediate response of the equity analysts and the business press was that Alcoa was doomed. However, with Mr. O’Neill’s focus on safety, Alcoa’s stock soared 500% by the time Mr. O’Neill retired in 2000. 

Bestselling author, Rodd Wagner writes, 

“…the research on accident prevention shows connections throughout the organization, from leadership to culture, to employee engagement, to sleep. “Effective risk prevention,” wrote three members of the civil engineering faculty at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, “can only be achieved by a global correlation of ….production…client requirements, financial climate, design team competence, project and risk management, financial capacity, health and safety policy, and early planning. Those are the operational realities. Compounding their effect are the motivational truths. When employees believe their employer is aiming to keep them safe, it unleashes the kind of reciprocity that affects more than just the accident rate." 

If creating a physically safe environment is leadership’s first imperative, addressing psychological safety must be a close second since it allows people to confidently return to the work environment. During this period of “sheltering in place,” leaders have a unique opportunity to create the psychological safety necessary for this confidence to emerge in our people. 

For some, this requires a transformation of leadership, one that prioritizes psychological safety as a means of achieving our organization’s business goals. Psychological safety is what allows people to fully develop the motivation necessary to do their best work. As Alcoa’s O’Neill experienced, focusing on safety brings reciprocity from employees that, in turn, drives an organization’s financial health. 

Julie Rosovsky wrote in her landmark paper "The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team,” that “Psychological safety was by far the most important of the five key dynamics we found. It’s the underpinning of the other four.” 

Psychological safety underpins all of the important physical actions to create a safe work environment. Without psychological safety, people will not embrace the investment that organizations make in creating the social, physical and digital solutions. 

As outlined by Rosovksy, the 5 dynamics include:

• Psychological Safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
• Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time.
• Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? 
• Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
• Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

The dynamics identified by Google’s study echo the groundbreaking 1991 work by William A. Kahn in his study "Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work." Kahn studies the employees of an architectural practice and the counselors of a summer camp to understand what experiences allow them to fully engage in their work, or to cause them to disengage. Kahn discovered that when engaged individuals are fully present psychologically, cognitively and emotionally, the more “stirring” are their performances (in delivering on their organization's business objectives).

Kahn identifies the key conditions for engagement as: 

“Psychological meaningfulness - work elements that created incentives or disincentives to personally engage.” 

In other words, this requires an individual’s job to be emotionally attractive, provide challenge, creative autonomy, and professionally respectful interactions with one’s colleagues. An organization’s mission must be compelling and provide an organizational compass.

“Psychological safety - was associated with elements of social systems that created more or less nonthreatening, predictable, and consistent social situations in which to engage.”

This requires interpersonal relationships that are supportive, honest, and non-threatening. Kahn mentioned that fundamental to this was “leader behaviors that show more or less support, resilience, consistency, trust and competence.” People need to trust that they can be vulnerable, take risks, and on occasion fail without being a failure.

“Psychological availability was associated with individual distractions that preoccupied people to various degrees and left them more or fewer resources with which to engage in role performances.” 

This is critical in today’s shelter-in-place, and will continue to be important as we return to our workplaces in shifts and other lower occupancy structures. Leaders need to support people’s work and personal lives when working from home becomes a steady part of an employee’s work environment. If leaders provide this support, employee stress and distractions will diminish knowing that they can manage life’s demands on their own schedule. In essence, it gives people choice that allows them to succeed in their entire lives.

Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor in their bestselling book, Primed to Perform, provide an excellent and practical outline for how leaders achieve these experiences in their people. In their chapter on leadership, they define great leaders as “The Fire Starters” whose actions allow their people’s motivation to catch fire and burn brightly. They write:

“Great leaders inspire curiosity and encourage experimentation. Psychologists have shown us how these behaviors create the play motive within their people. Complexity researchers have shown that by “allowing experimentation and encouraging novelty, leaders create adaptive performance (in their people)”.

Doshi and McGregor outline all of the specific behaviors that are necessary to inspire total motivation in their people and are an excellent example of creating psychological safety.

In addition, in their article "How to Keep Your Team Motivated, Remotely" in Harvard Business Review (HBR), Doshi and McGregor state:

“ Between 2010 and 2015, we surveyed more than 20,000 workers around the world, analyzed more than 50 major companies, and conducted scores of experiments to figure out what motivates people, including how much working from home plays into the equation. When we measured the total motivation of people who worked from home versus the office, we found that working from home was less motivating. Even worse, when people had no choice in where they worked, the differences were enormous. Total motivation dropped 17 points, the equivalent of moving from one of the best to one of the most miserable cultures in their industries."  

The challenges we face in helping people stay motivated and engaged is more urgent than at any time in the past, and there is a pressing need to create leadership habits that ensure psychological safety so that employee motivation and engagement grow well into the future.

I'll leave you with four favorite resources for leadership guidance:

Primed to Perform, by Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, by Amy C. Edmondson

Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink