Cultivating Psychological Safety
A study on team performance by Google found that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychologically safe workplaces. Earlier this month, we rolled out a survey asking if you felt you had Psychological Safety in your workplace. Here are a few of the highlights that stood out to us:
90% of respondents could make mistakes without fear that their coworkers would hold it against them
95% of respondents felt that their co-workers welcomed opinions that were different from their own
While most of the responses were positive, 30% of respondents felt that it was not safe to take risks on their team. We see this a lot with our clients and here are some great tips to consider in providing a safe environment for employees to take risks.
How can you create an environment where it is safe to fail?
Learning and failing go hand in hand but unless people feel safe, they won’t take chances. Making it safe to fail is crucial because learning happens through experimentation, and experimentation often results in failure.
Stop pointing fingers: We have all been part of the blame game at some point in our working lives but the problem with blame is that it singles someone out. It explicitly highlights their inadequacies or ‘failures’ and creates an environment where people will try to hide errors for fear of being shamed for their mistakes.
Encourage idea sharing and early drafts of work: One of the biggest reasons why failure should be encouraged is because it catches potential issues early. This is a huge benefit to both employee and employer – saving time for both.
Foster a culture of openness and communication: Communication is key here – encourage openness, constructive feedback and more to expose early failures.
Embrace failures and learn from them: We are all human beings and we make mistakes but if you can nurture a culture which welcomes and curates failures as an intrinsic element of the fabric of the business, you’ll find there’s suddenly more ideas at the table. You’ll probably also find your staff are more receptive to criticism and feedback because they aren’t fearful of the consequences.
When psychological safety is low, not only does employee well-being suffer, but so does performance, quality and workplace safety. The road to psychological safety is not an easy one, but hopefully you can see that it’s more than worth the struggle.