Psychological Safety at Work & Why it Matters
From the personal experience of being on a team with psychological safety, I have felt the positive effects of added productivity and collaboration. In other situations, I have felt the fear and lower productivity of being on a team without psychological safety. High functioning teams tend to have a sense of purpose or meaning, something that Millenials and Xennials are calling for in their work. This is the workplace for which we should all be striving.
In 2012, Google researched high-performing teams in an attempt to find the common denominator of success. They focused on 180 of their teams, and spent a lot of time looking at the data, struggling to find a pattern.
When Google decided what made a team successful, they looked at these measures of effectiveness:
Executive evaluation of the team
Team leader evaluation of the team
Team member evaluation of the team
Sales performance against quarterly quota
At first look it appeared that successful teams had nothing in common. For example, some were friends outside of work and some never socialized beyond team meetings. Some groups had a lot of highly intelligent people and some groups had average intelligence but were equally successful.
After continued analysis of the data they started to see the patterns of “conversational turn taking” and “social sensitivity” appearing in successful teams. And when they read the research on psychological safety, it all clicked. What they found was successful teams varied greatly, but they all had a sense of equality and safety, everyone on these teams spoke a lot about how the teams felt.
In 2017, Google came out with the data from this research. In addition to looking at their own teams, they highlight findings from a meta-analysis on the topic by Lance Frazier. The meta-analysis looked at 117 studies representing over 22,000 individuals and nearly 5,000 groups. Both of these studies point to the importance of psychological safety or as Amy Edmondson, the most prominent academic researcher in the field, describes:
‘‘A sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.’’
What is psychological safety?
Amy Edmondson is the professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School. She began researching psychological safety in teams in 1999. Edmondson defines psychological safety as “the shared belief among team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” She explains that “team psychological safety involves but goes beyond interpersonal trust; it describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves” Psychological safety is trust at a team level and should be felt by everyone in the group. If even a single person does not feel it, then it doesn’t exist for the team. You can hear more from Edmondson on the topic in this excellent HBR Podcast.
We spend a lot of our time at work. An employee working 40 hours per week spends 2,080 hours of the year at work. Over a lifetime this amounts to 97,760 hours. This figure doesn’t include those who work overtime, go to school after work to further their careers, spend time job searching, or the fact that for many of us, who we are at work makes up a great part of our identity outside of work. With all this time spent on our careers, feeling at ease at work and within our chosen vocation is paramount and having psychological safety in our workplace can reduce the stress we feel in our everyday lives.
Benefits of psychological safety in the workplace
Other than feeling good at a place we spend so much time, what are the benefits of psychological safety?
1. Successful teams
Teams have higher success rates when everyone in the group has a sense of psychological safety. A study published in The Harvard Business Review, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more” —so this is important stuff!
2. Greater learning
People feel more comfortable asking for feedback and sharing what they know without the fear of looking bad to the group, which means that information is shared more quickly and effectively, and people in the teams learn more.
3. Role clarity
Role clarity—meaning an employee clearly understands their job—assures that people aren’t working on the wrong things, and that their work consistently furthers company goals.
4. Greater employee engagement
Greater employee commitment to the organization and a happier, safer work life lead to higher engagement and retention.
How to build psychological safety on your team
Now that we know psychological safety is not only important, but the most important factor for team success, let’s talk about the next step—ensuring your team has psychological safety.
If you are a team leader and don’t feel that psychological safety is there for everyone on the team (or maybe anyone on it), how do you build that trust? There are a few actions you can take to build initial trust or even build trust back in an untrusting team.
Eliminate shaming
Leaders can model tolerance for mistakes by celebrating risk taking and encouraging a forum that allows for the free flow of ideas. This ensures employees don’t feel shame when they mess up or suggest an idea that doesn’t gain team support. But what is shame and why is it bad?
“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” —Brené Brown, Dare to Lead
There are two words that often get used interchangeably but in practice they are very different. Those are:
1. Shame—I am bad 2. Guilt—I did bad
When thinking about shame and guilt I try to think of how one can apply these things in the workplace. When we feel shame, it is telling us that we are not good enough and can’t be good enough. Guilt on the other hand recognizes that we did something wrong and that we want to fix it. Guilt allows us to fix it.
What does shaming our employees look like?
Being scolded for speaking up in a meeting
Not being able to have a dissenting voice without being told you are wrong
Being excluded or ostracized if your opinions look different than the group
Shame slowly eats away at trust, culture, connection, and psychological safety. According to Brown it hides in behaviors like perfectionism, blaming, bullying, comparison, harassment, and discrimination.
Eliminate shame on your team by openly speaking about dissenting views, recognizing people for failures when they took a risk, encouraging questions, and being wrong.
Ask the right questions
You aren’t likely to have psychological safety with a team right away, and if anything has happened to break the trust of psychological safety, it will take time to rebuild. The right questions can help set a foundation of psychological safety or can help to rebuild if the trust has been broken. Another way to begin doing this is to talk about a project after the fact by doing an after action assessment. Since the work is in the past, it can be easier to talk about than when it is happening.
Questions for after a specific project:
How did it go?
What went well?
What could we do differently in the future?
General questions for the team:
How is everything going right now?
Do you think we are working on the right things?
Is there anything missing from our work?
What additional support do each of you need from me or the team?
Hold space for feedback
Asking the right questions is important, but if an employee doesn’t feel that the space is there to speak the truth, it won’t build the trust you are looking for.
In Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he discusses this idea of holding space for feedback, or as he says, Seek first to understand. “We have a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first.
If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
We are busy, and sometimes we keep our heads down and just keep moving forward. Sometimes it’s all we can do to get through the day. But let’s work smarter not harder. That’s part of what creating psychological safety within a team is all about. It allows you to work on the right projects and in the right ways. It allows people to feel comfortable speaking up when that isn’t happening.
Building this trust can happen on a team level but should also happen in one on ones with each member of the team. One of the most effective ways that I have found to do this when meeting one on one with an employee, is to get comfortable with uncomfortable silences. When there is silence, people have the tendency to want to fill it, and this is when they open up (after you’ve asked the right questions of course). Once they’ve given the feedback, you don’t have to respond right away. You can take notes and let them know you want to think about it and respond later. But make sure to respond, unanswered feedback can have the same effect as feedback that is met with a negative response. It makes people not want to speak up.
Assume everyone’s intentions are good
I believe that most people have the best of intentions. They are not intentionally malicious or out to get someone. They are doing the best they can with what they have. I also do not believe that people are lazy. I think everyone has their abilities and motivations and if they aren’t productive in the way we want them to be, there is a perfectly good reason and it is the job of a team leader to discover the motivation behind the action.
As a leader when working to develop psychological safety on your team, you must respond to employees' work assuming good intentions. This is applicable if someone makes a mistake or suggests something that seems like a terrible solution. When we assume everyone’s intentions are good, we are more able to respond in a supportive way, and can often get work that may not be quite right, to where it needs to be.
It takes time—but it is exponentially worth it
Getting to a place where a team has psychological safety can take time, especially if that trust was violated in the past. But the benefits of doing the work to get there are valuable. Some of those benefits include environments that are more conducive to learning, teams that openly discuss and prevent future mistakes, and people on teams who ask for feedback. These teams tend to have stronger role clarity and peer support allowing individuals on them to be more successful in the work they do outside the team. Psychologically safe teams are also linked to greater employee satisfaction.
