How to Establish Psychological Safety at the Workplace
Psychological safety at workplace means that employees that are a part of the organization feel no threat that prevents them from being oneself and expressing themselves. This supportive environment enables one to utilize their skills and competencies to the maximum potential and increase innovation levels in the organization as shown by research. This improvement in innovation is due to the lack of fear of risk taking which promotes free-thinking and creativity. To establish psychological safety effectively in an organization, we must first evaluate the current levels of psychological safety or the lack thereof to establish a starting point for the action plan.
Establish psychological safety effectively in an organization
In an organization, we need to investigate the common practices within the teams to gauge the levels of psychological safety. The factors to look for within teams are: whether employees usually ask questions about things they don’t know during teams meetings or do they display a façade of perfect knowledge, whether they express difficulties faced with tasks or do they manage them using other methods outside of the meetings, how mistakes are handled within the team, do members come forth to take responsibility for them and are they approached with a learning mindset, how and how often are feedbacks given to employees, whether employees feel like their skills and talents are appreciated and, whether they feel comfortable expressing opposing opinions in meetings regardless of hierarchy of the members in the meeting.
Action Plan to Establish Psychological Safety
Once the evaluation phase ends, an action plan to establish psychological safety can be established. In today’s fast-paced business world, most organizations would need to start from the ground up. The organization should be open to changing this part of the organizational culture and assist the cascading changes in order to reap the complete benefits of this process. The core of the action plan must include the following elements while aiming to bring in psychological safety in the working environment.
Core Elements of the Action Plan
Leaders must promote extension of trust to every member in the team and everyone must earn trust from their members. Each team member must be given a space to voice out opinions, whether it is consensus with the majority opinion or not and be encouraged to give feedback. A 360degree feedback practice would promote open communication by reducing apprehension towards hierarchy. The leaders must encourage curiosity and continuous learning and also allow healthy conflict that results in optimized processes. Employees must be empowered to be effective in all tasks they engage in while also keeping an eye on the possible risks that may arise. Risks and failures must be shared and not the responsibility of a single individual. This will lead to a safe, productive, experimental and vigilant workplace.
Conclusion
The leadership must practice what they preach so that the new practices trickle down to the lower levels of the organization in whichever form of hierarchy that exists. The ideas and steps taken to establish psychological safety may be initially uncomfortable and go against the grain of how we have always worked but it’s has been proven to be a winning formula that catapults organizational, team and individual level growth in an institution.
