What are the Silent Factors that Contribute to Psychological Safety
Silent factors of psychological safety at the workplace assures employees to be and express oneself without the fear of negative social or professional consequences. It promotes creativity, free-thinking and a productive environment where these innovative ideas can be used to create competitive advantage for the organization.
Psychological safety builds a supportive environment where the skills and competencies of every individual are utilized to their best potential and are also acknowledged to remind them of the value they add to the organization. Each member of a team in such an environment extends respect and trust to all other members of the team. There are explicit factors of psychological safety that can be checked on an intermediate study of the organization but there are also more silent factors that need to be reviewed to ensure a fully psychologically safe environment.
Key Factors in Establishing Psychological Safety
Silent Factors Influencing Psychological Safety
These silent factors may not be obvious at first glance but are essential to establishing psychological safety effectively. In a team, do members treat each other like they like to be treated? Therein lies the mistake because we must acknowledge, during this modern era with abundant personality studies, that no two people are the same, hence, different people expect to be treated differently and an act that may be perceived as polite by one individual may be perceived as rude by another.
The key here is to treat others as they want to be treated and not as how we want to be treated. Another factor to investigate is effectiveness. Every organization works on goals and expects productivity and output but focusing on effectiveness along with efficiency rather than efficiency by itself will improve the quality of outcome and ensure positive results in the long run.
Effectiveness Over Efficiency
Efficiency by itself can be described as achieving goals within scheduled timelines by fully utilizing all the resources that can be gathered in order to complete the process, whereas effectiveness along with efficiency allows the maximum use of the resources to achieve goals while allowing room for errors and creating learning opportunities from them in order to aid continuous improvement and aid the organization in long term growth.
Shared Responsibility for Errors
Another silent factor is the responsibility taken for tasks and errors. Although psychological safety assures employees that errors do not result in negative consequences, the responsibility of the error must be shared by the members in the supervisory role as well, in order to provide an environment where there is an open discussion on the error made and to devise plans to ensure that the same kind of error is not repeated again. Criticism is one of the factors that many people find difficult to manage or respond to and it plays a huge role in psychological safety. Shared responsibility reduces blaming, empty criticism and instead helps the team focus on constructive criticism.
Action Plan for Psychological Safety
Both the explicit and silent factors of psychological safety must be evaluated and included in the action plan to fully establish a psychologically safe environment that is focused on sustainable growth and long-term success.
