Psychological safety in the workplace is more important than ever. Do your employees feel secure enough to have honest conversations?
As states begin to turn their attention to re-opening spaces, including offices, I've been reflecting on what this means for employees - at all levels - who may not feel comfortable or safe returning to their offices (assuming, of course, that they have been privileged enough to work remotely throughout social distancing measures).
What are we doing to promote the psychological safety of our employees as we look to come back from the collective experience of quarantine?
Let’s start with the idea of psychological safety. This concept was first introduced by organizational psychologist Dr. Amy Edmonson in 1999 and is defined as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” You can learn more about this in her excellent TEDx Talk from 2014.
If you've ever been hesitant to ask those questions for fear of seeming incompetent or being embarrassed by your team, you've experienced a lack of psychological safety at work. Feeling secure enough to bring up concerns or to point out mistakes - hallmarks of psychological safety - is a crucial part of building a high performing team at work (Google's Project Aristotle provides more insights).
Covid-19, and the ensuing quarantines and social distancing measures experienced throughout the country, forced public health and awareness into our collective consciousness. Companies nationwide were forced into changes in how they conducted business. Any employee who had the ability to work remotely was suddenly doing exactly that, with little to no preparation. As a result, the narrative around Covid-19 and returning to work has been framed in terms of how (and when) we can expect to "get back to normal". But - and here is where psychological safety comes into play - what if there are employees who are not ready to do this?
Have we created the type of environment where employees can share their anxieties around returning to close proximity to the office? What about workers who rely on public transportation and may not be ready to expose themselves to that many people right away? It's not uncommon for workplaces to confuse physical presence with productivity, even though that's an outdated measure of an employee's work (It's Time to Stop Measuring Productivity in Hours). Is there going to be a stigma against people who want to exercise their abilities to work remotely now that they've proven themselves to be fully capable of doing so over the last 3 months? What about the inherent power imbalance between direct reports and managers?
You can find resources for how to work on this all over the internet, but I’m going back to Dr. Edmonson. In that same TEDx Talk, Dr. Edmonson recommends the following steps to build psychologically safe workplaces:
Let’s work together to make work environments better for everyone.
