"Seek opportunities to show you care. The smallest gestures often make the biggest difference.”
These words hail from the late, great John Wooden; the legendary UCLA basketball coach during its dynastic reign through the 60’s and 70’s. Coach Wooden was known for his inquisitive and quirky style of conveying life lessons to his players and those who he came across. He was the kind of coach who spoke to an interviewer emphasizing the proper way of putting your socks on. The amount of people who are indebted and pay constant praise to Coach Wooden go far beyond the four lines he operated in as well.
Within his sphere of influence, Coach Wooden exemplified what optimal psychological safety should look like with former players and other professionals singing his praises until this day. All because he put his team first, over himself.
Drawing upon the virtues of Coach Wooden, in this article we will go over psychological safety in the workplace and a few ways to build and improve its efficacy.
Psychological safety might sound like something used to describe the state of a mind of a horror movie protagonist throughout various stages of the film. But if you fail to cultivate it in your workplace, you might actually find the office feeling like the sets of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Psychological safety, thankfully, is a term organizational psychologist Amy Edmondson coined as as employees, workers, and associates feeling empowered enough to speak on their beliefs without repercussions. In other words, it's where your team doesn't feel like Freddie Krueger might show up out of nowhere for saying something remotely against the grain.
While the freedom to express yourself without the fear might seem like a given or even trivial, the lack of psychological safety could cost you increased creativity, teamwork and positive employee sentiment.
Though we have to make sure that you shouldn’t build your office culture on simply making sure fear doesn’t exist, in the same way an empty house can be seen as clean because filth is absent. You have to actively mold and nurture an environment that leads to such positive outcomes. Once these conditions are met, you’ll find team members ideally exhibiting qualities such as acting less risk averse, collaborating more willingly with team members, and learning from mistakes much quicker.
As mentioned in the opening regarding Coach Wooden, psychological safety as you may have guessed is a top-down approach.
If leadership or upper management fails to set the tone, the consequences are assumedly going to be disastrous. Hence, leadership is the wind that drives the sail. For example, the biggest thing you can do is create a positive climate that sets the precedent for team members to see psychological safety as lip service to actual reality.
Two leadership styles that McKinsey suggests in spreading a positive climate, are ‘supportive’ and ‘consultative’ leadership. Supportive leadership entails you care for your employees beyond them as simply colleagues, but as individuals. Difficult, but it pays huge dividends. While the latter consultative style advises leaders to obviously consult, but also give feedback and understand what problems their team may be facing.
Once leadership is established, time to turn your flashlight on and illuminate the path forward for your team with crystal clear expectations. Ambiguous expectations can lead to a whole host of negative outcomes including misunderstanding and conflict.
In the same way successful relationships have both partners try to understand as best possible the needs of one another, the same applies in the workforce.
One great place to start is to ‘communicate early and often’ regarding expectations. The sooner you can do this the better. When teams know exactly what needs to be done from the outset, it ensures a lot less confusion and enables a healthier ongoing dialogue. A tip here is to try and be as specific as possible to limit potential misunderstandings.
And understand even if you establish these things, you're still bound to come across issues. As long as the foundation is sturdy, you can always approach these bumps in the road by providing feedback and support when these things occur.
When it comes to clarity, think of this quote by Isaac Babel, ‘no iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period (clear expectation) put just at the right place.”
As mentioned before, we prefer putting clear expectations right at the beginning.
DEI Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) can sometimes unfairly fall prey to a factor of importance that lacks a quantifiable measure displaying its actual effect on companies. But in reality, its economic and qualitative benefits have been well documented in multiple instances. In fact, early DEI literature, done here by McKinsey in 2015, found that companies with a higher ‘racial/ethnic diversity were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry median.’
Even in 2024, the staggering potential of creativity, innovation and of course revenue still exists when companies are intentional about DEI.
As it relates to psychological safety, an inclusive culture entails employees to work and express themselves in their most natural way without judgment. Diversity also has an added benefit of not only increased revenue, but cost savings as well.
But primarily, as mentioned above about creating a positive climate, as a subsection to this, when you create an inclusive environment where teams are celebrating one another’s individual expression, you unlock an unparalleled sense of open-mindedness and increased performance.
We have discussed at length on how Worksense and other AI-based sentiment analysis can help measure various employee feelings.
Of course surveys and even focus groups exist which can act as ancillary tools, but the ideal way in our opinion is through a deeper analysis that we believe only AI can solve.
For example, with Worksense, when it comes to psychological safety, we can calculate this by looking at the frequency and nature of interactions, the diversity of opinions shared, and the responsiveness to feedback and concerns across communications channels such as Slack, Teams, and other mainstream applications.
The better you score on these metrics and the one listed above, the better your company’s psychological safety will look.
I’ll leave you with a quote one final time from the Wizard of Westwood.
“Every single member of your team needs to feel wanted and appreciated. If they are on the team, they deserve to be valued and to feel valued. Do you want someone on the team who doesn’t feel necessary and appreciated? How do they find out unless you let them know?
And if you’d like to find out a little bit more about us and why we appreciate you, consider Worksense as a potential solution in helping make your workplace teeming with the happiest employees as possible.