Towards Greater Psychological Safety In The Workplace

Empowering employee expression

In today's dynamic work environment, an increasingly vital question arises: how can organizations go about creating a culture where employees feel empowered to express themselves? How is it possible to make employees feel psychologically safer to speak up and share their insights? 

Psychological safety was first defined in the 1960s and has more recently been made popular by Harvard Business School psychologist Amy Edmondson. At an individual and team level, the current definition of psychological safety is aligned with the sense of feeling safe to voice ideas, seek and provide feedback, collaborate with others, and experiment with new ways of working. People must also feel able to take a wider assessment of what Amy Edmondson refers to in her work as ‘interpersonal risks’ when collaborating with teammates and leaders.

As David Altman, the COO of the Center for Creative Leadership, points out, “Psychological safety at work doesn’t mean everybody is nice all the time. It means that you embrace the conflict and speak up, knowing that your team has your back”. At an organizational level, it can be defined as the formal and informal practices and procedures that guide and support open and trustworthy interactions at work, creating an environment in which employees are able to speak up without fear of being rejected or punished.

What matters most for our purposes is that when people feel psychologically safe they’re able to share knowledge and information about tackling the root causes of wellbeing issues. They can also propose new ideas for organizational improvement or take the initiative to develop new products or ways of working without fear of recrimination, censorship, ridicule, or being penalized. 

It’s the ability, according to Google’s Matt Sakaguchi, to take off the work mask and talk about the messy or the sad, to have difficult conversations with colleagues and to focus on collaborating with other teams instead of just focusing on efficiency. Unsurprisingly, high levels of psychological safety have been shown to have a positive impact on employee productivity, aiding team and organizational learning, growth, contribution, and performance sustainability.

To appreciate how beneficial improved psychological safety can be in the recalibration of our workplaces, a wider perspective is needed. Relentless pressure to perform inevitably narrows the focus to the task in preference to the humans actually performing the task. Quick fixes get favored over slower burn developments and, against a backdrop of the global recovery from the pandemic and subsequent economic crises facing many countries, governments and organizations increasingly turn to innovation to shore up sustainability. Of particular interest to policymakers are those innovations linked to production processes, work organization and human resource management practices. These are the innovations considered most likely to bring about a competitive advantage for an organization. Many companies pursue them, yet the results are disappointing. The major factors in this lack of success are likely to be the absence of critical complementary contingencies such as a supportive organizational climate and a collaborative working environment.

To achieve collaboration, the working environment needs to be one where employees genuinely value each other’s contributions to work processes and don’t just listen politely before championing their own cause. They need to feel safe enough to take those interpersonal risks. They also need to be brave enough to say something that might attract a negative response. 

Even though they may not label it as such, people need to feel they’re operating in a climate of psychological safety. When people do feel safe, they give their employer and colleagues their discretionary effort - time, energy, and outputs are willingly given for free - and commercially invaluable insights. They do this because they feel personally valued, and comfortable that their contribution is held in high esteem because they are, as a consequence, emotionally and intellectually engaged in what they’re doing.

Vicky Smith is passionate about sharing her knowledge and has more than 20 years of consulting, coaching, facilitation, and training experience in locations across the globe. She is working on a Ph.D., researching psychological safety in organizations, and is also a qualified NLP trainer, psychotherapist, and executive coach.

Lesley Cooper is a management consultant with over 25 years of experience in the design and delivery of all elements of employee well-being management programmes. In 1997 Lesley founded WorkingWell, an award-winning specialist consultancy that helps companies manage workplace pressure in a way that facilitates growth and development. WorkingWell was shortlisted for “Best Wellbeing Service Provider” at the Great British Workplace Wellbeing Awards 2021.