COVID-19 continues to challenge our sense of psychological safety. Many people are unsure how best to behave and miss the more casual interactions that help us ‘know where we stand’.  While we debate the need for hybrid working, mixing working from home with a return to the office, there is something we need to consider carefully as part of that discussion: how do we build trust with employees in this more remote working environment so that they feel comfortable to express their views, ideas and concerns? It’s a great deal more challenging when we aren’t seeing one another face to face on a daily basis.

From our current coaching experience more organisations and leaders appear to be grappling with this question across many sectors, both public and private. Many have found insight and help from the psychological safety research work undertaken by Harvard’s Professor Amy Edmondson. Psychological safety is after all one the strongest proven predictors of team effectiveness. It leads to a sense of security from working in an environment that treats mistakes fairly, where people feel safe to speak up about observed behaviours and where they feel comfortable to share ideas and  opinions.

As previously covered in these coaching blogs many organisations, such as Dropbox, have recognised the changed reality of work and the many challenges it presents for managers and employees. In our blogs we have advocated adopting new ways of working focusing on, for example, collaboration and communications.

To learn more about new ways of managing remote teams, a good place to start is with the excellent Dropbox Virtual First Toolkit: How to support your team.  This toolkit also includes an interview with Amy Edmondson who is the thought leader in the space of psychological safety and shares some nuggets of wisdom on how best to engage and support your team.

Psychological Safety Questions

In her extensive research on psychological safety, Edmondson examined team members experiences of “whether or not a particular work context was one in which people felt they could speak up, ask for help, offer an idea. It is far more common for people’s contributions at work to be thwarted by interpersonal fear than to feel able to be direct and candid. In contrast, when people are able to be themselves, they can do their best work and make contributions to the team in a timely way.”

A simple diagnostic to check the level of psychological safety of your employees is ask them to answer specific questions such as:

• In my workplace, can people share their opinion without fear of negative consequences?
• In my workplace, are people comfortable to speak up when they see behaviour they consider to be wrong? And, where people make a mistake,  are they treated fairly?

Specialist employee survey organisations like Karian and Box can help you benchmark your results against other external organisations to see how well you are doing on psychological safety.

The answers to these questions when asked in a confidential survey will help you to identify the level of psychological safety felt by your employees. However, listening to your employees isn’t enough. The danger is that, like many employee surveys undertaken, the results disappear into a black hole. You need to take action on the insights gained. We recommend communicating the results with the team as soon as possible  and collaborate to identify key actions you can take to improve the work environment. The resulting agreed actions should be within your own control. Follow up and review the actions with your employees which will help to foster high performance.

Finally, Dropbox shares some simple but important tips you can use to help build psychological safety in daily employee interactions such as:

• Invite engagement by asking “what do you think?” or, “What’s on your mind?”
• Get in the habit of asking, “how can I help?”
• Listen actively when others are talking (rather than tuning out or interrupting)
• Admit mistakes (and share what you learned)
• Offer up new ideas, and encourage your team to do the same
• Model giving people the benefit of the doubt