5 ways to create psychological safety in your team
Groov VP Behavioural Science Dr Fiona Crichton shares strategies for creating psychological safety in the workplace.
Psychological safety is consistently shown to be critical to wellbeing and performance in the workplace.
In essence, psychological safety occurs in a workplace when people feel valued and safe to offer ideas, ask questions, raise concerns, and make mistakes. A place where it’s safe to be themselves.
“In a psychologically safe work environment, employees feel that their colleagues will not reject people for being themselves or saying what they think, respect each other’s competence, are interested in each other as people, have positive intentions to one another, are able to engage in constructive conflict or confrontation, and feel that it is safe to experiment and take risks.” - (Newman, A., Donohue, R., & Eva, N, 2017).
Psychological safety within teams is associated with improved team communication, greater knowledge sharing, and enhanced teamwork.
Overall, studies show psychological safety in the workplace is tied to employee wellbeing, retention, innovation, creativity, learning, and high performance.
Here are five ways to create psychological safety within your team.
1. Model the behaviour you want to see
If you would like people to feel safe to offer ideas, ask questions, raise concerns, and make mistakes, it’s important to model this behaviour yourself. Show vulnerability, expose your human side. Talk about the times you learned from your own mistakes. Create opportunities to reflect and be open to honest feedback, and show that it’s OK for people to be candid, so long as feedback is offered respectfully.
2. Share things about you as a person
Give people a glimpse into who you are outside of work. Share your hobbies or interests, what you enjoy doing in your spare time. This gives people permission to do the same.
3. Be curious about the people in your team
Seek to get to know your people better. Ask questions about how they like to work and what makes work enjoyable for them. Listen to understand.
4. Create safe forums for discussion, feedback, and ideas
A safe forum is one where people feel safe to contribute feedback and ideas. Safe forums can be meetings or ideation sessions, where input from everyone is actively solicited and contrary opinions are sought for discussion and understanding.
Having a place for people to offer feedback anonymously can also help to create a safe place to share valuable insights.
You can also achieve safer forums by circulating reading material ahead of time, ‘passing the mic’ around the room to hear from everyone, and providing different methods for people to ask questions (e.g., in-person, via email, via a survey).
5. Make sure people feel valued
Recognise and reward people’s efforts. Make sure they feel valued for their contributions to the business. Help them feel truly seen. People will feel more reluctant to offer up ideas if they feel they may be commandeered without acknowledgement of where they originated.
About Dr Fiona
VP Behavioural Science Dr Fiona Crichton ensures everything Groov does is clinically sound. A health psychology specialist, she has hands-on experience designing effective programmes to improve health behaviour and wellbeing in the community.
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