Admitting mistakes, uncomfortable emotions and differing opinions at the workplace can be difficult for anyone. However, creating a culture where they are accepted and celebrated is crucial to not only organisations and the individuals in it, but also to team performance.
Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, is a shared belief among the group that it is safe to take risks, express concerns and ideas, and challenge the status quo, without the fear of negative consequences. Psychological safety is a group phenomenon and is created collectively. It has nothing to do with personal traits (such as being extroverted vs. introverted), or individual confidence.
Psychological safety also does not mean a total lack of conflicts or only agreeing with one another. In fact, psychological safety enables constructive conflicts, the kinds that enable the group to move forward. Psychological safety is also dynamic, it is created in everyday collaborations and communications and is affected whenever members enter or leave the team. As stated by Timothy Clark, there are also stages to psychological safety, where the peak of psychological safety enables the members of the team to feel safe to be included, to learn together, to contribute, and to challenge the status quo without fear of retribution or humiliation.
Why psychological safety matters
Psychological safety is the key factor that distinguishes organisations that learn from their mistakes from those that don't.
Numerous studies have shown that psychologically safe teams perform better, have lower talent attrition, and suffer from lower rates of burnout and pre-burnout. High psychological safety correlates with improved innovation, experimentation, and agility. Teams who do not have psychological safety have higher rates of stress, burnout, and turnover and also perform worse in the organisation.
Expressing ideas and innovations is easier when the team has high trust and psychological safety. When the members feel safe to express unfinished or even silly or bad ideas freely, the number of innovations increases. More importantly, with psychological safety, the team is able to build innovation into the culture, where expressing ideas with a low threshold is normalised and encouraged.
Having psychological safety ensures that the team members are expressing their feelings openly and that they can express when they are facing difficulty or challenges either professionally or personally. This benefits everyone from the team members to the managers and organisation, too, when there is an increase in awareness of each other’s state and more understanding of how to support one another better.
Additionally, teams with high psychological safety are able to move through crises and changes more seamlessly. Moving through a crisis with low or poor psychological safety can cause the individuals to feel isolated, whereas fostering psychological safety will enable the team to innovate solutions and enjoy each other’s support while doing so. At best, with the help of psychological safety, the workspace can provide a community and a safe place for the employees when the world feels uncertain and full of fear-mongering.
Most businesses say psychological safety is crucial to their success
97% of organisations considered psychological safety to be critical or very important for the success of the company.
It has been shown that teams with psychological safety have higher performance and poor psychological safety can cost employers up to 6 billion annually. No wonder majority of Finnish companies found psychological safety to be critical or very important for company success. Investing in employee wellbeing was also considered to be a very important factor in terms of the company's capability to innovate. However, while psychological safety was considered to be extremely important, only one-third of companies stated that the importance was visible also in the company strategy, budgeting, and operation plans.
Capability to measure psychological safety
A few companies have found good methods to measure psychological safety, but many strive for better real-time views and clear guidance.
The starting point of improving psychological safety is understanding where the company is today. Traditional ways of getting this insight include different kinds of employee and pulse surveys. These methods are very capable to investigate known issues and one's perceptions of things.
However, 74% of companies stated that they have only some or no capability at all to measure unconscious issues and how people actually interact instead of how they think they collaborate in the workplace. Furthermore, many respondents raised the difficulty of finding time to analyse the company situation.
Reasons why psychological safety matters for organisations
Companies' main focus area on their agenda was keeping their best employees. Here psychological safety plays a major role as more than half of employees who have left their jobs had stated that they did not feel valued by their organisation or lacked a sense of belonging. The second most commonly stated focus area was preventing burnout, where toxic workplaces have been shown to have the biggest impact on burnout risk. Other common focus areas were increasing innovation and ideas, and employee engagement.
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Revolution of AI-based communication solutions
To help companies understand their communication and collaboration patterns, and to save time from data gathering, many companies have developed solutions that can be tapped into existing communication environments such as Slack. These solutions can continuously analyse communication patterns without needing any work from the company itself after the installation and provide guidance on how to improve company performance.
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About the author
Krista has worked in multiple startups and growth companies with broad experience in digital business, strategic development, product management, and commercialisation. Krista is developing our core operations for growth, also focusing on the product roadmap for executing our vision. She holds a MSc in both Engineering and Health Science and is now working on her PhD at the University of Helsinki on the concept of wellness.
