So, what is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is defined as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” (Professor Amy C. Edmondson in “The Fearless Organization” )

Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea. Therefore, it is very important to take measures, which promote and build psychological safety for people at a workplace.

Some of the questions which can be asked to check / measure psychological safety are:

o   If you make a mistake on this team, do you think it will be held against you?

o   Do you think you or your team members can bring up problems and tough issues?

o   Are people inclusive – are people included even if they are different?

How can the workplace be made psychologically safe?

Now the question is – how does one bring in this important element at the workplace? What are the kind of measures structured measures that one can take?

Any initiative which tries too hard also finds suspicious takers. Mere talk about the concept will only build pressure to build psychological safety and only encourage a pseudo and non-authentic culture.

Consider this – why do trainers often use unrelated games for team building? Activities like building a tent or a raft to cross a river which are far removed from the real things that people do at work while working together as a team.

The same lessons have to be used to introduce psychological safety at the workplace too. Introduce non-work activities or experiences as a part of your employee engagement programme which needs people to differ, discuss, engage on a fun issue. There are higher chances of people engaging with one another with their guards down and discover each other.

plugH bouquet of services helps you build psychological safety at your workplace through its EAP, Empathy Circles and Mental Health Certification programmes. Our resource heavy Toolkits include many fun contests, challenges, popularity polls to help organizations create experiences for employees where they could practice behaviors, which contribute to the long-term psychological safety within the team and for teams which feel psychologically safe, are the teams which perform.