Want to free your people to express ideas, admit mistakes and take risks? Our workshops will help you create a climate of psychological safety
Psychological safety: The bedrock of high performance
You probably know the feeling. Your boss walks into the office and all of a sudden you can cut the tension with a knife. Or you can see what the problem was and how to address it, but you keep quiet to avoid being blamed for what went wrong. Or finish your presentation and ask for questions and it goes deathly quiet.
If any of those scenarios sound familiar, you’ve probably been in a work setting that’s psychologically unsafe. An environment where people don’t feel free to express ideas, take risks or admit mistakes. And if you’re a leader or manager, you might even – despite best intentions – have been making things worse.
The consequences can be dire.
American energy-trading and utility company Enron was a stellar success in the 1990s. But behind the scenes was a culture of fear and intimidation where employees were afraid to speak up about unethical practices. This led to fraudulent activities, massive financial loss and the company’s eventual collapse in 2001.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen’s disastrous diesel emissions scandal has been strongly linked to leadership behaviour that created fear and oppressed employee voices.
Those high-profile examples may not be as rare as we’d like to think. Research by pollsters Gallup has shown that only three in 10 employees agree their opinions count.
Yet that same study reveals the upside of tackling the issue. Gallup calculated that moving the ratio to six in 10 would generate a 12% increase in productivity and a 27% reduction in staff turnover.
What is psychological safety?
So what is psychological safety in a work setting?
The leading academic voice in the field is Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson. She defines psychological safety as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking”. It means staff feel confident they won’t be embarrassed, rejected or punished for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.
Edmondson’s seminal 1999 study showed that teams with higher psychological safety were more likely to learn from mistakes, innovate and perform effectively.
A subsequent meta-analysis in 2014 reinforced the link between psychological safety and improved performance, highlighting its role in enhancing team learning, innovation and overall organisational effectiveness.
But there’s an important nuance here. Psychological safety doesn’t mean being ‘nice’ all the time. A landmark study by Distefano and Maznevski looked at how culturally diverse teams perform better. In the most innovative and successful teams, members felt able to take the risk of challenging each other, engaging in disagreement that pushed the boundaries of creativity and performance. This is true psychological safety and trust.
Psychological safety: Shining examples
So who is getting this right?
Google’s Project Aristotle identified its best-performing teams and found that psychological safety was the critical factor. Meanwhile SAP, a European tech giant, promotes psychological safety through programmes like Autism at Work, creating inclusive environments that value diverse perspectives.
Both companies have high employee satisfaction and engagement scores, indicating effective implementation of psychological safety principles.
Edmondson advises companies to build psychological safety by encouraging open dialogue, showing appreciation for input and modelling imperfection. Leaders should invite participation, listen actively and acknowledge their own mistakes to create a safe space for others to do the same. Regularly reinforcing the value of diverse perspectives and ensuring all voices are heard is crucial.
Leadership training to foster psychological safety
And that’s where Axiom comes in.
For more than 20 years, we’ve been training leaders and managers to create environments in which employees feel free to speak up.
Our premise is that it’s a leader’s responsibility to create the right conditions for psychological safety. They must be able to draw people out and elicit involvement. That’s no easy task. It calls for strong interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.
Upskilling leaders and managers to do this is the focus of our in-house training communication workshops in this field. Examples include:
- How to Create a ‘Speak Up’ Culture by Harnessing Psychological Safety
- How to Generate Meaningful Dialogue
- How to Handle Difficult Questions
- How to Facilitate a Vibrant Q&A
Our expert-led sessions give your leaders and managers a forum to learn and practise skills that foster psychologically safe environments. They’ll learn how to get their people contributing their ideas, challenging each other and admitting and learning from mistakes and underperformance.
Making meetings safe spaces
That’s not all we can do for you in this space.
For many years, leading national and global companies have come to us to design, facilitate and manage their conferences, meetings and other live events.
To set the foundations for psychologically safe dialogue, we’ll help you establish a clear code of conduct at the outset. We then harness leading-edge interactive exercises and the latest tech to maximise involvement. For instance, we’ll create a bespoke app for participants to use to address challenging topics, anonymously if necessary. We’ll coach speakers in the best way to run their sessions. And we’ll facilitate small teams to collaborate to give meaningful input.
All of this will get your audience wholeheartedly and candidly contributing opinions, asking questions and generating solutions.
“I’ve been hugely impressed by the influence Axiom have had in driving up trust and psychological safety. This has resulted in significantly richer and more open dialogue within the team, leading to higher levels of engagement and ownership.”
– Chief of staff for global IT, leading healthcare company
Psychological safety: Key to enhancing customer and employee experience
Creating psychologically safe spaces is central to our work to help clients enhance their customer or employee experience.
We design and facilitate safe forums in which stakeholders can openly share their views on what’s working and what’s not going well. The insights that are generated go far beyond what a standard employee opinion survey or customer care activity could ever tell you. And novel ideas emerge that would otherwise never see the light of day.
Another tool for getting candid feedback from employees is the Engage app. A digital means of providing psychological safety, Engage allows you to tap into your people’s views on any topic – in real time, direct from their smartphones. You can track opinions on key issues over time and within specific groups such as job families, geographies or functions.
Cultivating psychologically safe cultures
More broadly, we have worked with some of our clients on far-reaching programmes to cultivate psychologically safe organisational cultures.
We’ll first diagnose current levels of psychological safety through surveys, focus groups and heuristic observation. We then use this analysis to develop a strategy that can include new policies and practices, extensive training, cascade briefings, wide-ranging communication content and a means of ongoing assessment.
Ultimately, a psychologically safe environment creates a culture of trust, respect and mutual support, driving performance and success. If that’s your goal, play it safe and come to the experts.
