3 minute read
The fearless organisation
By Richard Reid, CEO and founder of Pinnacle Wellbeing
There's nothing new about the idea that there's a
strong link between employees' happiness and a company's productivity. For decades, HR directors have been working on programmes for their teams to ensure employees remain content, well-resourced and motivated when they come to work.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
Reading the HR articles and features over the past 12 months, you might be aware that there's been some recent developments on this theme with the concept of psychological safety.
Psychological safety within a group of people is the belief that the environment is safe for those people to express themselves appropriately, and that they feel able to speak up when needed with relevant ideas, questions or concerns without the fear of being shut down in some way.
We all know recruitment is expensive and timeconsuming so there's now an even greater emphasis on employee retention. Could creating psychological safe environments be the key to retaining good people and driving company performance?
THE FEARLESS ORGANISATION
As I've touched on above. individuals, teams and organisations need environments where their unique talents and differences can be expressed and leveraged. Teams with high psychological safety foster greater trust, creativity, collaboration, and innovation. The ultimate goal could be described as the fearless organisation.
Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Too many organisational cultures and systems prevent people from challenging the status quo, speaking about blunt truths and difficult issues, admitting that mistakes were made, offering new ideas, taking risks, or trying new approaches to challenges faced. Without sufficient psychological safety at work, individuals and teams are not leveraging their full potential.
It can therefore be suggested that psychological safety can improve employee loyalty and be a key factor that influences someone to remain with a company rather than look to the market for more opportunities.
So, as a business leader or a manager of a team, what steps can you take and what behaviours can you encourage to create this type of environment?
KEY STEPS TO CREATE A PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFE ENVIRONMENT
• Opinions welcome: It's important you show that leaders don't have all the answers in group situations, so involve employees by encouraging questions and asking for opinions. • Be vulnerable and fallible: Demonstrating to your team that no-one is perfect and it’s okay to make mistakes can have a positive impact on your team and remove fears.
• Curiosity and humbleness: A high-performing team is one where team members can be humble when facing significant challenges and have the time to be curious to explore opportunities.
• Failure is okay: Creating an environment where it's okay to fail and responding positively when failures occur.
Work as a group to understand how the error occurred and how it can be avoided next time round.
• Feedback is key: As a business leader or line manager, if you can demonstrate the ability to be humble with a willingness to learn, it can have a profound impact on organisational culture.
Talking to your teams and line managers about these simple steps can be a great starting point to creating a psychologically safe environment.
Try it out in your next team meeting. Demonstrate that it's okay to make mistakes and only through failure can we learn from the experience collectively and put processes in place to avoid them happening again.
Once these ideas are woven into the fabric of your organisation, notice the difference it makes. Monitor how your employees and teams work together and the positive impact it has on employee happiness, motivation levels and productivity.
