Feeling Safe at Work – 7 Ways of Creating Psychological Safety in Teams
Feeling safe at work or enjoying psychological safety in a team is a very big deal for all of us. Being in an environment where you are valued as an individual, and your contribution is appreciated and acted upon is very motivating and enjoyable.
Employees feeling safe at work gives a huge number of benefits to the team and business including:
- Much more positive working atmosphere
- Better teamwork
- Lower staff attrition rates
- Greater levels of innovation
- Higher team performance and output
Feeling Safe at Work – 7 Ways of Creating Psychological Safety in Teams
- What is psychological safety
- 4 stages of psychological safety
- 7 practical ways to creating psychological safety in teams
Create psychological safety in a team and you as a manager, get to enjoy all the benefits that come with increasing team performance. Struggle to create an environment of safety, and your team will struggle to perform, to hit targets, and to enjoying being at work. None of these is good for the manager.
You, as a leader, are a key enabler to team members feeling safe at work, even if the wider company struggles with creating psychological safety at work. Please use what we discuss to improve how well you create psychological safety for your team members.
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What is psychological safety
You team has psychological safety when team members are comfortable:
- Asking for help if they are struggling,
- Asking questions when they don’t understand something
- Speaking up and expressing their opinion
- They are happy admitting a certain level of mistakes
- Everyone is happy to put forward ideas and solutions, even if they seem a bit out there or even appear crazy
- Team members challenge each other and you constructively, to improve on ideas or solutions.
You create psychological safety when each team member is absolutely confident that they can say what they think and there is not a hint of negative consequences, being embarrassed or risking humiliation, put downs or social exclusion as a result. Of course, one would expect them to be considerate and diplomatic when communicating within the team.
Creating psychological safety in a team is not about being overly nice, soft, or giving permission for team members to whine or not participate. Every team member is responsible and accountable for team performance, and creating psychological safety is a key building block to increase team performance.
the 4 stages of psychological safety
created by Timonthy Clark.
Creating psychological safety in teams is complex and rarely as linear as this model. Being aware of these 4 stages, I think, helps a manager plan out different actions to help team members, and particularly new joiners, journey from feeling as an individual on their own to enthusiastically contributing and creating value as a team member.
The stages are:
0. Exclusion – you are an individual outside of the group
- Inclusion – you now feel part of the team, accepted, wanted and appreciated as a member of the team
- Learner stage where members feel safe to ask questions, experiment, take minor risks and admit making small mistakes, each of which supports learning and getting better
- Contributor stage where members feel safe to contribute ideas, views, and solutions without negative consequences, minor or major.
- Challenger stage where members feel safe to question, argue and push for change while trusting team member are all acting in service of creating better solutions, plans or results for the team
As a manager you are perfectly placed to help make this journey from exclusion – to feeling safe and fully contributing and challenging as a team member – a lot quicker and easier for everyone. You, as a leader, are responsible and accountable for the environment you create within a team. Create a psychologically safe environment and you get loads of personal benefits. Create an unsafe environment, and your job is likely to be on the line because team performance will drop.
7 practical ways to creating psychological safety in teams
I have used each of these 7 approaches extensively in managing teams and when turning around underperforming teams. In my view each action is an essential ingredient to provide a safe environment that encourages team members to do their best work.
Setting Expectations
In my experience, creating psychological safety in teams starts with setting and maintaining really clear expectations. Uncertainty does not help people feel safe at work. Human brains are geared to creating and using patterns. Be direct, be clear and tell the team what you want and why. Don’t tell them once, keep telling them week in week out, verbally and through your actions, behaviours and decisions. Sensible levels of structures and boundaries help create a feeling of psychological safety at work. Add expectations that every team member is responsible for speaking up with ideas, questions, and concerns.
Be Open and Honest
Secondly, to promote feeling safe at work, be open and be honest. Tell your team what is happening around the company. Educate your team about what this means for them personally. Explain carefully, your own thoughts, concerns and fears. Be empathetic and be human. Give your team honest feedback so each person knows where they stand and what they can do to improve. Do all this carefully, diplomatically, and considerately. Your aim is to reduce fears and concerns not increase them so filter out or be very careful how you talk about really negative issues.
Proactively Seek Team Input
Thirdly, to create psychological safety in teams, proactively ask questions and seek team members views. Make your questions specific so avoiding answering is harder. Show your interest and curiosity in what is happening and what team members are doing. Demonstrate you value their input by actively listening and acting positively on their views, ideas, solutions, and concerns. Actions speak much louder than words in creating psychological safety in teams.
Control Your Reactions
Fourth, critical for feeling safe at work for team members is how you manage and control your reactions and responses. To encourage employees to communicate their ideas, solutions, concerns and fears, you cannot display negative reactions when they do. You cannot take revenge for asking difficult questions. You cannot humiliate them, put them down or bad mouth them. Even when what they say is crazy or really negative. To create psychological safety at work, invite through your actions and reactions ideas, questions, and challenge. Every team member is watching you. Demonstrate to them that taking mini risks is safe AND you won’t allow any other team members to react negatively either.
Making Mistakes Is Okay
Fifth, to create psychological safety in your team, prove that making some mistakes is okay. Share some of the minor mistakes you have made, what you did to learn from the mistake and, if possible, rectify the mistakes. Treat mistakes as learning opportunities and coach your team members so they learn rather than tell them off. Repeated mistakes or careless mistakes should not be accepted. Provide corrective feedback in private. By accepting mistakes, you encourage your team to take calculated risks, to learn and to innovate. There will be failures and treat failure as a key learning experience. Take these steps and your team will be massively higher performing compared to if you jumped on mistakes and told team members off.
Encourage Constructive Conflict
Sixth, to create psychological safety in teams, encourage constructive managed conflict. The best ideas and solutions come when everyone feels safe to share their ideas, opinions, and solutions and have those challenged. Knowing that team members will be diplomatic and considerate while challenging your ideas or solutions in service of improving team output creates the feeling of safety, belonging and teamwork. Stop any destructive conflict as quickly as possible – anything which makes teamwork harder or damages relationships between team members.
Make Asking For Help Desirable
Seventh, to encourage feeling safe at work, make it desirable to ask for help within your team. No-one is good at everything, including you. Make a point of asking for help from your team members. Asking for help to provide information that you don’t have or opinions that you are not in the best place to provide is an easy and safe way of asking for help as a manager. Jump to provide help or organise help when it is asked for by team members. The more you make is desirable to ask for help, the quicker problems are solved and the more you understand what you team is struggling with. You create significant psychological safety in your team by making asking help desirable.
So there you have 7 of my favourite and most effective ways of creating psychological safety in teams that I have used for decades. Please put to use as many of these ways to make employees feel safe in your team – today and onwards.
in summary
I view creating psychological safety in teams as essential in the journey to increasing team performance and making the team an enjoyable and rewarding place to work for everyone. Undertaking some of the actions listed takes courage on the part of the manager. To increase team performance, you need team members to take personal risks by putting forward their ideas, views and solutions. Show team members what they can expect when they do this by leading from the front and ensuring everyone in team is feeling safe at work.
To help you improve employees feeling safe within a team, we have been through:
- What is psychological safety
- 4 stages of psychological safety
- 7 practical ways to creating psychological safety in teams
If you have any questions on “Feeling Safe at Work – 7 Ways of Creating Psychological Safety in Teams”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Creating the environment where your team members feel safe is huge in terms of improving team performance. Team members need to feel safe to speak up, to share their ideas, to question and to challenge without reprisals or consequences before you have a chance of getting the best out of them.
The biggest factor in creating psychological safety for your team members is you. Work hard to manage your behaviours, actions, and decisions to ensure that every team member understands the boundaries between acceptable and not. Work hard to build trust, respect and appreciation of team members and you will get in back with interest.
Build trust, safety and certainty. You will get back much better team performance in return.
