In this episode of Your DEI Minute™, host Jamey Applegate discusses the critical topic of psychological safety in the workplace. Psychological safety is the belief that one won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up, asking questions, or making mistakes. Jamey emphasizes that this concept is foundational for creating an organizational culture where employees feel secure and valued. When psychological safety is present, it can dramatically enhance innovation, productivity, and employee engagement.

Jamey also covers what it feels like to be in a psychologically safe environment, highlighting the significance of support from team members, valuing integrity and honesty, and treating everyone fairly. To foster such an environment, Jamey outlines ten specific actions that leaders and team members can implement. These range from knowing and correctly pronouncing team members' names to developing formal structures for feedback and conflict resolution. The episode concludes with a reminder that building a culture of psychological safety is an ongoing process filled with learning opportunities.

For more information or to connect with Jamey, visit: https://www.equity-at-work.com/

Key Topics Discussed:

• Definition of Psychological Safety
• Importance of Psychological Safety in Organizational Culture
• Impact of Psychological Safety on Innovation, Productivity, and Employee Engagement
• Feelings Associated with Psychological Safety
• Ten Actions to Build Psychological Safety

I'm Jamey Applegate, senior director of DEI at Equity at Work. And this is your DEI Minute. Your go-to podcast for leaders looking to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Whether you're just starting out with DEI or looking to sustain your long term successes, each episode will provide you with actions you can take to move DEI forward at your organization all in 15 minutes or less. Join us every other week as we break through the noise and help you do DEI right. Let's get to it. Today we're gonna talk about psychological safety. In a previous episode, Michelle discussed building a roadmap for your DEI programming and the critical importance of knowing both where you are right now and where you wanna go down the road.

She also stressed the critical importance of having a strong foundation in place and of building out that foundation as you advance your DEI efforts. This foundation is all about organizational culture. It includes key priorities like focusing on people in your mission, vision, values, and key performance indicators, measuring and weighing behaviors equally to performance outcomes, having well defined team norms that are consistently followed, having expectations for collaboration, communication, learning, and giving and receiving feedback, and establishing transparency and decision making, and ensuring that team members utilize an inclusive leadership style. Underneath all of that is what we're gonna talk about today, psychological safety. Today, we're gonna dive into what that is, why it's critical to organizational culture and success, what it feels like when you have a psychologically safe environment, and then how to build psychological safety within your organization. So let's jump in. What is psychological safety? Psychological safety, according to the scholar and author Amy C. Edmonson, is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

That's a bit of an academic definition, but put another way, psychological safety exists when you have an environment where people can ask questions, share ideas, and raise concerns without being afraid. They don't think that there's gonna be any retribution from their supervisors or their peers. They feel safe to share what's on their mind, and the team benefits from hearing what they have to say. So why is this critical to organizational culture and success? Organizational culture is all about how team members feel when they show up to work. Are they happy in their current role? Do they see themselves at the organization for the next 1, 2, 5, 10 years for their entire career? Do they feel positively about their supervisor, teammates, and organizational leadership? Do they feel appropriately included in decisions that impact them in their role? Psychological safety is the key to ensuring that employees are able to speak freely within an organization and this impacts innovation, productivity, and employee engagement. Around innovation, can employees speak up when they have a new idea for how to solve a tricky problem or are they told to just do their jobs? For productivity, can employees share that a specific policy or process is inefficient and actually creates more problems than it solves? Or is it communicated that those things, those policies and processes are actually not in their purview and they need to leave those alone? For employee engagement, can employees articulate that any number of things might be negatively impacting their experience in the workplace? This could be interactions with supervisors or other employees, or they have to park too far away. Can they share things that are going wrong for them? Or they expected to just deal with it? Those are all psychological safety. When employees are explicitly encouraged from top to bottom to share their ideas, perspectives and raise concerns, and when leaders and team is respond with curiosity and the desire to collaborate on a path forward, that's psychological safety.

And it increases innovation and productivity and employee engagement by tapping into the best resource any organization has, its people. So now that we've talked about why psychological safety is important, I want to share what it feels like when you're in a psychologically safe environment. So psychological safety can be felt by team members in so many ways, but there's sort of three central themes that stand out. In a psychologically safe environment, people feel that their boss and their team have their back. Team members feel supported by those that they work most closely with, and they feel that their boss and their team will lean in if and when they need help. They can say, I need some help right now, and their team and their boss are not gonna say, I can't believe this person needs more help. They're just gonna say, let's get it done together. 2nd, they feel that they will be valued for doing the right thing.

This has to be messaged consistently, and it has to be messaged from the top down as organizational values. And it aligns with identifying and measuring behaviors, not just outcomes. If we are only focused on did we meet this goal and not how did we meet this goal, we're gonna struggle because people are gonna try to cut corners and just get to the best thing possible. As opposed to doing things the right way and making sure that we are acting in ways that move the organization forward. And finally, employees in a psychologically safe environment feel that they and others are treated fairly. This can be a little tricky because fair is subjective. So it requires connecting with team members, understanding their unique needs and desires and goals, and then engaging in a dialogue about what the organization can offer them across the employee life cycle and throughout their entire experience with the organization. Okay.

So we've talked about what psychological safety is, why it's important, and then what it feels like. So now we're gonna get to the good stuff. How do we actually build it within our organization? And there are many ways to foster a psychologically safe culture. I'm gonna list 10 key actions and behaviors that leaders and team members can do, and give a little bit of extra for each of those. So number 1, know your teammates names and how to pronounce them. This is key to making sure people feel like they belong, and then get to know them on a personal level. You don't have to be best friends with all of your teammates, but getting to know a couple of things about them and their life builds a sense of connection, and it helps people feel safe being vulnerable and sharing what's going on with them. Number 2, use active listening techniques.

This might seem really basic, but things like making eye contact, looking up from your laptop when you are being talked to, nodding as people speak, and then confirming understanding by asking, what I heard you say was, and fill in the blank. This brings people in and ensures that they feel heard, and it makes them feel valued. Number 3, move to open ended questions. Try to avoid asking just yes or no questions, and then when someone shares a response, incorporate that into an action plan. If that response does not fit with what the action plan calls for, that's okay. You just have to explain why it wasn't included, and then it will be good to go. Number 4, measure employee well-being regularly, both formally, like through surveys, and informally, like through weekly check ins. Just checking in on people, seeing how they're doing, seeing if they need any support.

Number 5, set clear and consistent expectations for every work task. Sometimes we think we're being really clear about what we expect people to do, and they walk away not really feeling sure about what it is we've just asked them to do. So being really clear with our expectations is critical. You can also follow-up by asking, can you share with me what I've just asked you to do to make sure that we're on the same page? That can reduce people doing the wrong thing or doing something in the wrong way and then needing to redo it later on. Number 6, articulate that integrity and honesty are core values in the workplace. Integrity is just doing things the right way and honesty obviously is telling the truth. Those are critical to business success, but those need to be explicitly stated. We cannot just imply that is what's expected.

We have to explicitly state these are things that matter to us, and we have to show over and over and over that those are important. Number 7, when you're sharing a decision that you've made, be sure to include the reasoning behind it. You might think that the reasoning is obvious and maybe it is obvious, but it doesn't hurt to take a few extra seconds and say, I'm making this decision, here's the decision, and here's why I made that decision, before people even have to ask. And then if you don't share it and someone does ask you, why did you make that decision? Be transparent and share why you made that decision. Number 8, be clear that it is okay to say, I don't know or I don't understand. That it's okay to say, I have another idea, and that it's okay to say I wanna try something new. Again, this focuses on the idea that it's okay for people to not have all of the solutions. Sometimes we have folks come in and say, I really want people with the solutions mindset.

Maybe the person who brought the problem to you doesn't actually know how to solve the problem, and that's why they came to you. So really making sure that it's okay to say, I'm just facing a problem and I'm not sure how to proceed, and that it's okay to say, I don't understand what you're asking me to do. That means someone is being vulnerable with you, And so you need to honor that and say, let's walk through it again to make sure we're on the same page. When they say I have another idea, that's innovation. See where it goes. And if you say, I wanna try something new, again, that's innovation. And that's also saying, I think I can make this a little more efficient. Honor that.

Say, let's try it out and see how it goes. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work, but there's no harm in trying something new and seeing if it can improve business processes at your organization. Number 9, reframe any mistakes you see as a normal part of progress. It is expected that people will make mistakes. There's not a single person in the entire world who acts perfectly all the time. Mistakes are opportunities for learning and growth. If someone makes a mistake and their supervisor comes to them or a teammate comes to them and says, hey, I don't think this went super well, and I'm gonna coach you on how we can improve it for next time. That employee is gonna feel a lot better about potentially making mistakes in the future and about trying new things and really working hard.

And they're gonna wanna they're gonna feel connected and feel bought in to you as a supervisor and to the organization because it helps to develop them as opposed to just expecting perfection constantly. Number 10, this is really really straightforward, develop formal structures and practices for solving problems, resolving conflicts, giving and receiving feedback, and building community with teammates. For solving problems, we often think that we are great problem solvers. When we come to group problems, we tend to run into challenges with how to move forward. So have formal structures and practices for how to do that. Same thing with resolving conflicts. We often say we expect you would be professional and to resolve conflicts respectfully. Great.

What does that actually look like? What are the expectations for when teammates get into conflict with each other? For giving and receiving feedback, people often think they are really really strong at giving and receiving feedback, but it can never hurt to just give people some tips around how to approach feedback in a way that's gonna make people feel set up for success and feel like they're able to give actionable feedback that's developmental, and that they can receive feedback in a way where they're leading with best intentions, and are able to really get some nuggets of wisdom and move forward. And for building community, we often expect people to build community, kind of, in the spaces in between work tasks, they do it at the water cooler, they do it over a quick coffee or lunch, but having set rituals where people can spend time together, and the key purpose of that time is just to make connections. It pays huge dividends in business outcomes because people will get to know each other, and they'll feel more likely and more positively about leaning in to support each other as they go about their work day. So those are the 10 key behaviors and actions that you can take. But remember, building a culture of psychological safety, it's a process, it is not gonna happen overnight. There will be big wins you have, you will see huge things where people come to you and say, hey, I don't know how to do this thing, and that's big that that someone says, I don't know, and is comfortable being vulnerable with you. There will be significant challenges where you're still about getting where you wanna go, and you'll make tons of little adjustments along the way. At points, you're gonna feel like you're making mistakes and you probably will make mistakes, but that's a part of psychological safety.

It is okay to make mistakes, it is expected to make mistakes, and you as a leader can model that those are valuable learning opportunities for learning, and they can help drive organization forward. You can share with your teammates, hey, here's a mistake I made and here's how we adjust it. If you as a leader can say, I'm okay making mistakes, so you can be too, it's gonna make the team feel more comfortable really pushing the envelope forward, really getting things done. And that's a wrap. I'm Jamey Applegate and that's your DEI Minute for today. Thank you so much for listening. That's a wrap. I'm Jamey Applegate and that's your DEI Minute for today.

Thank you for listening. Please be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts and don't forget to leave us a review. If you ever have questions, please visit our website or send us an email. You can also sign up for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Links to everything can be found in the episode notes. This episode was edited and produced by Podgrove with podcast art by me, Jamey Appcate.