Many employees don't really dare to show themselves at work. They think they won't be accepted as they are, and that is enormously distracting. If you as an organisation invest in psychological safety, you get more engaged employees in return.
In many organisations, employees stop being human the moment they cross the office threshold. They put on an official's suit, as it were, and turn into their role within the organisation. People who work from home and meet online, on the other hand, often show more of their real, messy and authentic selves. Colleagues who are otherwise always smartly dressed appear on screen unshaven and in a T-shirt, and a pet or housemate walks past in the background. Is that official's suit really so bad? Those people are just at work, aren't they? Actually, it is.
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety means feeling the room to do your work well. Professor Amy Edmondson described it as a shared belief in a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. Edmondson Think of giving honest feedback, admitting mistakes and coming up with new ideas, without fear of negative consequences. In a culture of fear, those are precisely the things that can damage your career.
Why is psychological safety important for work engagement?
Psychological safety and work engagement are closely linked. It is about the energy you have left for your tasks. When you feel at ease, you can concentrate better. And when you feel safe enough to be yourself, you can put more of yourself into your work. You then dare to use a larger part of your talents.
Research by Utrecht University among 680 Dutch bank employees confirms this. Employees who feel more themselves at work are more engaged, more satisfied and, by their own account, perform better. Job resources, such as support and room to manoeuvre, make it easier to be yourself. Metin et al. Guido Heezen of Effectory sees the same link between being able to be yourself, feeling safe and work engagement in his organisation's employee surveys.
In a psychologically safe team, employees don't have to worry about their status and position. They can focus on the quality of their work, and they feel more room to come up with ideas and be creative. Google studied 180 of its own teams and found that psychological safety is the most important factor for an effective team. Google re:Work
How do you increase psychological safety?
How do you make employees feel that they are fine as they are, whether they are straight or gay, Muslim or Buddhist, black or white? It starts with rewarding and assessing people on the basis of their work and the results they achieve. That shows that it doesn't matter who you are. You can also consciously hire people from different backgrounds and let them work together. When your direct colleague is really different from you, but competent and simply very nice, the organisational culture automatically becomes more open-minded. Diversity in your team opens eyes.
The role of managers
Managers are role models. They can increase psychological safety by showing vulnerability:
- tell people what you yourself are struggling with in your work
- admit when you have made a mistake, to show that mistakes are human and that you can learn from them
- don't have an answer ready for every question straight away, so employees get room to come up with solutions themselves
- build an environment in which people build on each other's ideas and feedback
That is how you work step by step on a good company culture.
Showing another side of yourself
It also helps to encourage employees to show more of themselves. At Effectory, for example, a 'Big Day' was organised with creativity as its theme. There was poetry, singing and a lot of applause. That visibly did good to the employees who dared to show an unexpected side of themselves. They felt even more seen and appreciated, not only as colleagues, but also as people.
You can also organise theme meetings, for example with talks by people with lived experience of caring for a relative or of mental vulnerability. They sometimes give employees just the nudge to be more open about sides of their lives they still keep quiet about. And once something has been said out loud, it no longer limits them from being themselves.
Also read personal leadership starts with awareness and what makes a successful team?.
About this article: this piece is based on a blog by Guido Heezen of Effectory, from his series on the conditions for work engagement.
