Psychological Safety Is Not A "Nice-To-Have"
Series is a new product that LinkedIn is piloting to help members build community around the topics they care about by writing regularly about those topics. I’m part of a pilot invitation-only group that is helping LinkedIn to launch Series. Which, I must say, I find very cool indeed. I’ll be discussing “Chasing Psychological Safety” a series about the concept of safety at team level, The Future of Work, Agile and Ways of Work, Technology, Leadership, AI, and most of all - People" every week, so subscribe to my series to be notified of new articles and join the conversation.
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Companies that are winning these days have, -despite what sensationalist reporting may have you believe-, immensely more engaged and happy employees that are productive and the key ingredient to that is that their teams have a fair amount of Psychological Safety. Psychological Safety -sadly- can't be either investigated or improved overnight. Creating value takes time. We didn't make our workforce unsafe overnight, we won't build them back again mindfully and with respect and admiration fast either. But how can we prepare for a long, arduous road when we're not even positive how important it is to be on this path?
First and foremost we have to move the topic from a "nice to have" to a firm and urgent "must have".
Digitally native companies such as the big tech in the Valley know their intrinsic value is not in the technology they create that is entirely replicable, but in the fact that they have built safe, happy, and invested teams and now have resilient, strong and healthy organisations. They wouldn't dream to think any of this is a side-note as they know it's the secret sauce of their success.
It ought to be the clear number one imperative in any other business who wants to succeed - how leaders could be prioritising anything else in lieu of their people's emotional well being is utterly beyond me, it can't be because they don't understand the risk and the opportunity but because they don't know what to do about it and have outsourced any of the thinking of this to a function that is struggling at the intersection of compliance and admin.
Psychological Safety or Employee Happiness?
Much as Psychological Safety of teams transcends a number of ideas it is indubitably also contained in the ethereal, fluffy concepts of employee engagement or employee satisfaction, etc with the pivotal caveat being that PS can be diagnosed and affected hence it is an execution lever for bettering the bottom line, whereas the other ones have remained anchored in un-actionable rhetoric for the enterprise.
For a while, some 10 years ago, those terms were en-vogue enough that a few studies to show the direct correlation between satisfaction and productivity had time to emerge with results ranging from 20%-45% across the board.
X% more profitable, X% more valuable in the stock exchange, X% more likely to survive the next big shift, etc. Every CxO carried one or two numbers like this in their deck and vowed to achieve them, but as time went by and they found nothing in the way of solutions to aid them in making this a priority, those numbers dropped and were replaced by trendier and seemingly more actionable ones on diversity.
