The Psychological Safety Experiment… In a Virtual World
If information is hidden, your organisation is compromised. When concerns aren't raised, risks go unseen. If questions aren't asked, learning is hampered. When ideas can't breathe, innovation is stifled.
Covid-19 Update: following the cancellation of all physical elements of our Psychological Safety Series, we’re back with an even more urgent theme: How do we encourage feedback loops in a time of crisis, when most of us are working from home? We’re delighted to say many of the organisations below are now active partners in exploring that question. Get in touch to learn about how we’ve adapted the series to this virtual world.
Amy Edmondson describes psychological safety as “a climate where people feel safe enough to take interpersonal risks by speaking up and sharing concerns, questions or ideas”. It manifests as an environment in which people are empowered to innovate and to strive for higher performance while being more sustainable owing to a lack of fear over expressing alternative views or raising concerns.
Psychological safety is not about being nice, nor is it about lowering performance standards. It is not a personality trait and it is not just another word for trust. Psychological safety is an operating environment that allows an organisation to reach its fullest potential by optimising all the knowledge and skills at its disposal.
When people keep concerns, questions or ideas to themselves an organisation is compromised. If concerns are not shared, risks may not be picked up. If questions are not shared, learning will be hampered. If ideas are not shared, innovation will not happen.
Psychological safety can overcome issues such as groupthink, by harnessing the cognitive diversity in teams. It can also mitigate shared information bias, one of the greatest hurdles to effective innovation. In one study, as little as 18% of unshared relevant information was discussed in group meetings. Countless further studies have demonstrated positive relationships between information sharing and group performance.
Psychological safety engenders what Manley Hopkinson describes, in his book Compassionate Leadership, as commitment over compliance. Committed team-members drive organisational performance, compliant ones are just along for the ride. Psychological safety has been shown to develop commitment by promoting learning and increasing engagement.
The big question - how do we increase psychological safety?
That was the question at our industry event this afternoon, attended by guests from Citi, HSBC, Swiss Re, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, the Financial Conduct Authority, Capco, Lloyds Banking Group and RBS, as well as guest academics from the London School of Economics and University College London. It’s one we believe everyone in the industry has a stake in answering. These findings from the BSB’s survey of over 194,000 financial services employees more than set that stage:
“30% of employees said that people got defensive when their views were challenged by colleagues and 28% that they would be worried about negative consequences if they raised concerns at work.”
Over the next 9-months, we want to spark a movement that addresses this challenge with evidence and experimentation. There’s been plenty said about Psychological Safety - we’re offering an opportunity for every financial services employer to get involved in the search for progress:
The Industry Lab - we’re running two Psychological Safety Labs for the industry, the first of which will be on April 29th 2020. You nominate a team of 3-5 from your organisation to come together with 4 other teams to learn, discuss, and design an experiment on a more psychologically safe workplace in collaboration with a team of behavioural scientists. The price for attendance is £1200/person.
The Diagnostic Survey - Our team has developed a diagnostic survey for psychological safety. Alongside an analysis of internal data, we can produce a bespoke measure of psychological safety that serves as a base-line from which to measure the impact of our/your interventions.
The Experiments - You can ask us to run a bespoke experiment on an outcome you care about, or you can sign up to our Manager Capability Programme. In this flagship initiative, we want to test the impact of a manager development programme on the psychological safety of the team they lead. Uniquely, we’ll do this by conducting a randomised controlled experiment across four large organisations over a six month period.
Download our series brochure or get in touch with a bespoke request.