The growing trend towards the adoption of hybrid organization structures is being reinforced through multiple surveys and reports. What is important to note is that the nature of interactions has shifted from a physical to a virtual environment leading to missing out on few critical signals that we get from our peers and colleagues. They are in the form of serendipitous interactions, unscheduled catchups and connections, and interactions that are informal, and casual. While the physical work environment naturally provided these, it’s becoming complex in the virtual and remote work environment. Now, you may ask, “Why is this required?”.

Social exchange is the micro-foundation of building trust and such social exchanges accelerate this process. Working relationships built on trust are a strong predictor of collaboration within a team resulting in smooth communication between team members. This environment of collaboration is fostered by high trust and high-quality relationships. This is where Psychological Safety enters our conversation. In this blog, we discuss the need for Psychological Safety in the workplace.

Psychological safety in a virtual world

A psychologically safe environment is a result of high-quality relationships leading to healthy group dynamics and organizational support. In a two-year-long study, Google’s Project Aristotle discovered Psychological Safety as one of the five key dimensions of high-performing teams. This is also reinforced by many other empirical studies by Harvard and MIT. As human beings, we have a fundamental need to relate and socialize with each other. This need if not fulfilled leads to anxiety, fear of missing out, feeling of loneliness, and becoming disconnected from the team and larger organization.

In a physical work setup, the work structure was designed to allow people to build these bonds, connect, and socialize with peers. With virtual work taking over, the opportunity to connect and in turn “satisfy” this need for relatedness is lost. Working virtually makes it difficult for people to pick up cues about an individual’s intention, body language, or mental state, making the trust-building process slower. The level of relatedness affects our intrinsic motivation at work.  As we move along with the newer ways of working, this need must be systemically addressed. This fundamental need for relatedness is taken care of by creating a psychologically safe environment.

Psychological Safety: Collective perception

Psychological Safety is a collective belief of a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks and be vulnerable to one another. Psychological Safety facilitates the willing contribution of ideas and actions to a shared enterprise.

Let’s take two scenarios where Ella is a new employee who has joined the organization during the pandemic. She has never met anyone from her colleagues and has been working virtually ever since she joined. However, she’s been a part of regular team meetings with the management and other teams as well.

What Ella experiences while working virtually?

Regular scenario: In the team meetings, Ella feels has queries that can help her provide clarity around the topics discussed. Sometimes she also has different opinions regarding the approach being taken by the team. Since she hasn’t met anyone from the team and is only exposed to work-related interactions, she hasn’t established the “connect” with her team members which makes her unsure of how her opinions will be perceived. She, therefore, feels reluctant to take the interpersonal risk. While she feels confident about her opinions, she often drops the idea of expressing these opinions as she is afraid of being wrong or looking “unsmart” in front of the team. Hence, she usually just agrees with what the team or the management agrees.

Psychologically safe scenario: In the team meetings, Ella is always actively participating. Through brief informal interactions at the beginning or end of meetings, she has been able to build a connection with her team members. Hence, she makes sure to ask the smallest of doubts that she might have. She often expresses her views while being aware that they might bring conflict of statements. She is not afraid of being wrong or being looked down upon for asking or making statements. Sometimes, her approach also helps the team to look at the problem from a different direction adding value to the solutions.

In both the scenarios, the meetings are only conducted at scheduled timings and Ella only interacts with her peers or manager while these meetings. The difference that stands in both situations is the presence of psychological safety in Scenario 2. Experiencing Psychological Safety allows an individual to take risks and be in the spotlight without worrying about being right or wrong. Building a psychologically safe environment means allowing an individual to fail and make mistakes without the fear of consequences. The environment is nurtured by the team (especially the Manager) in a way that all team members can easily communicate their beliefs, thoughts, admit to their errors and ask for help whenever required. Psychological safety enables teams to learn while making people feel secure and capable of changing their behavior in response to shifting organizational challenges.

What does it mean for organizations?

Creating a psychologically safe workplace can impact organizations in many ways, three of which are listed below:

1. Learning behavior: The ability to give and receive feedback enables employees to indulge in learning from peers and managers. Constant evaluation of their work allows them to identify their development points and establish a learning behavior. Having a learning behavior allows employees to continuously upskill and thrive with the constantly changing market requirements.
2. Reflection and Resilience: Thriving in a psychologically safe environment involves acceptance of failures and more essentially, reflecting upon these failures. The collective reflection at a team level defines the members’ ability to bounce back and improvise to succeed in their tasks, positively contributing towards higher productivity and overall performance.
3. Innovation and creativity: The environment to create and innovate is fostered by taking risks and communicating strong interpersonal trust in team members. Risk-taking allows employees to expand their horizons and seek to find newer interesting techniques to find solutions to problems. In our last blog, we highlighted how creativity allows the development and implementation of new ideas helping organizations to move towards agile organizational structures.

Psychological safety enabling the future of work

As the business landscape changes, the focus on minimal governance and maximum execution require people to take risks and decisions independently. A psychologically safe workplace exposes people to high-quality decision-making along with continuous innovation and collaboration. Research suggests that psychological safety is a strong predictor of team effectiveness and an organization’s sustained competitive advantage is an outcome of its people’s success along with team effectiveness.

At Kognoz, we are solving the problem of creating a psychologically safe environment in a virtual workplace. Our research is focused on scientifically diagnosing the team and organizational environment and creating conditions where all employees can operate in a psychologically safe environment resulting in higher team performance, innovation, and creativity. To know more about our research click here.