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ICML training courses > HR and wellbeing > Psychological safety
Psychological Safety
Is your organisation psychologically safe? Employees should feel safe to express their ideas and opinions and not be afraid to make mistakes. Without feeling psychologically safe, employees avoid taking responsibility, are limited in their creativity and become risk averse. Therefore, psychological, or emotional safety fosters productivity and innovation.
We help organisations build psychological safety at three levels:
- Consult with HR and management on how to create a culture of psychological safety.
- Train people leaders on how to promote a culture of emotional safety in their teams.
- Train employees on how to foster their own psychological safety.
Tailored Psychological Safety training program – in-house or virtual delivery – Melbourne – Sydney – Brisbane – Adelaide – Perth – Darwin – Hobart – Canberra – all regional areas – Asia – NZ – and anywhere else
Consultancy: building a psychologically safe culture
Our experienced consultants will work with your management, HR/OD team to understand your current level of psychological safety and help you devise strategies to create a culture of psychological safety.
Manager training: make your team thrive through psychological safety
Team innovation, collaboration and productivity thrive in a culture of emotional safety. Team members feel safe if they don’t fear negative consequences when they speak up, when they are being ‘themselves’ or when they make mistakes.
This psychological safety training course for managers is providing the tools and strategies to build a culture where colleagues respect, accept and encourage each other.
Audience
People leaders: from CEOs to Supervisors
Outcomes
Participants of this psychological safety for managers course learn how to:
- Encourage a culture of open communication
- Create an environment of mutual respect
- Encourage innovation and risk taking
- Foster learning and curiosity
- Promote team members speaking up
- Cultivate giving and receiving feedback in the team.
Employee training: Speak up and speak out
This psychological safety training course develops the confidence of participants to speak up and speak out. They will develop techniques to be psychologically safe in all relationships and thereby promote their team interactions and productivity.
Audience
This program is suited to everyone in the organisation. This psychological safety course is most effective if delivered at team level. However, organisation-wide roll-outs enable creating training groups consisting of team members from various teams.
Outcomes
Participants of this psychological safety course for employees learn how to:
- Understand what psychological safety is and why it is important to them, their colleagues and the organisation
- Identify the differences between assertive, submissive and aggressive behaviours in the workplace
- Describe the benefits of behaving and communicating in a more candid way
- Give and receive candid feedback
- know what stops us from speaking up at work
- Learn more about their own preferred behaviours and the impact that ego states can have
- Describe and use strategies for dealing with difficult situations
- Learn how to engage others in collaborative problem solving, seeking to resolve conflict and improve relationships.
Delivered in-house at your premises or in a virtual environment
We deliver our training programs either through:
- Face-to-face workshops at your offices
- Impactful virtual workshops
Tailored Psychological Safety course – delivered at your office
Ask us how we can tailor our Psychological Safety training course in-house to any size group: from one-on-one to conferences with hundreds of people. We are able to design a program that matches your audience, objectives, budget and available time. We deliver our courses all over Australia, including Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and abroad.
The advantage of in-house delivery is that we can tailor the:
- content to suit your organisation’s needs. The content of psychological safety training is particularly well suited to adapting it to your current or desired organisational culture and values and your procedures, values, examples and terminology. Discuss with us how we can create the program that fits your objectives.
- duration to suit the scope of the psychological safety training program and your budget.
Next steps:
- Call us on 1300 655 098, start a chat at the right bottom corner of the page or send us a message via the contact form on this page.
- When we understand your needs we’ll send you a proposal containing program options, a proposed facilitator and a quote.
- If you are happy with the proposal, we jointly agree on a suitable delivery date(s).
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More about our psychological safety training
What is psychological safety?
In 1999, Dr Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School coined the term ‘psychological safety’. She states:
“Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”
Seems simple enough, right? However, it is estimated that only one third of employees actually believe that their opinion counts in their workplace, and more than half of Australian workers view their work environment as psychologically unsafe.
Interestingly, this number differs greatly depending on the type of work. According to the Australian Workplace Psychological Safety Survey, only 23% of lower-income workers believed their workplace was psychologically safe. This number rose to 45% for workers with larger incomes.
Everyone has the right to feel safe in their workplace. To make this happen, it is crucial that leaders and those in a management role work towards establishing trust between their people and an open culture. Whether it is in an important meeting or during everyday interactions, every person in your organisation should be able to question, share an idea, and contribute.
Both leaders and the people in your organisation can benefit from a psychological safety training session, paving the way for greater levels of innovation and collaboration.
Book a psychological training program with us today at 1300 655 098.
The benefits of a psychologically safe workplace
‘Project Aristotle’, Google’s study into what makes effective teams, found that there were five factors that affected the dynamics of a team and their success:
- Psychological safety. Google found that teams that worked well felt safe to take risks without fear of punishment or embarrassment. This led to group members asking more questions and offering new ideas.
- Dependability. Teams could trust that members would complete their work in the time allotted and to the standard required.
- Structure and clarity. Individuals knew their role in a team, what was expected from them by their team and leader, and how they would accomplish their tasks. They were able to ask questions to clarify if needed and had the ability to find out any information that they needed.
- Meaning. Teams found a sense of purpose in their work or in the outcome.
- Impact. Team members felt that their contribution mattered to the team and the organisation as a whole.
Psychological safety was identified by the researchers as the most important of these factors — a prerequisite for discussion, collaboration and innovation that sets great teams apart from the good.
From this, it is clear that a culture where people feel safe enough for risk taking is key. If your employees fear that a single mistake will jeopardise their job or that expressing their idea will result in backlash, nothing will get done. The curiosity and creativity that drives effective problem solving simply won’t emerge.
If an employee is focused on self protection, it is likely that they aren’t living up to their potential. They aren’t able to rely on each other and build on teammates’ thoughts to drive innovation and better decision making. In the end, both organisations and their people suffer the consequences.
Even in workplaces with low psychological safety, people make mistakes — it’s just a part of life. In these environments, however, someone is less likely to report making a mistake, meaning that it may go undetected for longer and cause a bigger issue down the road.
It is important to note that psychological safety does not mean that no one will ever have a disagreement; in fact, people should feel comfortable expressing their opinion to others. Understanding how to effectively implement psychological safety can be difficult, which is why it is so important to learn from a qualified trainer.