ICML training courses > HR and wellbeing > 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:
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.
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.
People leaders: from CEOs to Supervisors
Participants of this psychological safety for managers course learn how to:
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.
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.
Participants of this psychological safety course for employees learn how to:
We deliver our training programs either through:
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:
Next steps:
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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.
‘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 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.