Psychosocial safety is equality in action. Here’s how to do it.
How can you create a culture of curiosity and autonomous growth?
How can you create a space where all team members can be themselves, living true to their authentic purpose and mission?
How can you build teams that embrace differences?
It all comes down to psychosocial safety.
Creating a culture of psychosocial safety is a lot like driving a manual. There are multiple moving parts (your clutch, brake, accelerator, gears and steering wheel) that all play a crucial part in a safe and smooth journey.
Psychosocially safe cultures look like…
Embracing all forms of diversity as a strength, including diversity of thought
Going beyond giving permission to speak up: actively encouraging others to share their voice as a habit
Creating regular opportunities to listen, be heard and learn from each other
Knowing that we’re safe (physically, socially, psychologically), and immediately taking steps if we’re not
Fostering psychosocial safety begins with senior leaders developing and embodying the leadership behaviours they want to see across the organisation.
As a leader, it’s your responsibility to get into the driver’s seat and build a culture of psychosocial safety by getting all of these parts to work cohesively together; creating the right climate, mindsets, and behaviours within team.
Three main drivers of psychosocial safety (Frazier et al. 2017) :
Positive team climate.
This is the MOST important. A psychosocially safe team values one another's contributions, cares about one another's well-being, and wants to make their voice heard by having input into how the team carries out its work.Positive leader relations.
A close second. A psychosocially safe team has a great leader who models and purposefully enhances positive experiences. Their leader creates a work environment and experience that makes each person feel they matter.Work-design characteristics.
A more recent addition that’s becoming a demand for all. A psychosocially safe team has access to an enjoyable place of work that has effective practices, flexible options and healthy boundaries and expectations.
As the driver, you have the responsibility to lead your people on a journey.
You’re the one with your foot on the accelerator, but making sure the voices of your team are heard can make it a much more enjoyable ride. Authoritative leadership behaviours are detrimental to psychosocial safety, while supportive leadership behaviours promote safety.
Our Insights and Recommendations
Once a year won’t cut it.
Look beyond one-off training sessions that simply tick a box, and look towards deploying an at-scale program of leadership development. This means touching base, measuring program engagement and creating goals for the future based on these learnings.
Make it immersive.
Invest in leadership-development experiences that are emotional, sensory, and create aha moments. Ones that create a memorable launching pad, with lessons tied to stories, that can be recalled when obstacles and hurdles arise.
Embed, embed, embed.
Incorporate practices that make development a part of leaders’ day-to-day work. Simple frameworks and models, and practical exercises that can be simply embedded into everyday life.
Mix up your learning groups.
Disintegrate any invisible barriers in your organisation by including both leaders and team members across all departments in your development program. This highlights that standards and principles are shared by everyone.
