How Leaders Can Create Psychological Safety on Their Teams
As the authority on public health issues in America, the Surgeon General released a study in 2022 that highlights the importance of building mental health aware workplaces, especially in a world changed by COVID-19.
As a leader, you can work to create an organizational culture that is also an "an engine of well-being." Mental well-being impacts both the employee and the company: better mental health improves creative thinking, risk-taking, productivity and positively impacts the bottom line. For instance, a Qualtrics study saw a strong correlation between a decline in mental health at work and the perceived difficulty of creative work.
The Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being offers five essential elements of workplaces that support workers’ voices and equity.
Essential #1: Protection from Harm
Essential #2: Connection & Community
Essential #3: Work-Life Harmony
Essential #4: Mattering at Work
Essential #5: Opportunity for Growth
Here, we will focus on the key components of Essential #1: Protection from Harm. Here’s how leaders can take steps to build safer workplaces:
Prioritize workplace physical and psychological safety as a foundational priority.
Physical safety: Ensure occupational health and safety standards are in compliance. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) offers a toolkit to support this work.
Psychological safety: Dr. William Kahn, the father of employee engagement, describes psychological safety "as being able to show and employ one's self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status or career." It is important that leaders create a culture of openness within an organization. Employees thrive when they can freely ask questions and share concerns. Feeling safe to speak up at work is a shift from older ways of doing business, which prized employees keeping their heads down and not rocking the boat. This older mode of operating leads to a "culture of silence" which negatively impacts employees' feelings of connection & community and mattering at work (essentials #2 and #3)
Indeed for Employers suggest three foundations for improving workplace psychological safety: be clear about expectations; encourage participation; be productive and constructive. Activating the insights of your team allows for innovation to thrive. When leaders stifle new ideas, they’re doing a disservice to the growth of their organization.
Enable adequate rest
As an employer, ensure that your staff are compensated fairly and find ways to support staff who may be overworked. Oversights in either of these areas contribute to employees feeling insufficiently rested. This can lead to increased mistakes or higher likelihood of injury. Negative impacts of inadequate rest also include exhaustion, anxiety and depression.
Now, most of us know what it feels like to be in a workplace with seemingly never-ending demands. As a leader, you may be wondering how this point can actually be put into practice when there are deadlines to meet and customers to serve. Sometimes, it may feel as though there is no other option but to expect your team to work longer hours. However, here are actionable approaches you can use to manage workloads for your team:
Get rid of meetings that are not useful. Ask yourself, do you need to meet about this or can it be resolved in a couple of Slack messages?
Respect people’s work styles, boundaries and manage your expectations. For example, if you’re sending an email at 11pm, what kind of response are you really expecting?
Remember to consider employee workload in relation to employee’s experience. Create deadlines with this in mind.
Train staff on non-technical skills like time-management, teamwork, delegation, and prioritization. These things can help employees be more skilled at assessing their workload and communicating if negotiations need to be made.
Make your workplace a safe space for employees to vocalize if they are being stretched too thin. Call out that you are receptive to this kind of feedback and use tools that help you trim unnecessary work, like the Action/Priority matrix.
Ask a hard question: are you understaffed?
Normalize and support mental health
Countless studies affirm the importance of supporting the mental health of employees. This National Alliance of Mental Illness fact sheet shows that one in five adults in America experience a mental illness. 37% of workers acknowledge that their work environment contributed to the mental health symptoms they experienced.
The U.S. Surgeon General suggests organizations support their employees' mental health needs by modeling, communicating and regularly promoting services.
Operationalize DEIA norms, policies, and programs
Creating an inclusive workplace can positively impact all employees' sense of psychological safety. The U.S. Surgeon General suggests that organizations create a culture of trust where all employees are welcome and value one another's perspectives and strengths. Create and operationalize policies and programs in order to foster diversity and inclusion.
For more information on supporting employee mental health, refer to The U.S. Surgeon General resources.