Psychological safety is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. At work, it’s a shared expectation held by members of a team that teammates will not embarrass, reject, or punish them for sharing ideas, taking risks, or soliciting feedback.
Trust is a byproduct of psychological safety. I believe team members who are courageous and open, who respect one another’s boundaries, and who are committed and focused on attaining a common objective based on trust help form a safe environment.
How many of you have evaluated the Psychological safety of your team?
Personally, I have never paid explicit attention to assessing psychological safety within my team. Until recently, when I was facilitating a retrospective “Stinky Fish”. One of the team members gathered the courage to express his or her struggles and vulnerabilities. That got me thinking about how I can evaluate psychological safety within my teams and differentiate between assumptions and facts.
The reason I mention differentiating between assumptions and facts is that no one on the team had any idea that the individual was going through stress due to unhealthy behaviours. In this situation, rather than focusing on individuals, the focus has to be on understanding the root cause behind the behaviours that cause stress. Most of us are unaware of how we make others feel. Just by knowing that we might be hurting someone, we tend to alter our behaviour.
Retrospective template to evaluate Psychological safety
This retrospective was a follow-up to the stinky fish retrospective. What got exposed during the previous retrospective was just the tip of the iceberg. I wanted to dig deep and find the root cause.
The first step after individuals demonstrates courage and share vulnerabilities is to acknowledge their feelings. Making sure that they feel seen, heard, and valued. To establish trust, your words should be followed by meaningful actions. The feeling of being heard will only last for a while. What actions follow that are critical and create a lasting impact? Hence, the stinky fish retrospective was followed by the psychological safety retrospective to uncover the unhealthy behaviours that were challenging trust and collaboration within the team.
Instructions:
Request that each team member spend 10 minutes writing down the most significant behaviors they have encountered while working as a team, both positive and negative
Let them place these stickies based on how these behaviours made them feel. Within the range of More safe and Less safe the further, the sticky is placed from the inner circle “You” the less safe the behaviour is. The closer the sticky is placed to the inner circle the more safe the behaviour is.
Let every individual team member explain the behaviour, and how it affects them, when discussing the negative behaviours. It is important to explicitly specify the alternative expected behaviour. To give a clear guideline.
Team members are then encouraged to ask clarifying questions, and think of alternatives or improvements. Note them in the form of action items.
The team members started mapping sticky notes with specific behaviours depending on how they made them feel. Did it make them feel safe, or did it threaten or endanger their safety?
After the team members were done listing these behaviours we started a discussion. The goal of this discussion was not to vent; the focus was to find an alternative expected behaviour instead of the toxic behaviour that was listed in the outermost circle. It also created an opportunity to highlight the behaviours that make individuals feel safe. This helps make sure the good behaviours get rooted within the team.
The action points or alternative behaviours were then noted on the black stickies. When they encountered or experienced toxic or unhealthy behaviour, team members were supposed to communicate the expected behaviour. This was important since what might be normal for one team member might be affecting the other team member in a negative manner. For example, checking your phone during 1-to-1 conversations can be normal for one person, but that could be offensive to the other, who expects you to be present during the conversations.
These improvements could be simple or more intense depending on the team dynamics and composition.
The quest to establish safety shouldn’t stop here, periodic checks or feedback from the team will help identify the impact of these discussions and action items. Employee experience in such situations could be a key to form a close knitted, committed teams with high trust, engagement and collaboration. It also nurtures an inclusive culture.
Feedback: I felt comfortable, and the most essential element was that I was able to express myself with the support of this retrospective template. It also helped to focus on the behaviour rather than individuals, which avoided further straining personal ties within the team, which was a significant advantage. Everyone on the team is aware and is working together to improve unhealthy behavioral patterns.
Apart from the Retrospective exercise that I conducted and shared my experience with the above article, I’d like to provide a few other activities that can help you start the dialogue about psychological safety in your teams.
Rate your sentiments
The below format helps to take quick feedback on people, processes, and technology. You can use this feedback mechanism for collecting feedback about Safety, Openness, and Respect. Change the format as per the team's requirements.
Safety Check
Ask team members to rank their avatars or stickies on a scale of 1 to 5 to indicate how comfortable they feel sharing information with this group
Emotion word cloud
Ask the team members to create a list of emotions they feel when working as a team. Combine the lists and use them to create a Word Cloud with the help of a free online tool. The visualisation helps to show the various emotions every individual from the team experiences.
It gives a clear picture of what kind of emotions dominate the space.
The range of emotions individuals experience.
Depending on the outcome of this activity, it can be a great starting point for a discussion about creating a healthy work environment.
Created online using free Word Cloud generated — https://www.freewordcloudgenerator.com/generatewordcloud
Comments