3 mistakes to avoid when it comes to mental safety at work
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When you think of Mental Safety, what comes to mind? There is a common misconception that it simply means allowing your team to take risks, make mistakes, speak up, and express ideas without fear of judgment.
This is not what psychological safety is all about, and this misconception leads organizations to struggle to measure it accurately.
In fact, psychological safety is a broader and deeper concept than just interpersonal risk-taking and discourse culture. It is a multifaceted aspect of workplace culture that is often underestimated. However, it is essential to creating an environment where individuals and groups can truly thrive.
Mental safety affects every single person in the world and affects every aspect of everyday life. Psychological safety includes the personal experience of safety, comfort, and confidence within a specific context. It refers to how safe and comfortable you feel in different settings, whether that's a physical space, place, situation, or when interacting with people.
To create healthy workplace cultures and a thriving business, where people truly enjoy their work, you need to invest in and commit to creating and developing a psychologically safe workplace. A healthy workplace culture, inclusion, diversity, equity, and inclusion all come from a foundation of psychological safety.
What does this mean? It means investing in your people. Don't assume that everyone has the skills they need to be successful at work; skills such as interpersonal awareness, effective communication, understanding group dynamics, collaboration and participation, decision making, feedback, self-reflection, growth mindset, creativity, and problem solving. Without adequate resources, training, and a supportive environment to practice these skills, people may hesitate or struggle to contribute confidently.
To cultivate true psychological safety, organizations must prioritize creating supportive environments where people feel confident and empowered to bring their Authentic Self to work. This includes equipping individuals with the necessary skills and resources for effective communication, establishing safe spaces for discussion, and cultivating a culture that promotes healthy conflict resolution.
At the Psychological Safety Institute, we often hear organizations say “We can't accurately measure psychological safety.” The main reason why they struggle is that they mistakenly equate mental safety with speech culture, and try to measure only that.
When we examine the methods they use and their knowledge about this, it is clear that without understanding what psychological safety really is, many organizations use ineffective methods to measure it. While some use qualitative methods through observation and interviews, most rely on quantitative methods. This includes employee engagement surveys, health surveys, exit data, retention statistics, performance management data, performance appraisals, 360-degree feedback, and profit/loss metrics. These methods fail to provide a complete understanding of the actual level of psychological safety within their organization.
Frustrated, the organizations decide to try something different. They ask a few questions to try to gain some insight. Sounds like a solid plan, right? In theory, yes. However, the challenge comes from the fact that these questions are directed at interpersonal risk-taking and cross-cultural communication. Often found through a general internet search, these questions may have been developed for use in unrelated industries or used for completely different purposes than their intended ones.
There are various tools, checklists, and great guides available to give you an overview of where you are in terms of your organization's mental security environment. But again, these focus on risk-taking between people and talk about culture, giving a narrow view of one aspect of psychological safety. Guidelines in the public domain often provide vague information, focus on abstract concepts such as building trust or respect, and lack practical, actionable steps that organizations can take to significantly improve mental safety at work, in all its aspects.
Here are three common mistakes organizations make when measuring psychological safety and how to avoid them.
1. Measuring the wrong thing
This stems from a misunderstanding of what mental safety really is. Many organizations mistakenly equate psychological safety with speech culture.
Educate yourself and your organization on the true scope of mental safety. Understand that it covers a broad spectrum, including each individual's experience of safety, comfort and confidence in a variety of situations.
2. Using indirect questions
The questions asked are often not tailored to their business or industry, resulting in data that is not very useful.
These questions often focus on whether employees feel safe to make mistakes or speak up. They rarely deal with critical factors such as whether employees feel they can bring their Authentic Self to work, how their thoughts and emotions affect their ability to communicate and interact with their colleagues, the nuances of group dynamics, or any other factors that affect the individual level. of safety at work.
Marking these questions on unrelated surveys shows employees that their safety is not a top priority. These tagged questions tend to focus on the symptoms of an unhealthy work culture, rather than addressing and analyzing the causes. It's no wonder organizations are failing to get the insights they crave and need right away.
Avoid focusing only on the symptoms of an unhealthy work culture. Instead, analyze and resolve the causes. Develop tailored, targeted questions that identify pockets of toxicity across the five different levels of culture (PSI Culture Framework) within your organization. This approach provides actionable insights into the nuances of individual experience and group dynamics.
3. Developing interventions without clear direction or focus
Based on the insufficient data they have been able to collect, organizations often flounder without actionable insights. While data and anecdotes highlight problems, they often lack the depth needed to be effective. The exact nature of the problem, its underlying causes and the appropriate measures to be taken are still unclear. Walking in the dark with no other insight available to them, organizations decide to do something, anything, to try to fix this issue. As a result, organizations may implement well-intentioned but ineffective interventions that do not address the root causes. This teaching method rarely addresses the real problem. How could it be?
Use a holistic approach to understand and measure psychological safety and identify toxic areas in your organization. Collect comprehensive, detailed data that reveals the nature of problems and their causes. This enables the development of clear, focused interventions that effectively address the root causes.
Understanding the true scope of mental safety and measuring it accurately is critical to fostering a healthy, productive, and inclusive workplace. By recognizing its multifaceted nature and using tailored, actionable strategies, organizations can identify and address potentially toxic areas within their workplace culture. Avoiding these common pitfalls and taking a comprehensive approach will lead to meaningful action in creating environments where everyone can thrive.
This is an edited excerpt from Authentic Organization: How to Create an Emotionally Safe Workplace, by Gina Battye, published by Wiley, June 2024, and available wherever books and ebooks are sold.
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