Fostering a culture of psychological safety at work

Psychosocial hazards range from excessive job demands and poor support, through to bullying and harassment. And there are a range of factors to consider when managing psychosocial risks in the workplace.

Karlie Cremin, managing director of leadership consultancy DLPA, explained in a webinar recently that one of the easiest ways to manage a lot of psychosocial risks is by creating really strong psychological safety within your organisation.

“When we talk about psychological safety within an organisation, the easiest access point to build that – a culture of psychological safety – is really to equip your leaders to have it in their focus and to be able to drive that within their teams.”

What leaders can do for psychological safety

During the webinar, Psychological safety and leadership: A leader's role in creating safe workplaces, Cremin highlighted a business leader’s role in driving psychological safety within an organisation. It involves actions such as providing procedural fairness.

“When we talk about procedural fairness, we are talking about everyone within an organisation having access to an equal process to deliver theoretically an equal outcome,” she said.

“What that means is that similar to that organisational justice…that people have confidence that the procedures and processes in place keep them safe, provide equity, provide them with recourse where things are maybe veering from the intended outcome, that there’s not inherently bias ingrained within them.”

Other areas business leaders can focus on when it comes to psychological safety is around:

• Fostering curiosity
• Checking in regularly
• Owning their own weakness
• Being inclusive
• Showing understanding
• Finding ways to hear new voices

“Finding ways to hear new voices is also a really important thing,” Cremin said. “Just bringing awareness into what voices are being heard and what mechanisms are in play for people to voice ideas and concerns.

“For example, most organisations that we go into, there’s a handful of people who, their voice is always the one that comes up. They’re either the formally or informally elected spokesperson; people tend to defer to them. They are used to asserting themselves first and most loudly.”

And so DLPA encourages organisations to become aware of that and look at how ideas and knowledge flows throughout the business. And from there, it’s about finding ways to hear what other people have to say.

“Things like one-on-ones are great,” Cremin said. “Some people aren’t comfortable raising things in a big meeting setting so having smaller ways for them to do it.”

Change takes time

Cremin acknowledged that cultural change can be a slow and long-term process, so it’s important for business leaders to focus on things that are going to deliver results quickly to deliver that incremental change.

“It is important to really make sure that you’re doing the high impact things early,” she said. “And think about that long term roadmap. The key areas after that…that I would recommend that you focus on and where I think a lot of the low hanging fruit is, in this area, is first of all building a structure that supports the culture.”

Find out more suggestions from Karlie Cremin in the webinar Psychological safety and leadership: A leader's role in creating safe workplaces.