Psychological Safety and a Return to the Office
Psychological safety is just as important as physical safety as you contemplate a return to the office. Most of us are starting to return to the physical office, to the new normal of working conditions, and we all have a responsibility to our peers, colleagues, direct reports, and managers to create an environment of psychological safety.
Psychological Safety is defined as an environment that allows people to show vulnerability without fear of judgement, punishment, regret or embarrassment. Being empathetic, letting employees feel heard and understood, and comfortable to speak up will make the transition to the office much smoother, and allow all of us to manage this change productively. It is a way to acknowledge the wide variety of emotions that people are coming in with: fear, anger, anxiety, relief, grief, joy, etc.
If individuals do not feel that sense of psychological safety, they will be pushed into a defensive mode of performance, they will be preoccupied with personal risk management, loss avoidance and self-preservation. The costs of this “punished vulnerability”, as coined by Timothy Clark, are so high for an organization: lost time worrying about the incident or avoiding the offender, decline in commitment and performance, intentional decrease of work effort to name a few.
How can you mitigate this risk and allow for a psychologically safe return to the office? Intentionally allow for conversations that are vulnerable, and apply empathy.
Encourage 2-way communications
It’s important for you, as leaders to encourage 2-way communications and formally have conversations with your teams about the return to work.
• For example, meet with the team, have the item on the agenda of the meeting.
• Share with them why the return to the office is important: valuing collaboration, social interactions, or innovative problem solving
• Lead the way by sharing your concerns or challenges in coming back, which could be around concern with getting the virus, commuting, childcare. Share your ideas for returning to the office and what are the new ways of working or meet with your team in advance and discuss practicalities, get buy in, so they feel they are being heard and not just told what to do.
• And finally, know that this may take a few iterations.
Discuss Wellbeing
As the focus for these last 14 months has been on health and wellness – in the form of the virus, feeling sick, boundaries between work and home, “quarantine 15”, exercise, work/life balance and so on, it’s an advantage to keep that conversation going. Wellbeing is increasingly becoming a hot topic in many large organizations.
Capture Lessons Learned and Look Forward
Another suggestion that will help in involving and engaging your team is capturing lessons from working through the year of the pandemic, what worked and what didn’t work, discussing the new ways of working, as that can support your organization in moving forward and innovating. As we go ‘back to the office’, we are certainly not ‘going back’ to the ‘old’ ways of working pre-pandemic. This is an opportunity to re-set, to re-create ways of working. The more you involve your teams, the more they realize that what they think matters.
Essentially, these kinds of discussions can give employees a renewed sense of belonging and ownership, and therefore more positive energy in a return to the office.
Finally, to support employees further it’s important to highlight any wellbeing programs that are available in your organization that can support mental health.