You spend the majority of your time at work. You shouldn’t have to feel unsafe while you’re juggling responsibilities, connecting with team members and making progress in your career. Everyone should learn what psychological safety at work is to ensure it exists in their workplaces. Learn what it means and how you can help transform your workspace alongside the help of your team members.
What Does It Mean to Feel Safe?
Feeling safe means you don’t feel worried or threatened by physical, emotional or verbal attacks. You may recognize this feeling when you can take a deep breath and relax or move your body without feeling tense.
Experts define psychological safety as the belief that you’re able to make mistakes without fear of retribution or loss of social standing. A psychologically safe environment erases any worries related to the potential for making mistakes.
What Is Psychological Safety at Work?
Psychological safety at work is an environment where people of all professional positions support each other by encouraging team members to be themselves, vocalize their ideas and ask questions. People who do those things don’t encounter pushback or criticism just for speaking up. The goal of a psychologically safe workplace is to push the entire team forward as a unit instead of making everyone chase career goals in a competitive environment.
What Is a Safe Workplace?
A safe workplace is any professional space where employees feel physically, emotionally and socially safe. They know they have the full support of their team members, they can learn from mistakes and they aren’t at physical risk of injury or illness.
There are numerous ways team leaders create safe workplaces. The most important way is by combining both physical and psychological safety. That might mean a team puts up signage instructing everyone to respond to an emergency in the same way.
While the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has six required safety standards to prevent fires in professional spaces, team leaders might also hang a poster showing how to use a fire extinguisher. Employees will know they’re working in an OSHA-approved building through an OSHA-approval poster and feel empowered with individual instructions they can read close to the fire extinguisher storage place.
Professional leadership teams can also strategize other ways to transform the safety of their workplace for everyone’s benefit. Once more leaders are thinking about psychological safety in addition to physical safety, feeling comfortable at work will become commonplace.
How Everyone Can Make Workplaces Safer
After learning what a safe workplace is, everyone can team up to transform wherever they clock in each day. Consider a few ideas with other people in your organization to discuss the most effective steps to a more psychologically safe workplace.
1. Form Trust Through Conscious Conversations
It’s so easy to get caught up in a busy professional schedule. Whenever you interact with your co-workers, try slowing down with conscious conversation techniques. Actively listening, avoiding any interruptions and responding with thoughtful replies make the other person feel seen. If they feel seen, they know they aren’t alone.
People who have a community of friends know who they can turn to if they need help. Consciously slowing down during conversations to show the other person you care about them forms bonds that facilitate the trust needed before safety can flourish.
Don’t forget about the power of expressing gratitude. Extending gratitude for even the smallest kind comment builds security between two people through positive reinforcement. You’ll show you have someone’s back by thanking them, regardless of their workplace role or corporate title.
2. Prioritize Everyone’s Well-Being Before Deadlines
Workplace leaders often stress the importance of deadlines while forgetting about each team member’s comprehensive well-being. If you work for a supervisor who demands that you work overtime every day, you’ll quickly realize they don’t care about your ability to rest between shifts. Their intense expectations indirectly prove that your professional performance is more important than anything else.
Try creating an environment where everyone cares about each other’s well-being more than deadlines. If someone needs to slow down because they’re dealing with stressors at home or aren’t feeling well, work with them to delay upcoming due dates or delegate their responsibilities. Team members will feel safer vocalizing when they need help if everyone makes this kind of effort on the job.
3. Make Work Schedules More Flexible
Some jobs require the team member to show up in person every day. Others involve mostly work on computers, which can easily happen from home. Psychological safety at work is a high priority when management teams recognize that flexible work schedules make employees feel more comfortable.
Optional work-from-home days help people compensate for long commutes that take a toll on their mental health. They may also feel recognized as human beings instead of cogs in a work machine, which fosters greater appreciation for their team. People will worry less about asking to work from home due to medical appointments, health conditions or mental health complications when systemic support exists through policies like flexible schedules.
4. Respond Quickly to Prejudices
Anyone can say they don’t tolerate prejudices in the workplace, but that isn’t always the case. It’s up to each team member to act quickly when they see discrimination occurring. Reprimanding the person and enforcing consequences shows everyone they’re safe through actionable evidence.
Psychological safety involves feeling safe enough to be your true self. That’s only possible when everyone can live authentically without snide comments, office gossip, or passive-aggressive discrimination on the job.
5. Practice Emergency Situation Response Drills
Some aspects of a professional environment might feel unsafe, but still be within everyone’s control. While you can pay attention to your interpersonal interactions, emergency situations still occur. A safe workplace is any workplace that knows how to respond to the worst-case scenarios, like an active shooter. Organize a response team and practice how everyone should act in those moments so the entire professional team feels secure in their united response.
Enjoy Every Day on the Job
Psychological safety at work is a crucial part of the modern workforce. Everyone deserves to feel safe being themselves, vocalizing ideas and scheduling their hours around their needs. When things like flexibility and diversity are some of the core things behind your organization, you’ll create a safe workplace with the help of your co-workers.