Build Psychological safety at work
Transcript by Sean Jackson
Aidan Cammies (AC): Hi and welcome to Brainstorm - the podcast exploring how our minds work, how work affects us and how we can best deal with it. We are Aidan Cammies.
Damiano Tescaro (DT): And Damiano Tescaro. Explorers of the office jungle and mental health aficionados. Buckle up, because ideas are about to get wild.
[Episode recap]
AC: Hi Damiano and our first guests and absolutely our best guests, if there was one thing that you wanted people to take away from today, one thing that you would like people to go away and do after listening to this, what would that be?
Alexis Monville (AM): That would be for them to start the [psychological safety] survey in their team. [The survey questions are listed in the transcript.]
Bastian Schwippert (BS): Think and go through the questions and think about how psychologically safe they feel and what would be one to two things that they could do differently to increase psychological safety in their team.
Episode starts
AC: Hello and welcome to episode three of Brainstorm, the podcast in which Aidan always wishes he had a script in front of him instead of making it up as he goes along, I am joined by the wonderful Damiano.
DT: Hello, hello everyone.
AC: ...and Alexis Monville and Bastain … I’m so sorry I’ve forgotten your second name..
BS: Schwippert!
DT: We have a good mix of names today, Italian, English, French and German, it’s incredible.
AC: ..er Welsh, not English, I am going to have to call you up on that Damiano. Perhaps I win a point back after completely destroying the pronunciation. What are we talking about today?
DT: Today is a very exciting episode, we’re going to be talking about psychological safety. It is an interesting episode for many reasons. One, it is the first time we have guests on the podcast, so welcome Alexis and Bastian. Secondly, psychological safety is a very hot topic at the moment. Just yesterday I attended the unconscious bias training and I feel this is the perfect time to talk about this, especially as we have two experts. Alexis, Bastian, would you like to introduce yourself and tell people who you are, how you are, and what you do?
AM: With pleasure, I am Alexis Monville, thank you for having us on Brainstorm. I joined the EMEA Leadership team a few months ago as the Chief of Staff to the General Manager, I came over from the US, although I am not from the US, I am originally from France. I was in the engineering leadership team in a similar role, and my main focus is to make the organisation operate at the highest level of performance in a sustainable manner. We will see that it really connected to psychological safety in a second. So, Bastian, your turn.
BS: We have quite a similar focus Alexis. My focus is to help the organisation bring associate experience and engagement together, and psychological safety is very important for high performance and definitely to sustainable high performance. My role is HR business partner for Sales, Services and Marketing in EMEA. My background is roughly 20 years in different roles in HR. This is an interesting and powerful topic we are discussing.
DT: Indeed, welcome, we’re delighted to have you and I think it’s great that we have these two perspectives. From an HR perspective we have Bastian with all of your experience and Alexis with a technological and view from the chief staff is going to be extremely interesting. I propose to kick off the dance, what does psychological safety mean to you in one sentence?
AM: This is really hard. In one sentence I would say some people call it emotional connectivity, which helps describe what it could mean. It is more difficult than that. I think the team performance is a big one. I think we need to go into the story of that. When Google started looking at the performance of 180 teams, they were looking at all the behaviours that affect team performance. They didn’t find anything interesting until they looked at 150 years of academic study and found psychological safety, and they realised that is was the single thing that was the most important thing for team performance.
So, if I can make a sentence with emotional connectivity and team performance, I think I would have something there.
AC: I’ve got shivers, I love that.
DT: That was beautiful. And Bastian, what does psychological safety mean for you?
BS: I think Alexis is spot on. When people feel psychologically safe, they are at their best. They feel safe to be authentic and they allow others to be authentic too. This has a lot to do with respecting others and trusting others.
DT: I love that part of trust. Aidan, I think we have to go around the table, what does it mean to you?
AC: It’s a really long distance table. I think the key part is bringing humanity to the core of everything that we do. I see a lot of time with customers they have initiative to make everything great, or they might have brought in a new tool that will allow everyone to be super, hyper-productive and the best versions of ourselves. But a lot of the time it focuses on the productivity and the ‘do more things in less time’. But if you’re not addressing the key component which is the people who work there, you’re never going to see success.
For me, I believe that caring about the people you work with, caring about how they feel, and what their aims and goals are in life should be goal to strive for in its own right. But the data show (still saying data as a plural is so difficult as a native English speaker) not only is it a nice thing to strive towards but it pays itself off in so many ways. By just investing a little bit of time into making people feel comfortable to talk openly about things they’re afraid of, or encouraging people to own up to their mistakes and let them know that they are not going to be punished. We’re not at school, we’re not going to say “you got something wrong, you need to sit in the naughty corner”. I want someone to say “I made a mistake”, because I would rather know about it then than find out a year later and discover that they’ve been hiding it because they were afraid of punishment. For me it is about treating people as human beings and the positive side of that is you get the productivity.
BS: With productivity you mention an important point. When we think about our culture, a key part of this is, the best idea wins no matter where it comes from, and to make sure that people raise their voice and add their idea, and they feel comfortable to do so no matter where they come from, you will only do this if you feel psychologically safe, no matter where you are in the hierarchy. Also, to have creative ideas that are a bit out of the box and might even be unpopular at first is something you only do when you feel safe.
DT: So coming from the perspective of the associate, I’ve worked in toxic environments in the past where psychological safety was not something that remotely worried anyone. I am thinking about everyone listening to the podcast who thinks ‘ok, this is important, it sounds nice, but is it something the business is actually interested in? Alexis, you mentioned Google, do you want to give a bit of background to the business data that we have that showcases and supports how important psychological safety is for the whole organisation?
AM: The study was really interesting from that perspective. When they looked at it they saw that psychological safety was the single most powerful predictor of team performance, with real numbers linked to that. For example, we always hear people say that we need to reduce attrition. Of course attrition is a problem in some cases because it costs a lot to hire people and it takes time, and so on and so on. Reducing attrition by 27% is something important.
The other thing that is important, you mentioned hiding mistakes. This is a problem that will cost lives in some environments. Reducing serious mistakes by 40% is something important. You will reduce serious mistakes because you will speak about things that you are unsure about openly. Instead of staying quiet because you don’t really know if you can say that. Or you don’t really know if you’re right. They are important aspects.
And the last one is also really important, it increases productivity by 12%. Twelve percent is huge, ask any company if they would be comfortable to have 12 more percent of productivity, they would say “yes please”. So it is important for the business from that perspective.
If you look at what it is, I think it is important for the people, because when you increase your impact, your performance, you also increase your satisfaction. When you have psychological safety, you feel better, and if you feel better, you get all the other aspects that come with that. So it is important for the business and for the people (and so it is important for the business).
DT: That is an important connection, it is important for the business and also for the people. That makes a lot of sense. I am thinking, if I’m an employee working anywhere in the world. How can these people start to look around themselves, wondering or questioning, ‘ok, how do I feel about the situation, how can they detect the environment that they’re in? Are there any strategies, are there any tips that you can share?
AM: There are two things that I really like. The first is start to realise and catch yourself when not speaking up. When you have an idea. For example there is one thing that always happens to me, I don’t remember acronyms well, what they mean, in a conversation when someone is using acronyms, I know that I know it, but I don’t remember what it means, which means I don’t understand the context or what is going on and if I don’t understand the acronym, what should I do?
Sometimes I catch myself not asking, I am thinking ‘why, why not ask?’ It is a simple question, but sometimes I feel uncomfortable to ask. Usually I feel when I am comfortable to ask those types of questions, especially at the beginning of the meeting, there’s more questions in the meeting. If I am not, sometimes you can have the whole presentation and there are no questions. So if I can catch myself not asking questions or feeling comfortable, I know there is a problem.
Now, if I am aware of the problem, how can I make the others aware of the problem. The nice thing with psychological safety is there is a simple survey that you can run for your team. You can run it anonymously and then you have the results. And then you can discuss the results, which is probably something we can discuss a little later. How to assess psychological safety.
BS: Alexis, I believe that you used the survey a lot in your former role?
AM: Yes, absolutely, we tried to encourage teams to use the survey, we thought it was a really good idea to encourage others to do it. We looked at ourselves and realise that we should do it to understand what is going on.
We used the survey, which includes simple questions like ‘when someone makes a mistake on my team, it is often held against him or her,’ and the scale goes from strongly disagree to strongly agree. So we did the survey and we got the results and there was one question on which we were really surprised. So we looked at the result as a team and there were answers that we were not really able to answer why the scale was used, because we all assumed that we were a good team.
The next challenge was how to discuss it, we said “ok, let’s try to work with someone else, someone external to the team, to help us understand why we have that issue. It was really interesting to hear the feedback from all the interviews that they did. We learned a lot about some behaviours that we had that were preventing people from saying somethings at some points in conversation.
So it was ‘In my team sometimes people are rejected for being different’ we were not realising that sometimes you say things, and sometimes you don’t because you are the only one thinking that way.
AC: Yeah, that imposter syndrome tallies nicely with what you were saying earlier about noticing when you’re not comfortable and so you don’t say something. It’s kind of like our brains are tricking us into thinking ‘I can’t say that because everyone will judge me and everyone will think I’m stupid and I will not be respected’. Whereas what actually happens, 90% of the time when you say “I’m sorry, what does that acronym mean? Or could you just say that again please, you were talking quite quickly? People just go “OK” and then they say it. It’s just five seconds, that’s all it takes and you actually know what is going on.
BS: While you were sharing your example Alexis, I was thinking ‘how would this work with people in teams with a low degree of psychological safety? Some people might already feel anxious and you do the survey, how can the team discuss it.
AM: Yes, if I take one of the other questions ‘it is difficult to ask other members of the team for help’ or ‘members of my team value and respect each others’ contribution’ or ‘in my team it is easy to discuss difficult issues and problems’. If you do the survey and you have answers on the strongly disagree side, you cannot discuss them as a team. Now you know that you have a problem that you cannot discuss as a team. But at least you’re aware of it.
I have seen teams that are not psychologically safe, and the team leader was in denial, when you asked him he thought everything was fine and that he really had a great team. We had to explain that it was not exactly what a great team is from that perspective.
BS: Maybe he was the only one who felt psychologically safe.
AM: I am giving this as an example, but sometimes it is not only one person. It could be two or three who think everything is fine because they have known each other forever and the others who are new to the group don’t feel the same way but don’t feel comfortable to say it. It is not necessarily the manager, it could be sub-group of the team that feels OK, while the others don’t feel OK.
BS: When this is the outcome, I think this would be a typical case, you know you have to work on this, you cannot work on this as a team or alone. You will need an external party who is not part of the team to moderate this discussion.
AM: Absolutely, we worked with our People Team business partner. It was really cool, we found someone who all the team could trust, that they would handle the information confidentially. It was not a dramatic situation. The scale was a little bit larger than what we wanted.
DT: I find it very interesting and inspiring that you went through this process with your own team. As you said, it does not necessarily have to be a disaster, but there is always room for improvement. People can be nice in a team but creating that extra space for safety, there is always room to improve that. I am curious to know how you came to the realisation that you wanted to go through this process with your team?
AM: For our team it was more that we recognised that it is really important and we would like all the teams to do it, we recognised that if we wanted all the teams to invest time to do something, it probably should start with us and see what happens and try to understand what could happen. It was not something in our team that was specific, the trigger was we wanted all our teams doing it, so let’s do it first and lead by example on that.
That was the part that was interesting, you don’t need to wait for something, you just have to try it. It is just a five minute survey, but the results can be very interesting because they are surprising sometimes. And then you cannot fix it immediately, but at least you are aware that you have a problem that was invisible before.
DT: I think this is really interesting, we were talking about this in the unconscious bias training. Some biases are unconscious and they sometimes express themselves in ways that we don’t fully realise and it is easy sometimes to make people feel a bit alienated.
BS: Alienated? What does alienated mean? I just learned from Alexis that I should just ask when I don’t understand.
DT: It’s working, yes! Alienated means that they come from a different place, say someone does not feel comfortable giving presentations, but the manager is pushing for this person to have more visibility because maybe it’s good for their career. So the manager has a reasonable point to push the manager, but maybe the associate feel distressed, so this could be a microstressful moment, but it is something that can be easily tackled if there is the confidence and safety talking with the manager and saying “you know what, I really don’t feel confident about this” and from this point the manager has the starting point to start the conversation. That is the beauty of the ideal psychological safety is that it opens the door to so many conversations and so many possibilities that are sometimes hidden underneath the silence.
I was wondering, Bastian, from your experience working in HR, is psychological safety something you find resonated with people you speak with?
BS: Definitely. And I think it is definitely worth putting more focus on this. We have items on diversity and inclusion, and ‘I feel respected when I share my ideas even if they are different’.
If I am correct I think some teams has included psychological safety items in the quarterly survey. While we were talking I was thinking about how great it would be to include this topic when we have interviews. It could be very powerful and ensure we hire people that feel comfortable working in the company and know what they would expect and vice versa.
Alexis, have you discussed this when you worked with your team?
AM: Yes, it was a goal for us, we wanted to have a shared result on psychological safety so we could work with all the teams involved. It was important. It is also something that cannot really come only from the top because it needs to be at the level of the team, you want to encourage teams to do it and it is not necessarily the manager of the team that can launch the survey, it can be one team member. You don’t need to managers’ approval, I know in some environments you would need the manager’s approval, but that is another problem!v You can discover and uncover things for your team.
You are opening a new topic, what happens in the interviews as part of the hiring process? I have to admit, I don’t remember discussing it. We discussed a lot of things around hiring to make sure that we understand the biases that we put in place, understand the practices that we put in place, not consciously, that prevent people either to apply or to be hired. So when they apply and when they have an interview.
Incredibly interesting, because a lot of surveys have been made, there is a lot of material available, that shows a lot of practices are totally wrong and that prevent people from applying. If you include a long list of mandatory requirements, I have read that it will discourage many women from applying, while men are more likely to think ‘I tick three of the nine boxes, I’m good’. Of course, this is a caricature and real life is more subtle. But those practices are creating discomfort that are unsafe for people and they will not even apply.
But if you think about it, during the interview, do you want to interview people who are at their best or do you want to interview people who are really uncomfortable? We are encouraged to use the interviews to focus on a specific competency to make sure that we ask only the same questions to people when we’re interviewing several people for the same role. This is really hard, but this is really interesting. Because then you realise you would have behaved totally differently with some people.
I was on a panel last week and I remember it vividly, there were some people who I was instantly comfortable with and I don’t know why and that is the part that is unconscious, I am biased towards them during the interview process, but I had my list of questions that I needed to go through, which was hard. And there were other people I felt uncomfortable with, I didn’t know why, but there was something. I had my list of questions, and with some of them I was forced to realise that they were doing great.
Now, I don’t think you can be totally psychologically safe and comfortable in an interview, there is a lot at stake and the relationship is not even, you’re not peers. But at least you can try to balance it out to make it more comfortable for the candidate. It will not be perfect, but it will be much better. You need to watch yourself, because you will go in the wrong direction if you’re not strict and you don’t watch yourself carefully.
AC: I absolutely love that, because as you say it is so difficult because it is an unconscious bias by its very definition. You have got to think that at a certain level even when you’re aware that you may have biases it doesn’t prevent them from happening. Then at another level even for people who don’t acknowledge that they might have a hint of those biases, it is a very difficult thing to try and create an even playing field instantly over time.
It is interesting that when you find companies that do have a great culture, and I truly believe Red Hat has a great culture, how do you balance that wanting to create a culture that’s great and that you really enjoy, how do you keep that culture, whilst recognising that encouraging diversity of thought or any kind of spectrum, do you see those as opposing things, can a culture continue to thrive without it becoming an echo chamber or is there a bit of a balance that needs to be found?
AM: I think you’re making a very good point, I don’t see that opposed in our culture, if you look at our values, we want to balance courage, freedom, accountability and commitment, and there’s nothing in those values that don’t tell you that you don’t or you can have a really diverse crowd of people working on those values, but there is something that tells you that you can have a team that believes it has courage but that excludes people and ignores other perspectives.
I think that is where the open organisation is really strong. Because we know that inclusivity is one of the characteristics that is really important. So you cannot have courage if you are not inclusive and have demonstrated. Maybe someone on the team can demonstrate courage, but everyone else is quiet. Is it courage? Probably not. Is it really freedom? No of course not, you’re not free if you’re not able to speak up. You can’t say, “you know what I would like to try this, let’s take half a day to work on that idea so we can see if it is something interesting to pursue.”
I don’t see that as inclusive, I see it as something that will really help us to grow better, even better than we are today. And really foster a better, more open meritocracy.
BS: I was just thinking, when we think about open source communities, and how open sources works, and how they are so successful. Maybe it is because the set-up allows psychological safety, there is not much room for biases, you don’t see the people you work with, you just look at the contribution and you have a common goal. You can have very diverse people working with different thoughts and ideas and opinions, probably as long as you have a common goal or purpose to work on. It would be difficult if this is not defined then, if you have very diverse teams and they work in different directions then it can get chaotic and unproductive.
DT: At this point, I imagine all of the two million of our listeners they we have for every single episode, but all three million of them now are thinking ‘OK, I am completely sold, I love this, how do I do this. We mentioned before that there is a survey somewhere. I would love Alexis and Bastian to go on a step by step guide to explain to the other associates what is the survey, how does it work, how can they start one of these and what can they expect to get out of it?
AM: So the survey is really simple, you can create your own survey in whatever survey tool that you want to use, you just need to make sure that it enable anonymity, because you want the survey to be anonymous. The scale goes from strongly disagree to strongly agree and I would recommend that you have seven points on the scale so you have enough to see how it will spread on the scale. It is rare that people strongly agree or disagree with something, there needs to be some space, there you have six questions, so let’s go through those questions, as I go through the questions, try to answer in your head where you would put yourself on the scale for your team.
Q1: When someone makes a mistake on my team, it is often held against him or her.
Where are you?
Q2: In my team, it is easy to discuss difficult issues and problems.
Strongly disagree, strongly agree? Let’s see.
Q3: In my team people are sometimes rejected for being different.
Where are you on that team? And remember when people read ‘different’ they will all read it in a different way. I am the only French guy on this call for example, but is it really a problem in this group? It seems not, they even accept my English. Next question.
Q4: It is completely safe to take a risk on my team.
Note that ‘completely’ is a trigger, so this is an interesting one. You’ll have trouble to strongly agree or disagree with that, it is always interesting to see how the questions are framed, and I would encourage you to not rewrite the questions, some really bright people worked on them.
Q5: It is difficult to ask other members of my team for help.
Q6: Members of my team value and respect each other’s contributions.
And you’re done, people will position their dots on the scale, and you will have your results. You have a nice bar chart for each question and you look at where you are. In a psychologically safe team all the dots will be at the same place and I bet in your teams all the dots will not be in the same place because that’s how it is and if it is you need to call me because I want to visit that team.
AC: I completely agreed. It’s an excellent set of questions, the one tiny thing I would change is, and it relates to the fourth question about whether people are allowed to be different, and it is the wording of him/her, all I’d do is change that to ‘them’.
Of course, it is all very well having the survey and getting the data is really important but what is the next step. If I have got all this data that shows a team could be doing better in multiple ways, what can I do next? From a bottom up approach.
AM: So now we have the answers and the problem is what will you do with the answers. My guess is that it is not a catastrophe, you’ve not got all the answers at the end of one scale, there will probably be one question that the team will find more interesting to work on and you will not necessarily be able to work on all the questions. But maybe pick one and say “ok, that question is really something we can work on. Something we’re all interested in working on, because we all see the connection with our work.” There’s probably one question that is interesting and I would start with that.
DT: I’m wondering if I’m on a team that ran the survey, maybe the team doesn’t know how to take the next steps, maybe the manager find there are some things that need to be addressed, maybe he doesn’t know how to start the conversation, are there any resources available that will help kickstart the conversation?
BS: One thing that they could always do is connect with their HR partner. We have regional HR partners, we have a business partner who are HR partners for function, connect and just reach out and they will always guide you to the right person for support, as far as I know we don’t have a programmatic guideline to work with this, but I think it might make sense anyway to consult with someone on how to focus because every situation can be unique and a bit different. This is one thing that they could do.
Ideally they will reach out before they do the survey. In some cases it might make sense that a third person sends the survey. Imagine you have a team and the people don’t feel psychologically safe due to their manager and then the manager sends out a Google Survey. They might not feel safe to answer.
DT: That’s a very good point. HR is one strong resource that people can go. Of course we’ll add all the questions Alexis mentioned to the show notes:
Q1: When someone makes a mistake on my team, it is often held against them.
Q2: In my team, it is easy to discuss difficult issues and problems.
Q3: In my team people are sometimes rejected for being different.
Q4: It is completely safe to take a risk on my team.
Q5: It is difficult to ask other members of my team for help.
Q6: Members of my team value and respect each other’s contributions.
DT: Great. I think we’re getting towards the end of the episode. First, I’d like to say a huge “thank you” to Alexis and Bastian for being our first guests in the podcast talking about such an important topic. I am hugely passionate about psychological safety, I think it is tremendously important, so this conversation means a lot to me and I’m sure a lot to Aidan and a lot of people listening to us.
AM: Thank you very much for having us on the show, it was a great pleasure to discuss the topic.
BS: Yes, thanks a lot it was really great. The more we think about it, the more it is at the core of an open culture.
AC: Damiano, anything from you before we wrap up?
DT: I feel like this is just the beginning, I really want to keep talking about this and I think some of the next episodes (spoiler alert) will touch on different aspect of perhaps how we feel at work in general and all of these things belong in this important umbrella of psychological safety.
I also think it is beautiful to hear from our listeners, so we would love to hear from you and if you want to join the podcast just drop us an email. I would say that we’re a pretty friendly bunch. Alexis, Bastian, we had a good time right?
AC: A loaded question if ever I heard one.
BS: Yes, this was my first podcast and it was great. I felt very comfortable and free to add my thoughts.
DT: Bastian, would you say this is the best podcast you’ve ever been on?
BS: Yes, I was nearly about to say, I am quite a reflective person, but yes I would completely agree, it definitely was.
AC: For your first podcast Bastian you were an absolute natural, as is Alexis, as always. I have heard that you have your own podcast. Where can people find out more about that. Yes, it is available on all your favourite podcast platforms: it’s called Le Podcast, you can find it on Alexis.Monville.com, I would love to have new listeners, new questions and new topics that I should cover. The two last episodes were about the job of an open leader, maybe something you would be interested in, and human-centric agility coaching which was great. The next one, which will be published soon, was with the author of Radical Focus, a great book that I recommend to you.
And that’s it in terms of advertising from me.
DT: Friends, it’s been a pleasure, I want to say thank you and as always it has been a pleasure to continue the conversation. Aidan, I will talk to you very soon because it is always a pleasure sharing the hosting chair with you.
AC: Likewise, I am looking forward to the next one. Thank you everyone at home for listening, or at home at work, there isn’t really a divide. Thank you, I hope you’re having a wonderful day. Always feel free to reach out about anything, it’s difficult, but reaching out and talking about how you’re really feeling is key. And remember …
AC & DT (almost in unison….): It’s OK, to not be OK.
AC: One day we’ll say it at the same time!
DT: Ciao!