The Importance of Creating a Speak Up Culture at Work
6 Min. Read
For any organisation wanting to deliver sustainable superior performance, you need a culture in which your people feel free to speak up at work. In this blog we’ll look at what a speak up culture is, the benefits it brings, and how you can foster such an environment.
What is a speak up culture?
Creating an organisation where people feel comfortable speaking up means building a culture that puts people first and embraces psychological safety.
According to LeaderFactor’s global research: “Speaking up lives at the intersection of the top six most vulnerable behaviours from the 20 behaviours we measure in our Ladder of Vulnerability survey. Here are those six behaviours, ranked from most vulnerable to less vulnerable:
- Giving an incorrect answer.
- Making a mistake.
- Expressing your emotions.
- Expressing disagreement.
- Pointing out a mistake.
- Challenging the way things are done.”
What are the benefits of a speak up culture?
When people feel safe to speak up inside their workplace the benefits are significant. Organisations with strong speak up cultures typically see:
- Reductions in risky behaviours (because people feel confident to raise concerns).
- Increases in employee wellbeing and engagement (because people feel included, heard, and valued).
- Greater innovation and collaboration (because people work together to push boundaries and experiment).
- Improvements in customer satisfaction (because they have built reputational trust).
All of this boosts business performance and the bottom line (Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace Report). Yet, for the average employee, speaking up is a risky business. So, how do we bridge the gap?
Creating a Speak Up Culture at Work
To create a culture that encourages innovation, collaboration, inclusion and integrity, organisations must focus on reducing the risks involved in speaking up, and boosting the belief that different, diverse, and constructively challenging views will be heard and welcomed when people do.
This means building a culture of inclusion where wellbeing and safety are acknowledged as top priorities, and people feel encouraged, supported, and empowered to speak their truth, without fear of failure or negative repercussions.
Culture is created by the patterns of behaviour that are encouraged, discouraged, and tolerated by the people and systems in place in an organisation over time. It’s anchored in the unspoken messages that people get from three different sources, which at Walking the Talk we call Behaviours, Symbols, and Systems.
Behaviours
These are what people see others doing all the time in their organisations. We learn how to fit in by watching and following. How leaders in particular behave matters. What leaders say and do (or don’t say and do!), what they encourage and discourage, what they always, or never, prioritise all send out important messages about how we should behave too. Sustainable culture change can only accelerate when leaders take a good, long look at the leadership shadow they cast, so this is a key starting point.
Symbols
These are the decisions and choices leaders make that tell us what is truly valued in the organisation’s culture – regardless of what they might say is important. For example: what gets celebrated in town halls; who is promoted or given stretch projects; what gets prioritised when there is bad news or a workplace crisis, etc.
Systems
These are the formal processes in the organisation and the behaviours that these processes encourage. They can either help or hinder the culture you are trying to create. For example, your business planning process might support cross-functional collaboration, or encourage department-led priorities. Your performance management system might prioritise delivery of individual KPIs, or reward people for how they achieve their goals together.
By adapting the messages people get from the Behaviours, Systems, and Symbols at play in your organisation, you can create sustainable culture change.
7 Ways to Support your Employees and Promote Speaking Up
Below are seven examples of how Behaviours, Symbols, and Systems could be adapted to signal the importance of psychological safety and inclusion, which sit at the heart of any strong speak up culture. Have a read, then think about what simple, powerful changes might work best in your organisation.
Encouraging Desired Behaviours:
Put the spotlight on specialisms
To increase the number of unique contributions in a meeting and avoid groupthink (people agreeing with each other for the sake of harmony), try starting sessions by sharing an issue that you need everyone’s input to solve. Then, introduce each person attending by explaining the specialism they bring and the value you believe they will add to the conversation.
As the session unfolds, invite people to share their different perspectives to ensure a rounded discussion. Finally, wrap-up by asking the group to reflect on the impact that the different contributions made and explain the value you appreciated. Make sure you ask whether people think any key perspective was missing, so you can address this next time.
Key influencers go last
People often defer to the most influential voice in the room. You can disrupt this behaviour by privately asking key influencers to encourage the contributions of others and hold back offering their own opinions. Persuading your influencers to share what they learnt from team conversations will also send a clear message that everyone’s views count. Remember, people can achieve influence in lots of different ways (e.g. job level, tenure, subject matter expertise, team relationships, etc). So, pay attention to the dynamics of your meetings to spot what’s going on.
Using Symbols:
Test your decisions on a global stage
Before you move to action on a big decision, set up a meeting with people attending from every territory your decision could impact. Ask everyone to imagine stepping into the shoes of a journalist in their country. Then, ask each person to share the story they think this local journalist might write as a result of the decision you are proposing to make. Discuss how comfortable you would feel as a collective if these stories appeared as front-page news. What risks and opportunities need to be considered further?
Celebrate speak up achievements
Use meetings (like town halls and quarterly offsites) to showcase and celebrate times when speaking up has helped push the team or organisation forward. Encourage team members to celebrate peers who say things that are bold, brave, different, or daring – with positive intent to encourage improvements. Be sure to explain the specific business outcomes that have been achieved, the impact the speak up had, and the skills and actions the person demonstrated that made the difference.
Implement effective systems:
Make it easy to talk about issues
Project brainstorms and learning reviews can be a great way of encouraging people to talk about potential concerns before they become big problems. Try introducing a regular twenty-minute discussion process about what’s ‘working well’ and what could be ‘even better if ….’
Alternatively, try sharing an action you took, or a decision you made, that didn’t go as well as you had hoped. Invite the team’s ideas on how you could do things differently next time. Let them know which ideas you’re going to experiment with and keep them updated on the progress you make.
Make a public commitment to a confidential speak up line
Demonstrate your commitment to high ethical standards by publicly promoting a confidential speak up line for employees, partners, and customers. Complement this with a company-wide charter that simply explains your organisation’s ‘red lines’ and encourage regular team discussions about these topics.
Track your inclusion success
To find out whether people feel comfortable speaking up, ask all your people managers to capture some mini data points from their meetings for a week. Ask them to pay attention to who speaks, how often, and what they say. Do certain people simply repeat ideas already shared by others? Do some stay silent? How many times do people challenge each other? Are different cultural preferences having an impact?
See what patterns they notice individually and then look at the themes emerging across the whole group. Combine these scores with inclusion questions from organisation-wide surveys and think about simple routines and rituals you could introduce to get a better balance of contributions.
Building a speak up culture doesn’t happen overnight, but is foundational to becoming a high-performing, high-care organisation.
Get in touch to take your first steps towards creating a speak up culture with our culture transformation services.
Author: Lisa de Jong
