Building Psychological Safety Through Your Culture Diagnostic Approach

6 Min. Read

Employee listening is a critical part of every organization’s talent strategy. It alerts you to potential challenges with retention and engagement, provides feedback into what is facilitating or obstructing the delivery of your strategy, and helps you identify what is fueling or deteriorating your business performance. For this reason, employee listening is a critical part of all our culture diagnostics: your people have invaluable insight into how well your work works.

Critically, you can’t gain that insight if people aren’t willing to share it. Many employee listening projects suffer from low uptake, while even more suffer from guarded, cynical, and mistrustful participation. Too often, employees have good reasons for holding back their true thoughts; they may have been scolded for criticizing their organization in the past, hold the belief their company only wants positive feedback, or participated in similar initiatives that didn’t lead to change. 

This refusal to speak up betrays a lack of what is known as ‘psychological safety’, which is defined by the term’s creator, Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School Professor of Leadership and Management, as, ‘A belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’ 

I will unpack why psychological safety is important in the workplace for culture diagnostics, how your employee listening approach can help to build and reinforce a speak-up environment, and what you should consider before getting started.

What are the benefits of psychological safety in the workplace, and why is it important in your diagnostic approach? 

Having an environment of psychological safety when you do culture diagnostic work is helpful, because it’s a precondition for maximum honesty from your people. If your people understand that it’s ok to speak up and share their opinions, then you're going to get high-quality accurate and actionable results. Conversely, if your people suspect that their true opinions and observations aren’t welcome or wanted, you’re going to end up with lower-quality data that may or may not paint a true picture of the organization.

In a psychologically safe workplace, your diagnostic is going to help you: 

1. Solve your real business problems. When there is no psychological safety, you might not be able to identify the issues that are damaging your culture and weakening your business performance, for example poor leadership behaviors. Employees feeling they can speak openly, without fear of reprisal, is the best way to ensure that critical issues are surfaced.

2. Ensure delivery of your strategy. When you undertake a culture diagnostic, the output needs to be data that helps you improve business performance. If people aren't honest about what might be standing in the way of delivery of your strategy, it will take significantly more work to produce meaningful insights.  

3. Improve employee engagement and retention. Any challenges in your culture will inevitably impact employee engagement and retention. Excessive voluntary turnover is an expensive problem to solve.

What if psychological safety is low in your organization? 

In a perfect world, every organization would have a fully psychologically safe environment and each employee listening project would yield full honesty. In the real world, most organizations face some challenges with psychological safety. If, going into your diagnostic, you suspect that people in your organization might not have psychological safety, or it’s at low levels, you need to be:

• Thoughtful about the approach you choose.

• Clear and intentional in your employee communications around the project.

• Careful about what you do after the diagnostic has been conducted, so you can use the exercise as an opportunity to build greater levels of psychological safety (more on this later).

How do you decide the right employee listening approach?

Let’s assume your organization’s levels of psychological safety are healthy. Here’s what you need to consider when deciding on your employee listening approach:

1. What outcome are you looking to achieve? For example, if you want to compare parts of your organization to each other in a clear and reliable way, then you need an approach that's primarily quantitative. This is where traditional survey methods (such as our Culture Insights Survey) work well.

2. Where do you need to delve deeper? If you have a specific, sensitive issue in mind that you already know or suspect is a cultural challenge – let’s say, bullying – that suggests psychological safety might be an issue. In those cases, doing a quantitative survey won’t flush it out. You need the human touch – focus groups, one-to-one interviews, anonymous, third party facilitated sessions – to get people to open up about behaviors they see and experience, the beliefs and mindsets that drive them, and deliver useful results (our Discover Culture Diagnostic does just that). 

3. Not sure, need to know more. This is the middle ground, where you want open dialogue to learn more, and aren’t sure if there’s a particular problem/s that’s gone under the radar. Approaches like digital focus groups, what we call ‘culture jams,’ can quickly give you a lot of qualitative data, with a live facilitator who can probe into emerging issues.???????

How do you build psychological safety in the workplace through your employee listening approach?      

Culture diagnostics will not by themselves create psychological safety at the enterprise level. However, they can help to bolster it. The best ways to use your culture diagnostic or employee listening project to improve psychological safety are:

• Start with transparent communication. Before you start a culture diagnostic, communicate why the project is important. You should be clear about what specifically you’re trying to uncover, why that’s important to your organization, and that you intend to act. It could be that you’re doing a culture diagnostic as a precursor to a business transformation, and therefore it's important that your organization hears your people’s perspective about what should, and shouldn’t, change. If so, that must be the central message in all your communications.

• Communicating the parameters of the project. It’s really important to share whether or not participation is anonymous, who will have access to the data, and how the data will be used. Transparency goes a long way in earning trust from your audience of potential participants. 

The typical appropriate anonymity parameters are that no single individual will be identified and only group-level data will be published. In some cases, such as if you're using a technology-enabled approach (digital focus group platforms etc), there might be anonymity mechanisms built in, so let participants know if that’s the case. Similarly, if you're going to share verbatim quotes, let people know and tell them you won’t be naming quoted individuals or leaving identifying markers anywhere. 

• Circling back. If you’re asking employees to participate in an activity that takes them away from their work, you've got to make sure that they have a stake in it. That means having a communications plan in place that ensures that people who took part are told at least some of the high-level themes and results. 

• Making meaningful changes. The single most important factor in building greater psychological safety through diagnostics is to show your people that their perspective matters. The best way to show people that their perspective matters is to act on it: if your culture diagnostic points to an easy-to-solve challenge, solve it quickly and communicate the effort you’ve made. If it points to harder-to-solve challenges, communicate a plan for how you’ll address those challenges over time. For example, if burnout is highlighted as a recurring issue, you can share your plans to tackle it – whether that be hiring staff or stopping projects. This sends a powerful message to your people that when they are open and honest, their feedback makes a difference. As a result, they are far more likely to be forthcoming in the future.???????

What is the role of leaders in building psychological safety through diagnostics?

Leaders have a vital role to play in setting the tone for your culture diagnostic by encouraging people to speak up, and thereby helping to build psychological safety. Specially, they should:

• Amplify messaging. When people hear from their senior leaders and managers that the diagnostic is important, why, and what they intend to do with the findings, that makes a dramatic difference to participation. 

• Be equipped to answer questions. It’s good practice for managers to be equipped with talking points about the diagnostic, especially for questions on anonymity. This is particularly important if you think you might be going into the diagnostic with low levels of psychological safety in your organization.

• Role modeling. If you’re a leader or manager, tell your team that you’re taking part in the diagnostic, which will encourage them to do likewise. 

• Talk openly about the results. Discuss what the outcomes mean for you personally as a leader, and your team, and what you’re going to do next. Sharing the results and action plans will set you up for success with future follow-up initiatives.

Diagnostics are critical to understanding if your culture is helping or hindering the delivery of your strategy. But the only way you can rely on the data is if your people can speak freely. Psychological safety is therefore fundamental to successful business performance. Making smart choices about your diagnostic approach can reinforce it further, powering even higher levels of growth. 

We partner in business transformation, leadership acceleration, culture transformation, assessment & succession planning, executive and leadership coaching, and talent acquisition. 
 
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