Psychological safety is crucial within the workplace to encourage collaboration. Companies must rethink traditional approaches, including investing in creating and fostering psychologically safe environments.

This presentation will cover what psychological safety is, why it’s essential, and how leaders can promote it in the workplace.

Psychological safety is the feeling and belief that you can freely share your thoughts, opinions, and ideas without fear of being degraded or shamed. According to Maslow’s hierarchy, safety is a “”basic human need.””

To support high-performing teams, creating psychologically safe work environments is critical; this is beyond only basic human decency but employee retention. An effective team values psychological safety as much as physical safety and performance standards.

Developing a psychologically safe work culture has many benefits, including:
• Enhanced employee engagement
• Fosters an inclusive workplace culture
• It encourages creativity and new ideas.
• Improved employee well-being
• It creates brand ambassadors.
• Reduced employee turnover
• Boosted team performance

It’s time to put a “”psychologically safe workplace”” on the list of fundamental human rights and hold businesses accountable for implementing it. Team cultures reflect the actions and reactions of their leaders. Therefore, leaders who fail to establish and support psychologically safe team environments can cause irreparable negative consequences and damage to the organization.

Creating a psychologically safe work environment starts with coaching focused on behavior change. This begins with each team member and spreads throughout the organization.

Changing cultural norms requires progressive learning by everyone in the company. A coach to guide these processes at the individual level ensures that behavior changes are being taught correctly. It’s reinforced in real-time through experiential learning. To establish and maintain a psychologically safe work climate, leaders must consistently model inclusive behaviors to build out new team norms over time.

This helps to establish the behaviors that lend themselves to psychological safety. By doing this, organizations retain talented teammates who deserve their seats at the table. In the Long-term, the entire organization will benefit.

In some work cultures, toughness, aggressive challenge, or the ability to roll with the punches are valued. So the idea that some team members don’t feel safe might be seen as their problem, a lack of fit.

These leaders might miss how no one on the team feels psychologically safe, even those who fit in with the group. And that lack of psychological safety might be costing the team and the organization.

The organization should be a workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. That learning and development hinge on interpersonal trust, self-awareness, and psychological safety.

In the workplace, team psychological safety must be a top priority if businesses want to create a successful enterprise. And more importantly, psychological safety contributes to an inclusive, diverse, and accepting workplace where team members feel safe to express themselves.

The mark of any good safety process and system in any company is the safety of its team members.”