It's clear that fostering psychological safety within your workplace can have many business benefits. But what are the best ways to develop that safe feeling with employees? Immersive simulations can be a powerful part of the L&D toolkit if you’re looking at how to develop psychological safety at work.
In her highly influential work at Harvard Business School studying behavior in work teams, Dr. Amy Edmondson gave the following definition of psychological safety:
"a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking"
While the concept goes back over two decades, Google popularized the term psychological safety in 2015 when they published research by their People Analytics team into what makes an effective team at Google. This work was titled Project Aristotle, and pointed to psychological safety as the foundation of an effective team:
Psychological safety in the workplace is more than the self-assuredness of any one individual. It’s an organizational culture that defines how new team members are welcomed and how dialogue occurs with the collective goal of continuous improvement and high performance.
The goal is to eradicate the idea of blame for mistakes and instead see them as milestones on the way to team success.
In his book “The Four Stages Of Psychological Safety”, Timothy R. Clarke describes a 4-step model that teams can move through, progressing from stage 1 to stage 4.
These are:
Some experts have argued that in reality, there are not four such distinct stages through which to progress, and that team development is never so linear. However, there is certainly merit in looking at these four categories as factors to consider carefully and perhaps measure progress against.
Therefore, placing a great deal of emphasis on psychological safety is not just an HR exercise to keep employees feeling contented in the workplace – it’s a smart business approach that leaders across the board should take seriously.
The most devastating example of a psychologically unsafe workplace was that which culminated in the Chernobyl power plant disaster in 1986, directly killing 31 people and as a result of the nuclear fallout, indirectly killing an estimated 4,000+ more.
In addition to the unsafe design of the power plant itself, it’s perceived that there was a working culture in the Soviet Union at the time of fearing authority and the consequences of raising concerns to leaders.
This culture of fear led to a level of workforce ignorance that allowed a chain of errors to occur, resulting in a steam explosion and the subsequent deadly nuclear explosion.
While this is one of the most extreme examples one could imagine, there are red flags for a psychologically unsafe workplace to look out for in a corporate environment:
So what does good look like? Here are some of the telltale signs of psychological safety at work:
In her popular TED talk titled ‘Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace’, Amy Edmondson gives advice including the following 3 pillars for leaders and team members to foster psychological safety:
By modeling these behaviors, leaders can help develop a culture of exploration and freedom in sharing knowledge and ideas without fear of failure or ridicule.
McKinsey & Company research published in 2021 found that leadership development appears to play a critical role in building psychological safety at work.
Survey data showed that few leaders display the behaviors that instill psychological safety, and employee experience depends greatly on how leaders act.
Those leadership behaviors are trainable though, and investment in this area pays dividends:
While not always addressed to the same extent as other leadership skills, ‘Developing high quality social relationships in teams’ was shown to be the most important skill to address in order to improve each of:
Demonstrating all three of these leadership behaviors was shown to be key to fostering psychological safety at work.
In the corporate environment, interpersonal abilities are no longer seen as just ‘soft skills’ - they are ‘Power Skills’. And, like any other type of skill, Power Skills are not just inherent to the individual. They can be learned and practiced - and trained.
Developing your abilities in dealing with people can be fraught with anxiety; nobody wants to look foolish in front of peers or managers - or worse, cause offense.
When it comes to communicating in a sales or customer service setting, practicing leadership and management skills, or discussing issues around diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), there’s often no single right or wrong approach. It’s often about improving your abilities in a way that works for you as an individual.
Face to face, group training environments have traditionally been used to develop skills in these areas, but many employees feel awkward in such settings. This is where immersive simulations can be a powerful tool for overcoming learner anxiety.
With simulation-based training, learners can practice interpersonal skills within true to life, virtual scenarios and feel completely free to experiment and make mistakes without fear of failure. Immersive simulations can replicate real-world situations, and the learner can try out approaches to see what works for them, gaining useful and personalized, automated, feedback along the way.
Learners can leverage that feedback to adapt their approach and gradually turn theoretical knowledge into skills - and confidence in using them. This ‘learning by doing’ approach to training brings breakthroughs that may occur at a different pace for each individual - everyone has their own unique ‘Aha!’ moment.
Not only do immersive learning simulations enable Power Skills training at a time and place that suits the learner (important in a remote or hybrid workplace), but they bring a tangible improvement in training outcomes in any location. Immersive simulations have been shown to reduce time-to-competency by between 30 and 50%, getting new hires in position and being productive much faster.
As suggested by the McKinsey research mentioned above, leadership development training is critical to instilling psychological safety in the workplace, and simulations are a particularly powerful way for current and potential leaders to hone their skills.
Psychological safety is now being seen by leading organizations across every industry as a potential source of competitive advantage.
It can reduce the crippling costs of replacing team members due to low staff morale, and it helps create a strong reputation that attracts top talent.
When mistakes are made, psychological safety helps to turn them into learning opportunities. Through greater communication and knowledge sharing, it also reduces systemic errors and stops many problems happening in the first place.
Psychological safety is a route to faster skills development and employee engagement that helps ideas to germinate, leading to innovation and performance gains.
Developed through effective leadership behaviors, a culture of psychological safety enables individuals at every level, and in turn the entire organization, to thrive.
Thomas leads the design and implementation of ETU simulations. Whether built by ETU or in assisting client authors, he strives to ensure that ETU solutions are immersive and engaging while adhering to robust architecture that will lead to powerful data insights. Thomas has over 15 years of experience in designing and delivering learning and training products for corporate clients and national cultural and education stakeholders. He holds a Ph.D. in multimedia education from Dublin Institute of Technology (now Technological University Dublin) where he was a fully-funded, inaugural GradCAM scholar.