With the pandemic changing the work landscape, much attention has been given to the more visible aspects of remote work, including the challenges of managing people from a distance. But a far less visible factor may dramatically influence the effectiveness of hybrid workplaces: managers’ ability to rethink and expand psychological safety, an important predictor of team effectiveness.
Psychological safety—the belief that one can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation—is a well-established driver of high-quality decision-making, healthy group dynamics, innovation and effective execution in organizations. Though it’s an easy concept to grasp, remote and hybrid work settings make it anything but straightforward to apply.
Psychological safety has traditionally translated into enabling candor and dissent with respect to work content. The problem is, as the boundary between work and life becomes increasingly blurry, managers must make staffing, scheduling and coordination decisions that take into account employees’ personal circumstances—a categorically different domain. Over the past year, many have found that previously off-limits topics (from child care to health risks) have become important factors to consider when making decisions about how to structure hybrid work. And while it may be tempting to think we can separate the work and the life domains once we return to the office, that’s neither realistic nor sustainable.
The solution, however, cannot be simply to demand greater disclosure of personal details. Instead, managers must create an environment that encourages employees to share aspects of their personal situations as relevant to their work scheduling or location, and to trust employees to make the right choices for themselves, their families and their teams. This is why we need psychological safety now more than ever: to enable productive conversations in a new, challenging (and potentially fraught) territory.
Obviously, simply saying “just trust me” won’t work. Instead, we suggest five steps to creating a culture of psychological safety that extends beyond work content to include broader aspects of employees’ experiences:
1. Set the scene
Trite as it sounds, the first step is having a discussion with your team to help its members recognize not only their challenges, but yours as well. The objective of this discussion is to share ownership of the problem. Clarify what’s at stake. Employees must understand that getting the work done (for customers, for the mission, for their careers) matters just as much as it always has, but that it won’t be done exactly as it was in the past. As a group, you and your employees must come to recognize that everyone must be clear and transparent about the needs of the work and the team, and jointly own responsibility for succeeding despite the many hurdles that lie ahead.
2. Lead the way
Words are cheap, and when it comes to psychological safety, there are far too many stories of managers who demand candor of their employees, without demonstrating it themselves. The best way to show you’re serious is to expose your own vulnerability by sharing your own personal challenges and constraints. Remember, managers have to go first in taking these kinds of risks. Be vulnerable and humble about not having a clear plan and share how you’re thinking about managing your own challenges.
3. Take baby steps
Don’t expect your employees to share their most personal and risky challenges right away. It takes time to build trust, and even if you have a healthy culture of psychological safety established around work, remember that this is a new domain. Start by making small disclosures yourself, and then make sure to welcome others’ disclosures to help your employees build confidence that sharing is not penalized.
4. Share positive examples
Don’t assume that your employees will immediately understand the benefits of sharing personal challenges and needs at work. You have to market psychological safety. For example, you could share your conviction that increased transparency will help the team design new arrangements that serve both individual needs and organizational goals. The goal here isn’t to share information that was disclosed to you privately, but to explain that such disclosures have allowed you to come up with solutions that were better for the team as well as individual employees.
5. Be a watchdog
Most people recognize that psychological safety takes time to build, but moments to destroy. The default is for people to hold back, to withhold even their most relevant thoughts at work if they’re not sure they’ll be well-received. When individuals do take the risk of speaking up, but get shot down, they—and everyone else—will be less likely to do it the next time. As a team leader, you will also need to be vigilant and push back when you notice employees make seemingly innocent comments like “We want to see more of you” or “We could really use you.” Such observations may leave employees feeling like they’re letting their teammates down. The idea isn’t for you to become the thought police or punish those who genuinely miss their colleagues working from home, but rather to help employees frame these remarks in a more positive and understanding way. For example, they may say: “We miss your thoughtful perspective, and understand you face constraints. Let us know if there is any way we can help.” Be open about your intentions to be inclusive and helpful so that people don’t see your requests for their presence as a rebuke. At the same time, be ready to censure firmly those who inappropriately take advantage of the personal information they have shared to the detriment of the team.
It’s important that managers view conversations around personal needs as they relate to hybrid work arrangements as a work in progress. As with all group dynamics, they’re emergent processes that develop and shift over time. This is a first step; the journey ahead comes without a road map and will have to be navigated iteratively. You may overstep and need to correct, but it’s better to err on the side of trying and testing the waters than assuming topics are off-limits. View this as a problem-solving undertaking that may never reach a steady state. The more you maintain this perspective—rather than declaring victory and moving on—the more successful you and your team will be at developing and maintaining true, expanded psychological safety.
Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School. Mark Mortensen is an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD.