By Josh Kohlbach, CEO and founder of Rymera Web Co, the makers of Wholesale Suite.
As business owners and entrepreneurs, we want to bring out the best in our employees. The reason why we do that is to boost their productivity and improve their efficiency.
In doing so, what we often forget is to create a work environment that promotes psychological safety for the employees. Your employees won’t be able to give their best effort unless they feel safe at work.
Psychological safety is when you can confidently speak or act and be yourself without the fear of being judged, humiliated or rejected for sharing your ideas, questions and concerns.
Employees who experience psychological safety trust each other without any judgments. They fail without being labeled and voice their opinions without being humiliated.
Working in such an environment can help your employees in several ways. It can promote a positive state of mind, no matter how loaded they are with work. This can help them feel more creative, which in turn makes them more productive and more efficient.
Now the question is, how do you improve psychological safety in the workplace? Let’s look at three easy ways to do that.
1. Lead with empathy.
One of the most important factors to consider when leading a team is to be empathetic. When you demonstrate empathy instead of ego, you help create trust within the team. Building trust is vital for creating honest and empowering relationships between the team and management.
When you deal with your team empathetically, you assure them that you care about them and that their feelings and needs will be taken care of. Letting your team feel that is a very powerful way of building psychological safety in the workplace.
So instead of leading with ego, learn to lead with empathy. Be kind to your team and be attentive to their concerns and problems.
2. Be open to feedback.
To create a positive workplace, you have to be open to feedback. Getting feedback from your employees can help you improve the workplace and improve employee satisfaction. So encourage your employees to voice their opinion and raise their concerns. This can help you know the loopholes and flaws in the system.
It’s not possible to improve your system unless you have the negatives in it. Getting feedback helps you understand the flaws, defects and gaps that need to be fixed to make it a better place. But not all employees may be comfortable giving feedback openly.
To encourage such employees to give their feedback, you can try sending them feedback forms once every three months. Let them know that their feedback will remain anonymous. This can give them the confidence to give their honest opinion.
3. Encourage inclusion and acceptance.
This point is especially important for companies with a global team. As a leader, you need to encourage inclusion and diversity in the team.
Most smart leaders in the current times outpace their competitors by respecting their employees’ potential, unique needs and perspectives.
But sometimes, despite your willingness to create an environment of inclusion and acceptance, you fail to create one. That’s because you haven’t trained your managers well enough to handle it the way you want them to.
Your managers act as the bridge that connects the employees with the management. You may not always be able to interact with your employees one-on-one. That’s where managers come in. This makes training your managers to handle diversity so important.
Make sure to explain why diversity and inclusivity are important for your business and set expectations about how you want employees to treat their teammates.
4. Make room for mistakes.
Another very effective way to create psychological safety in the workplace is to make room for mistakes. Mistakes are important for the growth of the team. It’s a positive and powerful part of a person’s learning process.
So let your team know that it’s okay to make mistakes as long as they learn from those mistakes. Instead of rebuking them or shaming them for their errors, let them take it as a learning lesson.
Letting them know this can help them grow professionally and create an atmosphere of psychological safety.
Building a psychologically safe atmosphere is important to boost employee morale and retain team members for longer. When employees feel safe at work, they feel more productive and become more efficient.
So if you haven’t yet considered creating a psychologically safe workspace, start working on it now. It’s a very effective way to boost employee satisfaction and increase employee loyalty.
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