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Chasing Psychological Safety - Putting A Number On It

Chasing Psychological Safety
A series about The Future of Work, Agile and Ways of Work, Technology, Leadership, AI, Teams and most of all: People

Putting A Number On It
Published on January 19, 2020
Duena Blomstrom
Author, Keynote Speaker, Co-Founder and CEO of PeopleNotTech and Emotional Banking

We have talked about the fact that Psychological Safety is not a “nice to have” many a time before. We at PeopleNotTech firmly believe in the value of hands-on change, clear real-life application and the ability to put numbers on concepts that business was previously happy to confine to the land of esoterically non-important.

Tomorrow’s video will invite you to think of various measurements from KPIs to OKRs to any other types of internal measurements of success where we could show correlation, in particular, if you're at a time when you're building budgets and thinking of what matters, but in today’s I’d like us to explore why we are uncomfortable juxtaposing numbers on these topics.

Our thesis is of course that Psychological Safety is a performance lever and one that refers to yet another neglected topic - that of teams, so together, both these big topics are relatively new in the vernacular of enterprises and institutions, but in the absence of clarity on numbers (and for avoidance of doubt these numbers DO exist, thankfully) they too are at danger of being lumped with all the other “soft”, “human” topics where important human factor issues are bundled together and collectively disregarded.

Employee “engagement”, “satisfaction” and “happiness” have long been heralded as immensely important to every organisation but if we’re honest, to this day, they are consistently demoted to second-tier priorities and inevitably lose ideological and budget fights in favour of “real priorities” which are mainly of a legal or operational nature. No board will tell you they don’t care about their employee’s happiness but I have yet to see the director pointing out in any strategy meeting that they are not part of any risk strategy and are never considered first priority.

Empirically and from arms’ distance from the plight of HR over the years, my speculation would be that this lack of importance, this disregard and this demotion that is assigned to these topics in some environment, is the direct result of how the main metric that was used to illustrate them was “retention”. The organization was told: “look, you’re haemorrhaging people/talent, this costs money if you want to reduce turnover by X, make your employees happy”.

Aside from how oftentimes, this was never accompanied by a map of steps needed to achieve that, and aside from how practical suggestions and actionable serious plans never existed, this has somehow failed to resonate in the way intended. I postulate that this is because it’s appealing to the “fear” side of motivation whereas where it would have made an impact, it would have had to appeal to the “greed”.

While the retention stats are all correct, would the enterprise been as sluggish to respond if they had been told: “Make your employees happier by 1% and you’ll see a 40% increase in business?”. Absolutely not. They would have clamoured to figure out ways to do it. Mind, that would have incidentally meant they would have had to start with figuring out what their current level of happiness was. A nebulous area for most if not all.

Somewhere along the way, the establishment’s lack of interest became justifiable to professionals and they stopped being intellectually curious and eager to find the numbers that would have appealed to “greed” - i.e. the correlations to show how the “fluffy topics” resulted directly in coins in the pockets of the stakeholders- and everyone just quietly accepted that the bits about their humans are just simply not as important as the bits about the printers, the new regulation or the data centres.

Incidentally, I feel like this resignation to this bizarre status quo is what has (or will) precipitate the demise of HR as a function because they failed to elevate the importance of the humans they were meant to understand, help and better. If they had done so, including finding some of the numbers I am referring to then the ladder of the importance of functions and topics would have tipped where the people issues are at the very top and regarded as critical in ways that operations and finance would never be.

Seeing how now the new rhetorics on measurement is being driven by other areas of the business (we’ve met more people-centric CTOs, more thoughtful about humans CIOs and more interested in repairing and bettering risk officers than HR professionals in the enterprises that win); and how the numbers that prove the importance of people in trying to build anything digital, innovative or lasting are coming from DevOps communities (again, broken record style, read “The State of DevOps 2019 report” and then buy Gene Kim’s “The Unicorn Project” to see the importance of Psychological Safety); it’s clear that they are the new beacons of advocating for better, cohesive, open and happy teams comprised of courageous and happy people because they can show how that correlates to better, faster and lasting business results.

Conversely, other industries such as healthcare have a lot firmer of an imperative - patient safety. There, numbers are crystal clear thanks to the work of Amy Edmondson and scholars regarding the direct effect of the lack of Psychological Safety of the medical teams on the safety of the patients. That’s an un-ignorable metric that no hospital can choose to ever de-prioritise.

Ironically, not even this measurement is about “morality” or “decency” but has a very well defined number in healthcare which puts our reticence to define it in business to shame.

Some voices deplore numbers when it comes to human topics. Some claim it’s dehumanising to dissect and focus on productivity. Some find it in poor taste to show the dollar sign at the end of humanity.

I put it to us that a lack of numbers will continue to keep our employees into a vicious circle of being treated appallingly by the enterprise - the lack of feedback, the lack of listening and the lack of respect will continue. We won’t have Psychologically Safe teams and we won’t have happy, fully human, EQed employees if we don’t have and then incessantly declare the numbers.

In the places where they started from a culture where the humans matter most, where teams have to have Psychological Safety and individuals feel heard, they measured what that means to their bottom line - the Google, the Spotify, some of the other Silicon Valley darlings and as of this year, hopefully, some incumbents too!- and the % they found is unbelievably high. Ask anyone who knows their internal research and prepare to have your mouth drop.

Turns out treating your people right, making them happy and safe, and improving their lives at work - pays - who knew?!?

Comments

Great article on the dangers and fallacies related to "measurement."

Amy C. Edmondson
One thing to ponder more: Strictly speaking, psychological safety is not a lever - meaning not something that one can turn on and off directly, through action - but rather is an emergent state that comes from acting on other levers. For instance, asking questions, displaying humility (as in, that's interesting, I dont know, would like to learn more, etc) and curiosity, and creating opportunities/structures for dialogue are all levers that help build psychological safety.

Duena Blomstrom
Oh absolutely! Just between us few thousands who care deeply about this - it hadn’t even occurred to me that anyone would think there’s a way to flick the PS button on or off instead of the concerted amount of actions that need doing to change and improve behaviours around courage, flexibility, resilience, engagement, openness or learning! Thanks so much for clarifying!