By Josh Kohlbach, CEO and founder of Rymera Web Co, manufacturer of wholesale kits.
As business owners and entrepreneurs, we want to bring out the best in our employees. The reason we do this is to increase their productivity and increase their efficiency.
In doing so, we often forget to create a work environment that promotes the psychological safety of our employees. Your employees won’t be able to do their best work unless they feel safe at work.
Psychological safety means that you can speak or act with confidence and be yourself without fear of being judged, humiliated or rejected for sharing your thoughts, questions and concerns.
Employees who have experienced psychological safety trust each other without judgment. They fail without being labeled, and express their opinions without being humiliated.
Working in such an environment can help your employees in a number of ways. It promotes a positive mindset, regardless of their workload. This can help them feel more creative, which in turn makes them more productive and efficient.
Now the question is, how to improve psychological safety in the workplace? Let’s look at three easy ways to do this.
1. Lead with empathy.
One of the most important factors to consider when leading a team is empathy. When you show empathy rather than ego, you help build trust in the team. Building trust is critical to building an honest and empowering relationship between the team and management.
When you deal with your team, you assure them that you care about them and that their feelings and needs will be taken care of. Make your team feel like this is a very effective way to build psychological safety in the workplace.
So instead of self-led, learn to lead with empathy. Be kind to your team and pay attention to their concerns and problems.
2. Be open to feedback.
To create a positive workplace, you must be open to feedback. Getting feedback from your employees can help you improve your workplace and increase employee satisfaction. Therefore, encourage your employees to express their opinions and raise their concerns. This can help you understand vulnerabilities and flaws in your system.
It is impossible to improve your system unless you have a negative impact. Getting feedback can help you understand bugs, flaws, and gaps that need to be fixed to make it better. But not all employees are willing to give feedback publicly.
To encourage such employees to provide feedback, you can try sending them a feedback form every three months. Let them know that their feedback will remain anonymous. This gives them the confidence to give an honest opinion.
3. Encourage tolerance and acceptance.
This is especially important for companies with global teams. As a leader, you need to encourage inclusivity and diversity in your team.
Today’s brightest leaders outperform their competitors by honoring 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 manager well enough to handle it the way you want it to.
Your manager acts as a bridge between employees and management. You may not always be able to interact one-on-one with your employees. That’s where managers come in. This makes it so important to train your managers to handle diversity.
Be sure to explain why diversity and inclusion is important to your business and set expectations for how you want employees to treat their teammates.
4. Make room for errors.
Another very effective way to create psychological safety in the workplace is to make room for mistakes. Mistakes are important to team growth. This is an active and powerful part of one’s learning process.
So let your team know it’s okay to make mistakes as long as they learn from them. Instead of blaming them or humiliating them for their mistakes, let them take it as a learning lesson.
Let them know that this helps them grow professionally and creates an atmosphere of psychological safety.
Creating an atmosphere of psychological safety is important to improve employee morale and retain team members longer. When employees feel safe at work, they feel more productive and become more productive.
So if you haven’t thought about creating a psychologically safe workspace, start now. This is a very effective way to increase employee satisfaction and increase employee loyalty.
