How did the “silent” protests that make a big noise in business life begin? Are we able to build safe cultures where employees can express themselves?
In this content, where we discussed the silence of employees and the expression fatigue they experience; we touched upon the importance of the concept of “psychological safety” in organisational culture and its effects on employees.
I first heard the concept of psychological safety 5 years ago from a foreign senior executive at an international meeting I attended. This executive emphasized that one of the main factors of employee engagement and well-being was the concept of “Psychological Safety” and that it played a major role in the development of organisational culture. I thought that these two words, which I heard side by side for the first time in business life, had an important place in industrial psychology and I started to read about them.
The concept of psychological safety was first used by William A. Kahn in 1990 and later published in the book “The Fearless Organization” in 2019 with extensive research by Amy C. Edmondson, a lecturer at Harvard Business School. According to Edmondson, psychological safety is “the state of believing that anyone in a team will not be penalized or humiliated for expressing an opinion, asking the stupidest question, talking about team or individual mistakes, or expressing concerns about a situation.”¹ Research on the concept of psychological safety mentions the contribution of free expression of oneself without fear and trust in interpersonal communication to organizational development. For this reason, the areas where the concept has been researched the most and its findings have been evaluated are business life.
So when we talk about feeling psychologically safe, can we talk about individuality? No!
The place where we interact most frequently with others is undoubtedly the workplace, where we spend most of our day. While there is a commonality of purpose that brings people together in the workplace, it is the social bonds that keep us together. The way to build these bonds is to develop a relationship of mutual trust with the people we work with and to have confidence in a system that can defend our values. Opportunities for new ideas, projects or areas of organizational development arise when employees express themselves freely and are not worried about the outcome. There are many reasons why individuals may feel secure individually, and they vary. But in an organization, the psychological safety of employees is a direct result of the organizational culture.
It will not be realistic to talk about the psychological safety of the employee in organizational cultures where the employee is not given the right to have a say, managed by harsh rules under the name of discipline, and where hierarchy is expressed more than employee loyalty. For this reason, one of the obstacles in ensuring psychological safety in organizations is traditional authoritarian orders. Since the sense of fear will be more dominant in these systems, employees may be swept away by their silence within a uniform structure or they may want to move to different institutions where they believe they can express themselves comfortably.
In a study conducted in 2021, The Predictive Index found that the likelihood of employee turnover is lower in the teams of managers who create psychologically safe working environments.² Accordingly, we can say that in order to ensure the best performance and retain talent, raising “inclusive” leaders in the organisational culture, developing humanist approaches that give employees a voice and making feedback culture a company policy will contribute to this field.
One of the consequences of psychological insecurity is “expression fatigue
Recently, there have been many studies that have been conducted to investigate the behaviors that are described as silent and the background of these behaviors. When such “silent” behavior of employees is evaluated especially as a result, it is possible to say that the situation is actually an expression fatigue.
Employees whose ideas or demands are not heard, accepted or taken into account give up voicing problems after a while and stop expressing them. Since the employee does not feel safe, he/she gets used to accepting the negativities that he/she cannot express out loud with the belief that “it will be useless anyway” or “I will get a reaction and stand out” and gets used to staying unresponsive in this situation over time. Unfortunately, this leads to the creation of climates that negatively affect organizational culture and employee loyalty.
However, feeling safe is a sociological need. Everyone wants to take part and create value in communities where they feel safe or loved. Everything that cannot be expressed grows bigger inside us and starts to take up much more space than its meaning. In organizations where psychological safety is not ensured and there is no feedback culture, people may have difficulty in contacting each other and may experience an internal conflict if they are in a negative emotion.
All of this causes employees to retreat from the virtues of expressing themselves, sharing their ideas and producing value, paving the way for the development of a negative and introverted management approach.
”Psychologically Safe for Some, but Not All?” surveyed 278 leaders and concluded that teams that feel psychologically safe perform at a higher level and experience less conflict in interpersonal communication.³³ From this, we can conclude that leaders who create a sense of psychological safety in their teams will continue to see the best performance and development. In areas where trust and sharing are not supported, people are free to choose the right to act “silently”. It is always a loss for an organization when talented employees choose to remain silent. This is why it is important that the employees who see the areas of improvement or negativities most closely and who will convey them to the management for a better structuring are heard before they reach this stage.
How do we feel safe?
he role of leaders in the development of organizations is undeniable, but there is a lot that not only leaders but all employees, from the lowest to the highest level, can do;
- We can all individually choose to be “trustworthy” and communicate accordingly to make each other’s lives easier and create a better working environment.
- If we are a team manager, we can give speeches or organize routine mini-meetings to encourage team members to share ideas.
- We can see and practice feedback culture as not just “saying the negative” but appreciating and expressing everything positive.
- We can discuss the programs that will be implemented in the organization and that will include everyone in meetings with representatives from different departments and design processes in which employees are directly involved.
- We can listen empathetically to employees’ bold statements and reactions and provide on-the-spot feedback.
- We can encourage employees’ hesitation to share failure or negative news.
Each organization can raise awareness on this issue through various practices appropriate to its structure and culture. The important thing will be to ensure that these practices are permanent by making them regular and continuous and to take regular actions according to their impact on the employee.
Within Nuh Cement Group, we prepare programs that directly involve all our employees under the corporate academy structure. We realize surveys where we can hear the employees more easily, and field applications where we include their ideas and opinions. We digitize the processes we currently use and establish systems that foster a culture of continuous feedback. We design practices that we aim to both develop a sense of psychological trust and ensure employee participation with a sustainable mission approach.
Conclusion
There are many ways to build a healthy and inclusive organizational culture. But the most important is to create climates where employees feel included and free. The basic principle of creating these climates is to build environments where employees first feel safe.
Sources:
- Loignon, A., & Wormington, S. (2022). Psychologically Safe for Some, But Not All?
- Edmondson, A., & Lei, Z. Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 2014; 1(1):23-43
- The Predictive Index, (2021). People Management Report.
Ezgi Ömür; Nuh Cement Group; Senior Training and Development Specialist
Source: https://kaynakbaltas.com/yonetici-lider/kurum-kulturunde-psikolojik-guvenlik/
