Creating Psychological Safety in a messy world
A term that we’re more familiar with since the pandemic is the concept of psychological safety. For me, psychological safety is all about how we can help people to create a sense of feeling okay psychologically and feeling safe within a very messy and rapidly changing world. This is a topic that I’ve wanted to visit for a long time to see how we, as internal communicators, employee engagement and organisational development professionals can increase the level of psychological safety within our organisations and for the individuals within it. In this episode we’re going to be looking at a number of different issues.
First of all, defining psychological safety, while I’ve already given you my definition, there are many other equally valid ways of defining it and we’re also going to look at the consistency amongst some of those definitions. We’re going to be looking at the business case for psychological safety and particularly from a mental wellbeing perspective, this has been very much more openly talked about since the pandemic. But is there a business case for psychological safety and increasing psychological safety in our organisations? We’re going to look at that.
We’re going to look at what tools and techniques are available to us on an individual team level and also at an organisational level. Finally, we’re going to look at the impact of remote and virtual working, which is all more prevalent in our organisations now and the impact that that’s had on psychological safety. Also whether we can mitigate some of the downsides of that, and also if we can increase some of the upsides of that new way of working that we’ve all had to become accustomed to. That’s what we’re going to be looking at in this interview, the whole idea of how we can create psychological safety in a messy world. I hope you find this a useful episode.
Guest profile
Stephan Wiedner helps organisations equip their leaders and high potentials with the tools required to navigate today’s rapidly changing business environment. With his team at Noomii, Stephan measures what is most important for team effectiveness: psychological safety.
Useful links
Link to a relevant episode of the podcast: https://thebigpicturepeople.co.uk/blog/podcast/the-roi-of-employee-wellbeing-with-dave-algeo-s1-e2/
Guest’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/swiedner/
URL for free Psychological Safety assessment: https://zarango.com/freepsi/