The world is constantly changing, and there have been significant changes in the ways we work that have resulted in good learning for us. A high-performing team or community is all about our people. We are the most valuable assets that lead the world to success. It can be through setting up successful workplaces, communities, or families. Today, I am writing about a modern HR practice that we are practicing nowadays in the workplace as it can add significant value to shape us in our community and our teams at work.

As an HR professional, the biggest area that I have seen change is the emphasis on understanding human behaviours to address workplace issues and focusing on proactive management of any employment issues to build high-performing organisations. I thought this was something we could practice as a community to make a better, healthier, high-performing community where we try to achieve things together in a constantly changing world.

Working with people is challenging because you work with constantly changing human behaviours. Also, managing humans has become even more difficult because we all have continually changing minds. With a frequently changing world and human minds, how will it be easy to manage people with inflexible expectations of them?

So, the best way is to find a way fit for everyone, build effective, healthy relationships, and remove barriers to open communication. How do we minimise these barriers? We can do this by creating Psychologically safe teams around us and our community.

As we work with people all day long in our community, work, and home, Psychological safety is very important to understand and shape our behaviours around the people we work with in any capacity. It will help you work better with your family members, colleagues, and community and also make decisions about how you want to be treated by the community you work with.

What is Psychological Safety? As per Amy Edmondson, “Psychological safety means an absence of interpersonal fear. When psychological safety is present, people are able to speak up with work-relevant content”

Feeling Psychologically safe will allow people to perform better at home, school, community, and work. My view is we should start practicing this from our smallest community “ home”, then we can practice at our community and workplaces. This will be from any aspect. If you are an employer, you can think about how to make a psychologically safe team to build a high-achieving organisation; if you belong to a specific community group, you can think about how to make our community psychologically safe where people can thrive, helping and achieving things in life.

A psychologically safe environment will help increase

• Productivity
• Sense of belonging
• Creativity and innovation.
• Better / strong relationships
• Strong community and culture

It is all about feeling safe to speak up, share feedback, share new ideas, not feel judged, not feeling that you will be told off, and feel safe to disagree.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a psychologically safe community or team, you will feel stressed, fearful, not yourself, not sharing your thoughts/ feelings, low performance, and conflicts, which will not help any team or community successfully achieve goals.

There are a few questions you can ask to determine whether you live in a psychologically safe team, workplace, community, or school.

1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is not held against you.
2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
3. People on this team sometimes accept others for being different.
4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It isn’t difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilised.

(Adapted from Edmondson (1999))

How to create this psychologically safe community or team?

This will not be something that can happen overnight; it will take some time and practice. In my opinion, practice makes you perfect, so taking individual responsibility and upskilling individual capability will lead to a better community, so if we can have.

• Open Dialog/ conversations – Conversation is the most important thing to create a Psychologically safe environment, having timely respectful, open conversations with no judgments will help you to build a Psychological safe community
• Open Mind – Accepting changes and differences and being respectful will be key for you to build relationships.
• Build healthy relationships/ mutual understanding – Relationships are crucial, so getting to know each other, your team, and your colleagues will help you understand them better without presuming and judging them.
• Empathy/ compassion – Act with compassion and Empathy. It will make you genuinely care for your colleagues, team, and community. This feeling will encourage people to share things, not to be scared, and to have that sense of genuineness when they are connecting with each other and sharing stories.

All of the above themes will have interconnections with each other. So, my view is that creating a psychologically safe environment through our genuine relationships will lead to healthy relationships and a high-performing community or team with fewer conflicts. When we have psychologically safe teams, the whole community will be a safe and happy place for us to share stories with no judgment.

By Tara Ratnayake – Wellington