96. Building Organizational Culture: Psychological Safety

In this episode, UpSkillers Michel, Flora, Mimi and Sylvia discuss the keys to creating and maintaining healthy, inclusive, organizational cultures. 

Topics covered include:

• Psychological safety 
• Netiquette: how we behave in hybrid and virtual situations
• People versus team versus outcome orientations
• Rewards, recognitions and evaluation programs
• Performance management

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Welcome to Upskill Talks, I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, lead Upskill at Upskill Community. Upskill Talks is a podcast for leaders, leaders who are actively seeking innovative and creative ways to interact. Lead themselves and others in every episode through real life stories and enlightening conversations, we will explore the challenges and opportunities real leaders face in today's everchanging workplace. We will present you with real strategies. For you to leverage your soft skills and produce transformative results. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let us begin. So let's talk now then about what are some of the. The keys to creating and maintaining healthy, inclusive, organizational cultures. This is what everyone in the world is trying to make sure they have right now. Healthy, inclusive, organizational cultures. Obviously we cannot talk about all things that are required for that in a few minutes, I actually wanted to touch back on something Sylvia introduced a concept that we did not define. Sylvia touched on the concept of psychological safety, psychological safety, the term popularized by Amy Edmondson and just want to flag up for our listeners. That term really means the ability to create a safe enough environment where People feel like they can take interpersonal risks so they can ask that dumb question that stupid question because they can say, I don't know something. They can make a mistake. They can fail and be okay. It's, it's an environment where you can take that risk that you can say the wrong word. Someone will correct you, but you're not going to be harmed by it. That's what it means by safe. You can make a mistake, but it's not going to harm your career, your reputation, your credibility. Really, that's what that means. So that psychological safety that you're sitting in the meeting, you have an idea, but you feel like, I don't want them to say, who does she think she is? I don't want them to say, not her again. I don't want them to say, who asked you? I don't want them to say, I know she's not just arrived here last week and ready to give ideas already. It's, is the environment safe enough that someone can ask, I have a question. Have you considered an alternative approach? Have you heard of this other way, this perspective? Does someone feel safe enough to ask that question, to say, I have an idea that may help to move this forward. May I, may I share it? Can people do that? Can someone see an opportunity, take a risk knowing that it may go up or down and be okay because they're working in an interpersonal space where that is given room. That's what the concept means. And it's a very, very important concept for healthy organizational cultures. If you imagine being in a place where you are at work, you are feeling sick, or you're having a family emergency at home, and you do not feel safe enough to say something's going on, I need to step aside. That is really, really what this is all about. So I just wanted to make sure we come back to that concept. You may have your own definition of it. And it's important that when we're talking about healthy organizational cultures, that you are thinking about your own definition of it. I wanted to come back to that leading out of Sylvia's earlier comment, Flora. What I'm hearing is that the people you work with have to be nice. They can't be mean, like they can't be bullies, you know, like if I do something bad, if I say something, they're not gonna. They're not going to come at me for saying something they'll be accepting. So it is that and more. It is come at you. It doesn't mean having a psychologically safe space doesn't mean everything goes. It really means that there are practices, established ways of dealing with matters that arise in a team. That's one, there are procedures, but there is grace. So you use the word kind so that the approach is kind, there's grace built into and baked into the system. And that the, the approach is that there are times when we call each other in, there are times when we call each other out depending on what's appropriate. But even if we call someone out, the person is not going to lose their job because they did something that we had to call them out on. But there are processes, there are. is that if that weren't necessary, this person was going to be taken over here, given this course, this process, this protocol to follow. And the person was not going to feel ejected from the team. They're still going to feel part of the team because mistakes are allowed on our team. Imperfection is cool on our team. Like we leave wiggle room for each other and we do not. Put people in straight jackets in the workplace where they have no room to move, no wiggle room, and they can't make mistakes. And what the outcome is, everybody shuts their mouth. Nobody's willing to open their mouth, ask a question, say something, indicate that they're unsure. And the outcome of that is that we are living in a culture and we're sitting on a powder keg. Because there's everything is underneath and no one knows what's underneath and it bubbles up to the top in interpersonal conflict, intercultural conflicts, malaise, retention problems, all of these other things that are sort of evidence of a poor organizational culture where Everything gets pushed under the carpet. Nobody talks about anything. There's a big elephant in the room and no one will call it out. That's the opposite of psychological safety and, and the opposite of a healthy environment in the workplace. It sounds like people are scared. A lot of people are scared. This is a time when people feel scared. People understand that there are great risks right now, great personal and interpersonal risks, institutional risks. The very big risks right now, the culture right now is, um, Sylvia says fluid, the culture right now is a little bit fragile. It really is at that place where there's a lot of division, a lot of uncertainty, and Many organizations are working hard to pull this back together, to help everyone feel that psychological safety, to help everyone feel like you belong here, your voice matters, you are valued, back to what Mimi talked about at the beginning, your perspective matters, it's tabled, it's acknowledged, I may not be able to bring it on board right now, but it's tabled for later. You matter to me, you matter to this organization, you belong here, and that makes someone feel excited, purposeful, and off to work. That is going to increase retention, that is going to increase engagement, that is going to increase productivity, that is going to increase all of the things that we want. The opposite is also true. If we don't have those things, it's really becomes a super, super challenge for us. Okay. So my question, um, speaks on post COVID. Um, most organizations, um, had to change, and adopt the remote or hybrid work. environment. So we talking about interpersonal, um, relationships. So how has this also been mitigated now that people don't have that personal, uh, touch personal work relations, you know, uh people are, like, uh, technological advancements. How have they also sort of, uh, how are they also being baked into the culture, as you said? That's a really great question, Mimi, because now we're doing training on etiquette. Netiquette is how we behave in hybrid and virtual situations. Simple things like organizations have to think about how they bring the values from the in person setting to the online. Do we need new values to address the new concerns that arise in a virtual or hybrid environments? Do we need new ways of interacting when we are all working siloed in our homes and visiting the office a couple of days a week and not really connected in the ways that we used to be? Does that leave room for people to be more abusive? Um, Or to be more aggressive or less kind, as you said, um, earlier, Flora, less kind, less caring, to give less grace, to be less compassionate, less empathetic. Does it leave space for more? How are we navigating this new space? NatiCat deals with these sort of rules and norms of living, working in this virtual space. And one of the things that challenges me is when I'm invited into an organizational's meeting and the members of the organization join the meeting and I only see a black screen with a name. And I wonder the extent to which even little things like that impact the culture. You're here to have a conversation with just voices. And, um, it's almost like this didn't need a virtual call. This could be a phone call. If everybody was going to have their cameras off, a phone call would be adequate. So maybe, maybe that conference call should be what we are doing instead of this. What are the rules governing this? And how are we messaging this? And how do people know when we need to have our cameras on? And when the cameras are okay to be off? You know, these are some of the things that we didn't need to consider before. We didn't need to consider the impact of putting people in a breakout room with everybody with the screens off and you have no idea. Who you're in there to have this conversation with their new concerns that arise and perhaps new rules, new morals, new mores, new, all of these things that are required to address these new, new setup. So it was a great question. Mimi, we have, we need like an hour just to go over netiquette and how it impacts organizational culture. But, but Flora said something earlier, which is really. You need to be nice and Harvard talks about some of the orientations that we bring to our workplace that impact the culture, sort of, uh, outcome orientation. These are people who care about the bottom line and they are going to focus on that. The people orientation. The team orientation, the attention to detail, the stability, the innovation, the aggressiveness, all of these things are at play. And so managing it, managing all of this, weaving together all these disparate pieces is a really important part of how we create a culture and how we sustain a culture. And as I said earlier. Some organizations create components for marketing, but not for sustainability. And so the social culture, the ideological culture, there's a lot of different pieces that underpin what happens in the workplace and that has to take place and have to be incorporated and baked into, as we discussed earlier, hiring practices, recruitment from the beginning, onboarding programs. Rewards and recognitions and evaluation programs, performance management, conflict resolution, communication, the metrics that we use to measure performance in an organization, all of this has to be baked in to, to the organization with our values as the lens through which we do this work. If we want to begin to flesh out. And rethink healthy and inclusive organizational cultures. Flora, I like everything that you just said. What I'm hearing is that it can't be a farce. Like it can't just be, you know, an illusion, like you put on all the makeup and you look so beautiful, but you take it off and you have a bunch of acne, really, because you're not dealing. It's like skincare, you know, you got to actually pull the pimples out of the organization. Um, I, I really like what you said about having to have the processes and the procedures in place to deal with things because like, it's not easy to be nice if there is a missed deliverable or like everybody is really stressed because you need to hold someone accountable, right? Because every you caught the problem. Um, yeah, like it's, it's not easy to be nice. So you have to think of ways that you can ensure people are nice. You have to structure it. Yeah. Yeah. You have to structure it in a way that like the system is running smoothly and people don't have to be stressed at each other. It's much easier to be nice in that context. Correct. Correct. So to wrap up our conversation here, there are a lot of words that I heard that start with a similar letter. I heard, shouldn't it be a farce? It shouldn't be fake. It should flow through the organization. It should be frequently discussed. It should be fluid. It should feel like you're a fit, you should belong. And this is all that people are looking for. And it benefits the organizations in every single way. And that means if every individual wants this, they want an organization that has a healthy, inclusive culture where they feel a sense of belonging. They feel purposeful, excited, and connected. If every individual is looking for that, and every organization wants to produce the place where the individual can experience that, every organization wants a place where people come and optimize performance. And this is the place, a healthy, inclusive culture. Every organization wants that, and every individual wants that. Then the question is. Why don't we all have it? And the answer? We'll have to take some time to explore, but if it were easy to do it, it would have been done because we all wanted to do it. It's easier to state it than to demonstrate it. It's super complex to go from stating. This aspiration to being able to demonstrate it. And that's what we're doing at upskill is helping individuals and organizations to upskill themselves and to build out the organizational culture that helps everyone to feel that psychological safety, to feel that sense of belonging, to have the structures and the processes and the leadership acumen in place and the confidence to execute, to bake our values. To bake our organizational culture into everything we do and to monitor it and track it and manage it because of its fluidity and because it's what we all want to feel well and to be able to deliver the outcomes that we promise to stakeholders and shareholders. Thank you for listening to this episode of Upskill Talks. We bring you new episodes every Monday. Please take a moment to subscribe. Leave a five star rating and a written review at Apple Podcast or follow us on Spotify, Google podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Don't forget to share Upskill talks with other leaders like yourself, so they too may gain the skills and insights to produce amazing results. Please go to upskill community.com to review show notes, and learn how you can join a community of leaders from across the globe. Collaborating to lead in a more meaningful and impactful way. I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, and again, thank you for joining me on this episode of Upscale Talks.