 Feeling safe at work or enjoying psychological safety in a team is a very big deal for all of us. Being in an environment where you are valued as an individual and your contribution is appreciated and acted upon is very motivating and enjoyable. Employees feeling safe at work gives a huge number of benefits to the team and the business including firstly a much more positive working atmosphere, secondly better teamwork, thirdly lower staff attrition rates, fourth greater levels of innovation and fifth higher team performance and output. Create psychological safety in a team and you as a manager get to enjoy loads of benefits that come with increasing team performance. Struggle to create an environment of safety and your team will struggle to perform to hit targets and to enjoy being at work. None of these is good for the manager. To help you create psychological safety in your team I am covering firstly what is psychological safety, secondly four stages of psychological safety and third seven practical ways to creating psychological safety in teams. You as a leader are a key enabler to team members feeling safe at work even if the wider company struggles with creating psychological safety at work. Please use what we discussed to improve how well you create psychological safety for your team members. My name is Jess Coles and if you are new here enhance.training shares people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build higher performing teams. I have included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as video timestamps so do take a look at these. And if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. So quickly what is psychological safety? Your team has psychological safety when team members are comfortable firstly asking for help if they are struggling. Secondly asking questions when they don't understand something. Third speaking up and expressing their opinion. Fourth they are happy admitting to a certain level of mistakes. Fifth everyone is happy to put forward ideas and solutions even if they are a bit out there or even appear crazy. And then sixth team members challenge each other and you constructively to improve on ideas or solutions. You create psychological safety when each team member is absolutely confident that they can say what they think and there is not a hint of negative consequences of being embarrassed or risking humiliation, put downs or social exclusion as a result. And of course one would expect them to be considerate and diplomatic when communicating within the team. Creating psychological safety in a team is not about being overly nice, soft or giving permission for team members to whine or not participate. Every team member is responsible and accountable for team performance and creating psychological safety is a key building block to increase team performance. Next I'll quickly take you through a simple model of the four stages of psychological safety created by Timothy Clark. Creating psychological safety in teams is complex and rarely as linear as this model. Being aware of these four stages I think helps a manager plan out different actions to help team members and particularly new joiners journey from feeling as an individual on their own to enthusiastically contributing and creating value as a team member. The stages are in before this stage of start you have exclusion where you are an individual outside of the group. The first stage is inclusion you now feel part of the team accepted, wanted and appreciated as a member of the team. Secondly is the learner stage where members feel safe to ask questions, experiment, take minor risks and admit making small mistakes. Each of which supports learning and getting better. Third the contributor stage where members feel safe to contribute ideas, views and solutions without negative consequences minor or major. And fourth the challenger stage where members feel safe to question, argue and push for change while trusting team members are all acting in service of creating better solutions, plans or results for the team. As a manager you are perfectly placed to help make this journey from exclusion to feeling safe and fully contributing and challenging as a team member a lot quicker and easier for everyone. You as a leader are responsible and accountable for the environment you create within a team. Create a psychologically safe environment and you get loads of personal benefits. Create an unsafe environment and your job is likely to be on the line because team performance will drop. This is a great point to talk about seven practical ways to creating psychological safety in teams. I've used each of these seven approaches extensively in managing teams and when turning around underperforming teams. In my view each action is an essential ingredient to provide a safe environment that encourages team members to do their best work. In my experience creating psychological safety in teams starts with setting and maintaining really clear expectations. Your uncertainty does not help people feel safe at work. Human brains are geared to creating and using patterns. Be direct, be clear and tell the team what you want and why. And don't tell them once, keep telling them week in, week out, verbally and through your actions, behaviours and decisions. Sensible levels of structures and boundaries help create a feeling of psychological safety at work. Add expectations that every team member is responsible for speaking up with ideas, questions and concerns. Secondly to promote feeling safe at work be open and be honest. Tell your team what is happening around the company. Educate your team about what this means for them personally. Explain carefully your own thoughts, concerns and fears. Be empathetic and be human. Give your team honest feedback so each person knows where they stand and what they can do to improve. Do this carefully, diplomatically and considerably. Your aim is to reduce fears and concerns not increase them so filter out or be very careful how you talk about really negative issues. Thirdly to create psychological safety in teams, proactively ask questions and seek team members views. Make your questions specific so avoiding answering is harder. Show your interest and curiosity in what is happening and what team members are doing. Demonstrate you value their input by actively listening and acting positively on their views, ideas, solutions and concerns. Actions speak much louder than words in creating psychological safety in teams. Fourth critical for feeling safe at work for team members is how you manage and control your reactions and responses. To encourage employees to communicate their ideas, solutions, concerns and fears you cannot display negative reactions when they do. You cannot take revenge for asking difficult questions. You cannot humiliate them, put them down or badmouth them in any way. Even when what they say is crazy or really negative. To create psychological safety at work, invite through your actions and reactions, ideas, questions and challenge. Every team member is watching you. Demonstrate to them that taking many risks is safe and you won't allow any other team members to react negatively either. Fifth to create psychological safety in your team, prove that making some mistakes is okay. Share some of the minus mistakes that you have made, what you did to learn from a mistake and if possible rectify the mistakes. Treat mistakes as learning opportunities and coach your team members so they learn rather than tell them off. Repeated mistakes or careless mistakes should not be accepted. Provide corrective feedback in private. By accepting mistakes you encourage your team members to take calculated risks to learn and to innovate. There will be failures and treat failure as a key learning experience. Take these steps and your team will be massively higher performing compared to if you had jumped on mistakes and told team members off. Sixth to create psychological safety in teams, encourage constructive managed conflict. The best ideas and solutions come when everyone feels safe to share their ideas, opinions and solutions and have those challenged. Knowing that the team members will be diplomatic and considerate while challenging your ideas and solutions in service of improving the team output creates a feeling of safety, belonging and teamwork. Stop any destructive conflict as quickly as possible yet anything which makes teamwork harder or damages relationships between team members. Seventh to encourage the feeling of safety at work make it desirable to ask for help within your team. No one is good at everything including you. Make a point of asking for help from your team members. You're asking for help to provide information that you don't have or opinions that you're not in the best place to provide is an easy and safe way for asking for help as a manager. Jump on any opportunities to provide help or organise help when it's asked for by the team members. The more you make it desirable to ask for help the quicker problems are solved and the more you understand what your team is struggling with. You can create significant psychological safety in your team by making asking for help desirable. So there you have seven of my favourite and most effective ways of creating psychological safety in teams that I've used for decades. Please put to use as many of these ways to make employees feel safe in your team today and onwards. So in summary I've used creating psychological safety in teams as essential in the journey to increasing team performance and making the team a enjoyable and rewarding place to work for everyone. You're undertaking some of the actions listed takes courage on the part of the manager. To increase team performance you need team members to take personal risks by putting forward their ideas, views and solutions. Show team members what they can expect when they do this by leading from the front and ensuring everyone in the team is feeling safe at work. To help you improve employees feeling safe within a team we have been through. Firstly what is psychological safety? Secondly the four stages of psychological safety and then third seven practical ways to creating psychological safety in teams. If you have any questions on feeling safe at work, seven ways of creating psychological safety in teams please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.