How to Foster Psychological Safety in Virtual Meetings

by Amy C. Edmondson and Gene Daley, August 25, 2020

Yagi Studio/Getty Images

When Covid-19 was recognized as an emerging public health crisis earlier this year, tens of thousands of employees were sent home from offices around the world to start working from home for the foreseeable future. It may take years before we understand the full impact of this abrupt shift to virtual work on people and companies, but it wasn’t long before many started to wonder about the impact of virtual meetings on psychological safety — people feeling they can raise questions, concerns, and ideas without fear of personal repercussion.

There are good reasons to worry. Detecting social cues or non-verbal agreement is nearly impossible. Team members may feel isolated without the natural support of an ally nodding from across the table. And distractions (emails, texts, doorbells, children, pets) are everywhere. If virtual meetings are inherently difficult, the current environment — the health and economic threats, the overwork, and the social unrest — makes them even more so.

The good news is that the very technology that thwarts candor and mutual understanding also offers ways to offset these losses. In our work leading hundreds of virtual sessions, we’ve identified opportunities and risks associated with each of several common tools found in most online meeting platforms:

Hand-raise.

Seemingly straightforward, the hand-raise function helps people signal that they want to speak aloud. However, it can easily yield a “false negative.” One of us was present with a manager who said, “Raise your hand if you have personal experience with someone battling Covid-19.” Seeing no hands, he continued, “Terrific, because I’m going to need full effort for the project we’re about to discuss.”

Unfortunately, two team members taking care of elders who tested positive failed to use the tool — perhaps because they didn’t find it quickly enough or they felt reluctant to reveal personal information.

When it’s vital to have a full set of responses, Yes/No and anonymous poll features may work better.

Yes/No.

Typically a green checkmark and red X, this tool allows quick input from everyone. A leader can invite missing participants to chime in, setting an expectation that all voices are needed. The tool’s obvious limitation is that not all issues are binary in nature. For greater nuance in soliciting voice, poll and chat tools provide worthy alternatives.

Chat.

Allowing everyone to contribute at the same time in their own words, with their names tagged, the chat function lowers the threshold for participation. At times, however, the sheer volume or length of entries leave some overlooked. Setting norms about brevity can help, but chats also can distract from the spoken conversation. When it’s vital that everyone listen intently to what is being said, chat may need to be turned off.

Polls.

Anonymous polls make it easy to express an opinion without fear of being singled out, and the results prompt thoughtful probing to dig into diverse views. This works best when leaders frame diverse views as a resource before asking: “What are people seeing that leads to this spread?”

Consider what happened in a recent leadership program focused on psychological safety. A senior executive proclaimed: “I don’t think we have an issue with [low] psychological safety at our company, but if you disagree, please enlighten me.” Unsurprisingly, no one used the hand-raise or chat functions. The facilitator then quickly launched an anonymous poll: “On a scale of 1 to 5, rate the level of psychological safety in our company.” When a majority of responses were “3”, the executive responded, “Clearly, I need to be less assumptive in my questioning!” At that point, individuals used hand-raise and were willing to speak up with candid views.

In another recent meeting, a manager used the anonymous poll function to ask participants to force-rank the company’s diversity initiatives on “potential impact” and “current performance.” This yielded a 2×2 map, identifying High Impact/Low Performance initiatives (“highest priorities”) versus “Lower Impact/High Performance” initiatives. The tool thereby triggered a richer, more candid dialogue, followed by brainstorming and action planning in the midst of national protests on systemic racism.

Breakout rooms.

Creating smaller virtual breakout rooms during large meetings allows small groups of, say, three to five people to talk more easily without muting and unmuting themselves, providing a more natural conversational experience than large virtual meetings. Breakout rooms, with specific tasks or topics assigned to different groups, provide a psychologically safe space to test ideas and build relationships. When participants return to the large group, they find it easier to report ideas from the small group with the confidence that comes from testing and sharing perspectives in that relatively safer space.

For instance, in one session we led, a cohort of 50 leaders from 50 medical centers convened to share best practices and lessons learned during the pandemic. Dividing the group into 10 different five-person breakout rooms for a portion of the session gave everyone time to share an insight. Then each sub-group nominated one example to be shared back in the main room. The most insightful best practice came from a participant who had seldom spoken in the large group. The idea was adopted across multiple medical centers.

Video.

Seeing faces creates engagement, but too much visual stimuli (faces and backgrounds) can be distracting, and low bandwidth can add to visual disruptions. All this can thwart our ability to read social cues and stress our cognition in subtle ways. Leaders may want to encourage view options in which one face is center stage while speaking and others recede to the background. Other times, audio-only may be a better option for deep listening.

Separately, seeing oneself on the screen can heighten self-consciousness, inhibiting psychological safety. Selecting “hide self-view” can help (after all, we don’t use a mirror during face-to-face meetings).

Audio-only.

Mimicking the old-fashioned conference call, audio-only meetings require acute attention and care to avoid misinterpreting silence as agreement and to explicitly ensure participation of everyone on the call. Its absence of non-verbal communication sharpens the need for proactive inquiry to lower hurdles to speaking up, such as, “On a scale of 0-to-10, what do you think about…” or “If you were to force-rank these five items, which ranks first and second…and which rates last?” Further, participants must resist the urge to multi-task, and leaders can be explicit in requesting their full attention, while trying to design engaging, interactive virtual sessions.

Before and After a Virtual Meeting

Beyond the thoughtful use of platform tools, a few simple actions before and after a virtual meeting can help build psychological safety during the encounter.

In advance, team leaders should experiment with meeting tools to understand their uses and risks and plan how they may want to sequence a discussion. In addition, they should consider inviting a facilitator — or a rotating member of the team — to help ensure participation. Finally, to foster engagement in meetings that will seek input for consequential decisions, consider interacting with participants in advance via such means as anonymous polling or one-on-one interviews.

After a virtual meeting, managers can reach out to talk to participants who were quiet during the session. To replicate informal water-cooler moments, managers can use text, phone, or email, to give reinforcing or redirecting feedback.

Teams can be lonely places, especially when you believe others may not support your opinion or come to your defense. Such interpersonal fears are amplified for employees working from home during a prolonged crisis like the pandemic. Building psychological safety in virtual teams takes effort and strategy that pays off in engagement, collegiality, productive dissent, and idea generation. The good news is that the tools and techniques that engage people — and lower hurdles to engagement — can become habitual and serve managers well today and long into the future.

https://psychsafety.co.uk/is-your-team-psychologically-safe-the-ten-statement-quiz/

Is Your Team Psychologically Safe? Take This Quiz.

by Tom Geraghty, in Measure, Psychological Safety, on August 1, 2020

You already know that psychological safety is the key ingredient for high performing, effective, and happy teams. And you’re a great leader and team member, so you’re doing all the right things, but how do you know whether your team is actually feeling psychologically safe?

Use these ten statements below to measure the psychological safety in your team or organisation. Consider each one and rate your agreement on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). If you “score” 50, congratulations! You’re on possibly the best team in the world right now. Chances are that there were some statements that you didn’t agree with so much, and these are the areas that you can work on, either as a leader or contributor.

On this team, I understand what is expected of me.
We value outcomes more than outputs or inputs, and nobody needs to “look good”.
If I make a mistake on this team, it is never held against me.
When something goes wrong, we work as a team to find the systemic cause.
All members of this team feel able to bring up problems and tough issues.
Members of this team never reject others for being different and nobody is left out.
It is safe for me to take a risk on this team.
It is easy for me to ask other members of this team for help.
Nobody on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilised.

When you’re happy to do so, share these with your team and ask them to rate their agreement too. You can do this anonymously, and gather the scores in aggregate. A great tool for this is Typeform, where you can really quickly and easily paste the above statements into ten statements and add a 1-5 scale. Typeform will give you a link to share with your team, and will even export the data into Excel or Google sheets for analysis. You can also use a survey tool such as Surveymonkey, or the free Google forms service to build your own survey.

Our resource page on Measuring Psychological Safety goes into a lot more detail about what each statement can tell you about your team.

In the Psychological Safety Action Pack, we expand on this measurement with more detailed statements and an action guide to follow for each statement. Also included are workshop exercises, checklists, posters and templates: so if your team score low on one or more of these statements, you can know exactly what to do in order to build psychological safety and team performance.

When running this survey, consider the environment you’re asking people to do it in, and ensure that people don’t feel under pressure to answer in certain ways, rush it, or worry that they might get in trouble for giving the “wrong” answer! Ensure that you discuss with your team what this data will be used for, why you’re asking for it, and assure them that it will be treated confidentially.

After this survey, you may also want to look at some of the other great exercises you can do to build psychological safety, such as a “Fear Conversation”, working with values and behaviours, or using a team performance quadrant to workshop how to improve performance in a psychologically safe manner. All of these exercises are in the toolkits provided by the psychological safety action pack.

If you’re working with a remote or distributed team, ensure you check out this great guide about building and maintaining psychological safety in remote teams.

Sign up to the Psych Safety Newsletter & download your free psychological safety Poster Pack

Receive regular updates of new, useful and insightful content from all over the world and the internet, all about psychological safety.

Tags: Measurement, Performance, Psychological Safety, Teams

Previous:Previous post:The Benefits of Psychological Safety

Next:Next post:Measure, Create and Maintain Psychological Safety with Workshops, Exercises, and Leadership Techniques

https://psychsafety.co.uk/six-ways-to-run-psychologically-safe-meetings/

Six Ways to Run Psychologically Safe Meetings

Psychological Safety & High Performing Teams: by Tom Geraghty, in Create and Maintain, In The Workplace, Psychological Safety, Theory and Practice, Feb 8, 2021

Meetings, whether in-person or virtual (or the worst kind – a hybrid of the two, where some attendees are together in a room, and the others are remote), are a fact of life for many of us. In fact, many of us spend up to 90% of our working day in one kind of meeting or another.

Far from being a waste of time, meetings can be highly productive – whether the goal is to reach a decision, plan work, investigate a problem, or educate and train. But they can only be highly productive if everyone attending feels psychologically safe enough to contribute effectively, by listening, learning, presenting ideas, or even challenging the ideas of others.

You can create a more psychologically safe meeting environment by using some or all of the techniques below (and download our action pack to access all our psychological safety tools and resources):

1: Start with short introductions or warm up exercises

Evidence shows that people feel increased psychological safety and are much more able to speak up if they’ve already spoken in a group situation or meeting, even if it’s just “my name is Julie and my favourite food is pizza”. If everyone in the room knows each other already, go around the table with a simple question (sometimes called an icebreaker), which could be anything from “What’s the last thing you watched on Netflix?” to “What’s your favourite pizza topping?”

2: Admit a mistake

Especially if you’re in a leadership role, build psychological safety in meeting by admitting a recent mistake, or a time when you were wrong about something. If possible, and to make it easier, tell it as a narrative, a story that encourages people to listen and identify with you. By showing that it’s ok to admit mistakes, or if you were wrong about something, you’re creating the psychological safety which encourages and allows others to do the same.

3: Have someone chair the meeting

Have someone chair the meeting to control the schedule, facilitate effective contributions and ensure people do not get spoken over, to increase psychological safety. Ideally, the chair should be not be a senior leader or anyone who could “threaten” the status of people attending. Having the wrong person running a meeting can damage psychological safety. A very strong move by a senior leader would be to demonstrate the authority of the chair by asking them for permission to contribute. Ensure the stronger, louder voices do not drown out the quieter, but equally valuable, voices.

4: Invite women to speak first

When multiple people want to speak or have their hand up to contribute (virtually or otherwise), try to ensure the first person to speak is female. Evidence suggests that if the first person to speak is a man, women are less likely to speak up, but if the first person is female, both men and women will feel psychologically safe to speak up afterwards.

5: Appreciate every contribution

Show your appreciation for contributions, even (indeed, especially) if they’re challenging your own contributions. It takes courage and psychological safety to contribute in a meeting or group setting, especially for those who are not used to speaking up. By praising and thanking people for contributions, you’re encouraging and facilitating that behaviour.

6: Manage your start and finish times

Having clear start times and finish times will improve psychological safety in meetings. Make the intended outcome of the meeting clear, maybe via an agenda if it’s useful to do so. By setting expectations of outcome and timeliness, you are fostering psychological safety via a shared group norm and shared understanding of behaviour requirements.

Use these techniques and behaviours to increase psychological safety in your meetings, and please get in touch to suggest other ways of creating productive and safe spaces for your teams.

Download the Psychological Safety Action Pack to build and maintain psychological safety across your teams or organisation.