Psychological safety is the most recent term to launch itself into the forefront of our vocabulary. Many are enquiring into what it means to create a sense of this in our communities — organisational and societal. And rightly so. For while the peak of the recent crisis was acute, at least things were clear and decisions made for us to a large degree. Lockdown was lockdown. We were all working from home. There were rules about how we could live, what we could and could not do, and that was that.
But the “easing” of Lockdown is far from easy. I am noticing increasing degrees of conflict, anxiety and tension around me, in the street and in my work and social circles. I have experienced some of it myself. Now there is so much more latitude to choose our own path, so our respective paths diverge more and we can easily find ourselves in disagreement with another. Risk appetites vary; what constitutes comfortable or safe or acceptable, differs and we are ripe for degrees of antagonism that are a far cry from the “in it together” mantra that we were chanting or at least dreaming of during Lockdown.
So the enquiry into psychological safety seems a good one, especially if it opens up the possibility for enhanced understanding of the multitude of perspectives this will surely need to take into account. The answers are complex and multi-faceted, I have no doubt, but one thing that strikes me is how now more than ever, there is a need for organisations to pay attention to what Margaret Hefferman in her famous TedTalk described as “social capital” or “mutual reliance, an underlying sense of connectedness that builds trust.” I have long been an advocate of relationship as a means of building effective teams and healthy organisational cultures. It is a big part of our work at Neon. Now, more than ever, I think leaders and managers need to be paying attention to relationship and social capital and exploring ways of building connection and belonging in this newly distributed, scattered, more virtual workplace. This, I believe, is a road that could lead to increased trust and a greater sense of safety.
The acute phase of the crisis is behind us — for the time being at least. But the long road back to life as we want it, is stretching for miles ahead in a way that many are finding daunting and relentless. Now is not the time to take our eye off the boil but rather to be creative in how we build our social capital and look after our people.