• Agile Coach

Can I make it to say this now?

By now we are used to working from our home office – read desk-in-bedroom. And of course, that’s really something different from meeting physically on a regular basis. Through your screen you peer at your colleagues. You try to gauge the mood. “What do they think of me? Can I say here in Zoom that I think completely differently? Can I make it to say this now?”, it shoots through your mind. You hesitate to open your mouth. Working online does something to psychological safety. So how do you ensure that an environment of trust is also created online?

Why psychological safety is so important when working online

To bring it back into focus: psychological safety is the degree to which the team is perceived as safe for interpersonal risk-taking. A team climate where there is a lot of psychological safety allows team members to spend their mental energy on creativity. They are willing to take the risk of suggesting different, new ideas and doing experiments. Without fear of failure and negative consequences.

Uncertainty

These are uncertain times. We are all searching how to deal with it. We would like to counteract uncertainty, which is very natural behavior. We do this by, on the one hand, putting our energy into self-preservation and, on the other hand, by actually carrying the burden together.

For starters, energy you spend on self-preservation cannot be spent on coming up with creative solutions to deal with that uncertainty. You are building a line of defense as long as you come out unscathed. So that doesn’t help create psychological safety.

The sharing concerns helps reduce stress and makes uncertainty more bearable. With mutual sharing of your concerns, you all put yourself in a vulnerable position. And this vulnerable attitude does help build more psychological security.

You find that online it is more difficult to broach sensitive topics. Meetings are often used very purposefully and quickly do not provide a space for sharing concerns and other feeling issues. And video calling and chatting are also a bump in my experience. Want to build psychological safety? So then this bump must be settled.

Unknown

A second barrier is unfamiliarity with each other. We increasingly find ourselves in the situation where we have never met new colleagues in person. And I don’t know how you look at it, but I still find it easier to get to know someone in person. Not that online is impossible. But that does require conscious handling of your online meetings.

To build psychological safety , you need to know what you have on each other and can expect from each other. By getting to know each other well, you create this understanding, and it doesn’t happen as naturally online.

Less transparency

At a distance, it is less easy to see what everyone is doing. But more importantly: how people think about things. Whereas in a group that is physically together you quickly sense the undertones and notice what is not being said, that is much more difficult online. As a result, it is difficult to sense whether you can take a personal risk or not.

So how do you make sure you face these dangers? Read more about that in this article.

Latest trainings

Do you grant yourself a boost in the field of psychological safety? Need more tools, knowledge and experience? Then sign up for Scrum Academy’s latest Masterclass in Psychological Safety. Are you a board member, manager or team leader looking for the ideal in-company solution? Check out the Agile Team Development training and develop your ideal program together with Scrum Academy.