The companies that invest in psychological safety today, will win tomorrow.

While we now understand that psychological safety, or the idea that you won’t be punished if you make a mistake at work, is the biggest catalyst for breakthrough innovation, how can a company build that at scale? Psychological safety at its core revolves around trust. And so, if we can create the channels that increase trust amongst employees, we can set the stage for psychological safety to flourish. Jam is the solution doing just that.

Think Tom Hanks in the 1988 classic Big.

Remember the scene when fancy corporate partner Paul (John Heard) is pitching the building-that-turns-into-robot toy that will capitalize on the growing industry trend of action-figure sales? He’s in a crispy suit in front of the CEO and other colleagues, armed with a detailed white board & tantalizing financial projections, promising the hockey-stick growth the company needs to stay relevant in the cut-throat toy market. Paul’s a hero, spewing a lot of jargon that carries the momentum no inferior colleague would ever dare to challenge. And so Paul finishes his pitch, the room goes wild with congratulations, and it seems like a done deal with the company in sure hands.

Until Josh (Tom Hanks) raises his hand and utters the words, “I don’t get it.”

In an environment that doesn’t encourage vulnerability, in a moment backed by the crushing weight of senior-level management doubling-down on a direction forward, Josh raises his five digits in an act of child-like curiosity and says “I don’t get it.”

I believe that scene, filmed 30 years ago, is representative of the single-biggest driver of success in today’s workplace.

What that scene represents is the idea of psychological safety, or the idea that you won’t be punished if you make a mistake at work.

Bit of a hyperbole to say that’s the most important thing? Eh — don’t take my word for it. Take Google’s. In their two-year study on team performance, it was revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety. Or take Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant’s word, who in his podcast, reveals that Trevor Noah & the Daily Show’s small creative team is able to pull off a show for millions of people four times a week largely because no employee is afraid of suggesting a bad joke. Or just hear from the guru herself Amy Edmondson who first coined the term psychological safety in 1999.

We’ve been taught that the companies with the best product or best customer service are the ones that will win in the marketplace. While that is not a crazy statement, we’re missing the point on what even gives companies the fighting chance to be able to produce the best product or offer the best customer services.

It is the psychological safety that allows for risk-taking, candid communication, and doubling-down on something you believe in. It’s the no-dumb-questions in practice and the child-like curiosity Josh exhibits which are the integral parts of the equation that leads to true innovation.

Therefore, the companies that invest in psychological safety today, will be the companies that win tomorrow.

We’re wired to need psychological safety. But we’re also wired to avoid it.

You can tip your hat to evolution for why we need psychological safety to thrive in the workplace. The workplace, historically and even more so today, is an uncertain and interdependent environment.

As Maslow taught us, in order to reach self-actualization and your full potential, you first need to feel safe in your environment. And so the logistics are simple: when we feel threatened in the workplace — the sales guy shot down your marketing campaign, the senior engineer questions your product management skills, your company-wide Slack message is met with silence — we sense fear and the evolutionary response shuts down our brain’s analytical processing and reverts to a ‘fight or flight’ mode. While that fight-or-flight reaction may save us in the house-is-burning-down situations, it handicaps the strategic thinking needed in today’s workplace, and prevents our brains from producing the innovative solution that companies in today’s economy need to win.

So, how do you get to the promise land of an environment rich in psychological safety?

As Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google, says,

“there is no team without trust.”

Makes sense. Except for the fact that building trust amongst employees, whether you’re a fast-growing tech startup or a Fortune 500 company, is about as easy as digging an elephant’s grave with a teaspoon.

While trust has always been an elusive thing, today’s society makes it that much harder to achieve. The combination of our natural tendency to avoid strangers, now combined with the fact that we increasingly rely on technology to navigate a lot of our social interactions, has put us on a high-speed track towards a crisis of connection.

19% of millennials say they don’t trust the people around them. That is bad news for employers because not only do millennials currently make up the largest percentage of the workforce, but they’re set to make up 50% by 2020. That’s next year folks. Which means we’ll have a significant percentage of the workforce operating in environments where they don’t even trust the people around them.

So if trust leads to psychological safety, and trust is a hard thing to achieve because of our natural tendency to avoid strangers, combined with the reality that we now rely on technology to navigate social experiences, then the real question is how can we build the channels that allow us to better understand the people we surround ourselves with on a daily basis.

Building those channels is harder than you think.

If you’re an employee that exists in a largish organization, you face three main barriers that make it really hard to connect meaningfully with the other humans you work alongside. Here’s why:

1. Who. The Dunbar Number tells us that our brains are incapable of managing relationships with more than 150 individuals. So if you’re an employee sitting at a Series B tech startup with 200 employees and set to double in size within the next year, or an employee sitting on a trading floor with 600 other traders, or an employee at your Fortune 100 company’s headquarters alongside thousands of other employees, how in God’s green earth do you know who is worth spending the energy on? Even more so, we operate in a world that is increasingly realizing the value of double opt-in experiences. So even if you want to get to know the stranger next to you, how do you know they want the same experience?
2. When. We as a society are collectively terrible at a few things. Most notably, email and commitment. And so, if you were to successfully figure out who in the company is compatible and who is also open to getting to know you, you still face the logistical headache of navigating one another’s busyness and the commitment to see through that interaction.
3. What. We know that meaningful conversations happen through a shared vulnerability, but our natural defense mechanisms make it hard to be vulnerable with strangers. So, if you were to successfully find the needle in the haystack, get double opt-in, and lock in a time on the calendar, what would you actually talk about that makes your time not only worthwhile, but likely for you to repeat this arduous process again and again? What information from your personal life can you comfortably introduce in your professional life that will allow you to build a rapport with your coworkers that will stand to enhance your professional accomplishments?

These three barriers prevent companies from planting the seeds that sow the trust necessary to build psychological safety.

But, if we can strip away these barriers, we can build a system which allows us to solve dynamic problems through fostering cooperative relationships. This system would successfully create a dialogue, building trust, between employees that otherwise would never exist.

Jam—facilitating more human connection in the workplace.

Some companies’ best efforts at facilitating the dialogue fall short at a happy hour or team retreat. Some think that modern employee-engagement surveys do the trick. Some get closer with lunch lottery programs or even random coffee chats. But very few, if any, implement an automated system that strips away the three barriers in a seamless experience all while providing actionable data back to business leaders on how to continually improve.

This is why Jam exists. Jam is a platform that integrates directly into an organization’s calendar system and intelligently schedules face-to-face connections between employees. Jam strips away the three barriers to trust by offering employees contextual connections on why they should connect with a certain employee, schedules ‘Jam Sessions’ based on an employee’s availability, and facilitates relevant talking points that fuel a more meaningful conversation. Jam does all of this while collecting first-of-its-kind data on how people are connecting within the workplace.

Employers look to Jam to help new employees feel welcomed on their first day, remote employees feel better connected to the rest of the team, and employees in different departments learn new skills from one another.

With Jam, we know that the sources of inspiration and discovery we need to move our careers forward can be found in the people that we show up and work alongside on a daily basis — we just have to figure out a way to connect with them.

It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that we connected meaningfully with each other more or less by default. We can use technology to figure it out again — especially now that we know what is at stake.

If Tom Hanks’ Josh didn’t raise his hand and let the team know he didn’t get Paul’s pitch, the world would have missed out on the robot that transforms into a prehistoric bug.

Jam is working to make sure companies today don’t miss out on their prehistoric-robot bugs of tomorrow.

If you believe your company could benefit from more psychological safety, drop us a line at hello@joinjam.io.