This is how we built psychological safety in our team — Part 1

by Faye Koukia-Koutelaki, User Research Consultant

A group of people chatting while having a hot beverage. The card reads ‘Building psychological safety. Part 1. By Faye Koukia-Koutelaki’.

Psychological safety. Every now and then this topic becomes the most popular talking point at work and online. A buzz word people use to get LinkedIn likes and brownie points for doing the right thing by their teams. But talking about psychological safety, and creating or enhancing it, are two very different things.

I’m Faye, a user researcher and former counselling psychologist who’s passionate about psychological safety. In this 2-part-blog, I explain how I understand psychological safety, and what I’ve done to try and help my team feel a little safer and more supported at work.

Defining psychological safety

Let’s start from the beginning. According to Frazier et al. (2017) psychological safety is a shared understanding that members of a team can authentically share their thoughts and feelings.

It creates a space where they feel able to:

• ask questions
• admit mistakes and discuss learnings, while looking for better alternatives for the future
• challenge each other in a constructive way that helps them improve and supports the team

Above all, for me, psychological safety lets people be their authentic selves and I’ve always felt it’s important to encourage that.

Understanding the problem — how might we best support user researchers at Kainos?

I like to observe. As a researcher it’s something that comes naturally to me. So, over the past few years, I have been observing my team and others. What I have noticed is that many of my colleagues were struggling to share their frustrations or ask for support.

This can happen because researchers’ work can expose them to sensitive, and sometimes traumatic, information and situations. For example, interviewing people who are dealing with a health issue and talking about their experience of identifying available support.

During a conversation around safeguarding in user research, it became clear that we needed to better understand and define the needs of user researchers. Only then could we identify the best and easiest ways to support them.

I decided to take action. First, set up a digital whiteboard and wrote down our problem statement:

“How might we better understand what’s going on with user researchers, what our needs are, and what the best or easiest ways are to meet these needs?”

After discussing my idea with our discipline lead and getting his approval, I shared the board with the rest of our team. Our new project could begin.

A design thinking approach to psychological safety

The design thinking framework is a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem solving that can lead to innovation. It follows a flow of:

1) understand
2) explore
3) materialise (for more information you can check out this article about design thinking from Nielsen Norman group)

We decided to use a design thinking approach to tackle this problem. To do this, we:

• empathised- by running a series of workshops to get insights on all the areas we were finding challenging as user researchers
• defined- organising all these insights to help us clearly define the problem
• ideated- through a second series of workshops to help us identify all the possible ways we could get support

We then organised our potential solutions using a value and effort matrix, asking questions like:

• What’s the one thing we could do to have the biggest impact on our working reality?
• How can we best support user researchers while making use of the skillset our team already has?
• How can we keep the budget low while still creating real change?

Identifying the quick wins and user needs

This design thinking approach made it easy to identify our quick wins.

From our value and effort matrix, it was clear that user researchers had a core need for support and access to information.

As consultants, we work with a wide range of clients and on different projects. This means that each project involves a different organisation and dynamic. It also means that researchers are often not aware that others may be facing the same challenges as them, or that they may have found effective ways to respond to those challenges.

So, we decided that we needed to create communication pathways to help user researchers:

• express their thoughts and feelings
• ask for and offer support
• share their own experiences

The solution — a peer support group for user researchers

So that was it! I decided to introduce a weekly peer support group for user researchers. A call where people could drop in to say hi and connect with each other. There would be no agenda, and no preparation. (Well okay, maybe a little bit of preparation for me or whoever runs the call on that week).

Stay tuned for my second blog post in this 2 part series. I look forward to sharing how we organised the group, its impact so far and how you can shape psychological safety with your own peers.

You can now read part 2 here.

References

Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta‐analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=management_fac_pubs