How healthy culture can drive psychological safety

A healthy work culture can empower employees and push productivity.

Furthermore, psychological safety can become much easier to achieve when the culture of an organisation is looked after.

Jade Green, people and culture specialist, joined The HR Leader to discuss why both are so important to a successful business.

HR Leader: “What are the best ways to build a strong work culture?”

Jade Green: “Culture isn’t bean bags and Powerades and pizza nights. Culture is what your people do when you’re not watching. Culture is habits, behaviours, and routines.”

“So, what you want to do is, when you’re creating a culture, you want to think about, what’s the way we want our people to roll? How do we teach them the actual habits, behaviours, routines, and actions that sit behind the way that we operate and the way that we think?”

Ms Green continued: “Rather than having junk words on a wall put together by marketing, if we can actually look at what do we really want our people to do, and talk to them in that regard, then you’re going to build a culture that the people know each day how to show up. They know how to make a decision.”

HR Leader: “What mistakes do organisations make in promoting an unhealthy culture at work?”

Jade Green: “They do a marketing version of their vision, mission, values that sounds great to a customer, that looks fabulous on a website or in a brochure, or it might even sound really sexy to employees coming in. But when they come in, they realise on the first day that none of the leaders live those virtues.

“They say integrity, yet they see the number one salesperson lying to a customer or omitting the details. And that salesperson is constantly praised because they’re the best salesperson. So, what we’re actually saying is, ‘We say this, but we actually praise this’.

“There’s a great book by Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are. And so the number one mistake that we make is we let somebody else decide what our vision, mission, values are, or we base it on what we think we should have, and not actually by who the leaders are able to show up as every single day and model the behaviour they want to see reflected back to them.”

HR Leader: “How can employers create a more psychologically safe workplace?”

Jade Green: “One of my clients we’re working with at the moment, we are going, ‘What’s one of the problems that our people have? What are some of the dramas that we’re having? We have people not turning up for shift, they’re having sick time, they’re needing to take time off, so we are missing people from the workforce.’

“And this is in a more labour-intensive role, and we’re like, ‘What’s the real problem there? What’s the problem behind the problem?’ It’s not that they don’t love work, it’s not that they don’t love us, there’s something else going on.

“Sitting down and having a conversation with these people, building true connection, building trust, building safety, having real honest conversations and letting them be seen, remembering the name of their kids, remembering the name of their partner, remembering what their problems were, and being able to have a real conversation with them, makes them feel safe to talk about it, and then we’re able to uncover the problem behind the problem.

“So, with a lot of them, the common problem is cost of living. Freaking out about mortgage rate price increases, and money is a problem, which causes stress, which in that area leads to sometimes drinking, which then leads to relationship dramas.

“We’re able to have this conversation and go, ‘We’re going to run a workshop for anyone who’s struggling with making ends meet at the moment, on how to run a budget for your household.’”

She added: “Just working on that, we get that base level line of safety for them. They’re able to show up more. They don’t have the rest of the drama. But the main thing there is that connection, and having a real conversation where they feel like they can share without judgement.”

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full audio conversation with Jade Green on 18 April is below, and the original podcast article can be found here.