How Psychologically Safe is your Workplace?

The benefits of a psychologically safe workplace are many:

Business Critical benefits include:

- Reduced lost time costs

- Reduced Presenteeism costs

- Reduced potential for workers compensation costs

- Reduced attrition costs

- Reduced loss of key skills in the workforce

- Reduced retraining of new staff costs

- Compliance with new legislation

Nice to Have benefits include:

- Positive work culture

- People are our most important asset

- Happy workers are productive workers

- People looking forward to work

- Staff going home with a good sense of achievement and with the energy to live their “home” lives to the full.

Other Business related benefit are:

- Improved innovation and creativity leading to potential new business

- Improved leadership through feedback from staff

- Improved customer interfaces through engaged staff

- Feeling of purpose and team unity

Whatever your KPIs are, improving the psychosocial health and safety of the organisation will improve them.

If your staff have a sense of purpose and trust in their manager/leader and colleagues, there will be demonstrable benefits in the business performance of the organisation and a greater quality of service to your customers, whether they are internal or external.

Sharing concerns and ideas will also provide improved processes which will result in cost savings and potentially improved margins.

Learning from mistakes will ensure that time spent correcting errors is reduced and prevent recurrence of them.

These are benefits that will be easy to measure, as they are reflected in your KPIs. However, other benefits, such as improved attitudes of staff leading to a happier workforce will mean that performance will be improved and staff will enjoy their work and whole life. Employees will have a greater energy coming into their work and, at end the day, to enjoy their “other” life. This is less easy to quantify, but will be reflected in a lower attrition rate and lower sick leave, which will impact the bottom line over time.

A great starting point is to assess the level of the psychological safety in your organisation. Through InteChange, you can take a short survey across all employees and discover where you currently stand. With these results, we can help you develop a pathway to improve this and radically improve your KPIs. It is amazing what the results of the subsequent survey, 3 or 6 months later, will be and bottom line improvements have been made.

For more details about psychosocial health and people focused leadership contact InteChange through this website, or direct message me on Linked In.