Psychological Safety

Source: Using the Westrum typology to measure culture

OKRs put an emphasis on transparency, shared risk, departmental and cross-functional teams, frequent conversations, and learning via retrospectives. This makes the OKR framework and OKR software an obvious fit for generative Organizations, plus those that aspire to move towards being more generative.

OKRs are an obvious fir for generative organizations

Psychological Safety

Google is not just the most famous company to adopt OKRs, they are also responsible for reinforcing the link between Psychological Safety and team performance. Over a two year period Google conducted over 200 interviews with employees and looked at more than 250 workplace performance attributes in over 180 different Google teams.

What they found was “who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.”

The 5 attributes that Googles best performing had were:

Psychological safety
Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?

Dependability
Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?

Structure & clarity
Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?

Meaning of work
Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?

Impact of work
Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

Source: The five keys to a successful Google team

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological Safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. 

Its impact on team performance was first discovered by Amy Edmondson and published in her paper Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.

Psychological Safety is a belief that for there to be excellence in the workplace it needs to be safe to speak up. Employees that feel safe know that their voice is being heard and valued. They are not holding back or being nice for being nice sake. They feel that it is safe to be honest and direct, and occasionally have conflict is normal and not avoided.

If you have Psychological Safety present you will have a climate where employees can freely speak up, share ideas, concerns, questions or share mistakes and problems. Employees are not worried or even scared about how people think. They don’t fear how what they are going to say will be received by their team.

Symptoms of low levels of Psychological Safety

Here are some signs and symptoms that your employees don’t feel psychologically safe:

• Team members do not ask many questions during meetings.
• Team members don’s share or own up to mistakes or blame others.
• There are few or no difficult conversations.
• There are dangerous ‘hot-button’ topics and these are avoided.
• Leaders / managers dominate meeting discussions.
• Feedback is not openly and frequently given or requested.
• Colleagues are not asking one another for help when they need it.
• There is rarely any conflict, disagreements or differing points of view.

OKRs and Psychological Safety

There is a clear overlap between generative organisations that are characterised by effective ‘information flow’ and a need for psychological safety in teams.

Adopting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is about more than using a specific goal format. OKRs are about adopting a way of working that aligns with generative organisational, agile working and safe company culture. With OKRs:

• The mission and committed goals need to come first.
• It should be safe to speak up, discuss, debate and even argue about which goals matter most.
• It needs to be safe to share ideas and prioritise activities that will serve the committed goals above all else.
• It needs to be safe to openly share goals, progress, plans, priorities, and problems not just in your team, but with everyone, without fear.
• It needs to be safe to share mistakes and learn from them.
• And of course, it needs to be safe to be ambitious, fail and learn.

This is why OKRs are as much about transforming culture and establishing healthy workplace behaviors and habits as they are about embedding a system and tool for managing goals—a process our OKR trainers excel in guiding.

Useful further reading

This is a really important and interesting topic that can and will have a profound impact on culture and performance – as well as overall performance management. Here’s further information that may help you.

• Creating Psychological Safety at work 
• Psychological Safety in a hybrid workplace 
• Check your Psychological Safety