Workplace Wellbeing is the topic of the week for me.
I’ll start by reinforcing that gym memberships, meditation, morning teas, etc are great. Workplace wellbeing is so much more though.
Do people feel safe to speak?
Whether it’s a new idea or to ask someone to stop a behaviour – do people feel safe to raise it without fears of ramifications or being laughed at?
Can they provide legitimate feedback without having a superior just grunt at them that their answer isn’t good enough?
Can difficult topics be discussed without emotions escalating to name calling and other un-helpful actions?
Before I go further, I am not a registered psychologist but having worked in a number of environments I think I’m more than qualified to have an opinion on psychological safety – as are all of you, by the way. Psychological safety is about having an environment where topics, mistakes, questions can be all discussed, without dire consequences, belittling, or other behaviours that are termed punishment.
I remember a case meeting where we (all the nurses and doctors available) were discussing the case of a man who had presented with what turned out to be hyperglycaemia. This was a person who had been contracted to provide services in a war zone. Some mistakes were made during the resuscitation of said person. Could it have gone better? Absolutely. Did the patient die? No. But what I witnessed was almost a ‘shark feeding frenzy’ – the peers of the person who was in charge all but tore him apart. That was a case of being psychologically UNSAFE.
What most of us learnt from this example, was not to own up to mistakes – cover them over and if you can’t keep it from the attention of others, certainly DO NOT allow the case study to be presented as a learning opportunity to others. Not a greatly supportive healthcare community.
Then, before I left Defence, as part of the promotion course I co-ordinated, we would host an officer each course session, who came to talk about healthy work environments and aviation safety. He was the Executive Officer at a unit when a great tragedy occurred, killing nine members of the Australian Defence Force. The root cause of the accident was a missing split pin and an attitude within in the unit that allowed substandard maintenance of aircraft to be accepted. This gentleman talked about how easily complacency can sneak in. How easily a workplace can become toxic.
How can we improve if we cannot examine mistakes, ask questions and float new ideas? How do we progress? What can you learn from my experiences?
