Every organisation should have psychological safety champions if they will remain innovative and keep their creativity alive.
This among others was recommended at the Wellbeing in Nation Building and Organisational Xcellence (WINBOX) Culture champions breakfast buffet themed ‘Creating and Sustaining Psychological Safety in Today’s Workplace’.
The event, had HR professionals, people and culture executives, team leads, talent managers, and CEOs deliberating on how the workspace affects employees and the effect on the general society outside of the workspace.
Psychological safety is a shared belief by the workforce of an organisation that a workplace is safe from interpersonal risk, Deji Osasona, Psychotherapist, and founder of Winbox explained.
“It has to do with the way leaders, their subordinates, and even colleagues within a workforce relate with one another. Which includes being able to share feedback, open to suggestions, allowing mistakes and proper correction,” he said.
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Osasona mentioned that a lot of workplaces are psychologically unsafe today. A psychologically safe environment promotes employees’ creativity and productivity.
A Gallup poll on Nigerian workers revealed that only 12 percent of the workers are emotionally connected to their jobs, 65 percent are not engaged at all, and 23 percent are actively disengaged meaning they exude toxic emotions towards their work according. Osasona said the report was from 2014 and he held that in 2022 the figures will be higher.
“We need to do more at every level in an organization there should be a psychological safety champion that will lead to a chain reaction of changes in the organisation,” he said.
Ehia Erhabor, Chief operating officer of Interswitch, said an organisation’s culture is the behaviour of the most influential person in that organisation. He, therefore, encouraged organisations to have long-term perspectives in their policies to benefit the workforce.
Kaosarat Abdulkareem an HR expert said there’s a need to change organisational culture to being psychologically safe so that it can become a new normal in the DNA of any organisation.
“Psychologically safety should be the culture of every organisation. A lot of talents come into organisations with high ability and interest but end up leaving with low abilities and interest and this is a result of the operations, system, process, and communication style in such organisations as well as the structure of the organisation,” she said.
“I’ve learnt that everybody is a leader in their own right and the responsibility of organisational safety is not left to the leaders or management alone. But for every staff member, this can be done by meeting deadlines, being a good organisation citizen and following the rules and regulations of an organisation.”
