In today’s workforce, there is no ‘standard’ working arrangement. Long gone are the days of peak hour commuting, inflexible hours in the office, and bumping into colleagues you barely recognise in the shared kitchen. Instead, we’ve settled into home offices, flexible hours, hybrid arrangements, and Zoom calls with our slippers on.
This transformation across many job sectors has been largely positive. But, leading a business with a dispersed workforce has implications on workplace culture, cohesion, collaboration, and leadership trust. This, in turn, can have an impact on your employer brand and the appeal of your business. We know that in addition to salary and benefits, workplace culture influences job seekers’ recruitment decisions. Despite not often knowing what psychological safety is, many candidates seek these traits in a workplace.
The importance of trust in leadership
Last year, Springfox released a report examining the impact of COVID-19 on Australian workplaces. The report found that alongside high stress levels attributed to new ways of working, employees indicated that their trust in leadership was eroding. 32% of staff reported lowered levels of trust towards leadership as a result of the pandemic. In contrast, when asked about their perception of staff’s trust levels, leaders believed only 16.5% of staff experienced decreased trust.
Inevitably, this scenario has a detrimental impact on employee wellbeing, workplace culture, and employer brand. This puts organisations at risk of increased turnover and, consequently, draining resources on recruitment and onboarding of new talent.
In an ideal scenario, new hires will be invited into an environment where leadership trust is high. This will enable employees to feel they can trust and be trusted by their employer, which in turn has a direct impact on engagement, innovation, productivity, and ultimately the business’ bottom line.
The importance of psychological safety
Psychological safety is a vital ingredient for a high-trust culture, and it’s something recruiters should promote when filling job vacancies. Showing staff that it’s safe to take risks and think creatively without fear of admonition can improve the climate inside an organisation. It can be the defining factor that compels you to either keep your head down or feel willing to speak up and share ideas.
A workplace that promotes and nurtures psychological safety could be hugely attractive to top performing candidates. A psychologically safe workplace offers staff the opportunity to work independently, feel comfortable voicing an idea, or suggest change. Rewarding employees who speak up in the first place is something that could be very appealing to many job seekers.
How do they coexist?
At Springfox, we look at leadership trust and psychological safety as two separate but related concepts. Psychological safety is a cultural concept experienced at a group level, while leadership trust is very much based on individual experience and personal perception. A high-trust environment will allow staff to innovate, but psychological safety means knowing there’s no punishment if something goes wrong. It also means that, in addition to trust, there is a culture of willingness to experiment, fail, learn, and persist.
As businesses compete for talented candidates, recruiters should highlight organisational aspects driven by psychological safety to attract top-tier talent. Psychological safety can have a lasting positive impact on an organisation and its people and can be measured and assessed. It also enables staff to perform at their best. Feeling confident and supported by leadership allows employees to try new ways of working or to test new processes without fear of failure.
In organisations with high levels of psychological safety and leadership trust, innovation and creative thinking are often showcased and celebrated openly, even when the outcome is less than what was intended. When this happens, experimentation and independence become ingrained in workplace culture. Organisations don’t thrive unless people are willing to offer discretionary effort, which a fear-based culture doesn’t allow for.
How it affects your employer brand
To differentiate from competitors and build employer brand, employers should offer employees opportunities to develop personal resilience. Encouraging them to develop routines and techniques to manage stress and build resilience work for remote and hybrid staff too. Recruiters looking to hire during the pandemic should consider heavily featuring these practices. They are a great indicator of company culture that you can point to when discussing the business with a candidate.
Highlighting and acknowledging the value of psychological safety and leadership trust to candidates will help improve a business’ reputation and attract creative, daring, and bold recruits. Traits like compassion, trust, and the ability to innovate are all characteristics that will motivate job seekers, and that will enable the business to stand out from their competitors.
Stuart Taylor is the Chief Executive Officer and founder of Springfox. Since 2003, Stuart has engaged and inspired more than 20,000 people globally through his workshops, keynotes and conference presentations.
A diagnosis of brain cancer in 2002 led Stuart on a personal journey back to health. Stuart became a strong advocate for incorporating cultural practices into organisations to nurture well-being. In 2003 he founded The Resilience Institute in Australia – now Springfox. His diversity of qualifications in psychology, finance, IT and aeronautical engineering bring a breadth of credibility and perspective to client situations. His purpose is to help people and organisations shift into a more compassionate space in order to reach sustainable high performance.