The upstream fix most AU and NZ psychosocial risk programs are missing.
Programs that treat psychological safety like a feel-good culture initiative have got it wrong. For real impact on reducing and managing psychosocial risks, behaviours and skills that support psychological safety should be positioned as a core senior leadership capability. Ensuring leaders are capable of creating and maintaining high levels of psychological safety within and around their teams is the human factor needed to put well-intentioned policy on psychosocial risk control into practice.
Why low levels of reported harm can be misleading.
A climate of low psychological safety is linked to both higher harm and higher underreporting. When employees are experiencing a psychosocial hazard coupled with low psychological safety, confidence to report or request support is reduced. Prolonged or frequent exposure to the psychosocial hazard then becomes more likely to cause real harm. This will be compounded if there is a learned expectation that managers will be unresponsive or indifferent, such that reporting feels pointless.
Low reporting of psychosocial hazards should be read, potentially, as a signal of poor visibility, not as evidence of low underlying risk. Professor Amy C. Edmondson’s well known 1996 study on how often nursing teams reported medication errors found something counter intuitive. Strikingly, she found the teams that reported more near misses regarding drug prescription, had fewer actual medication errors.
Edmondson found that the teams with better higher psychological safety and stronger leader relationships, felt safer disclosing mistakes. Conversely, the teams with poor psychological safety, reported fewer errors even though their rate of actual incorrect drug administration was higher. Here, nurses had been conditioned by prior encounters where speaking up meant being ‘put on trial’ for speaking up. This meant the true error rate in teams with low psychological safety may have been just as high, it simply wasn’t visible.
When the climate is psychologically safe enough to encourage or even reward reporting, it enables better traction on risk management. When psychological safety is low, visible major incidents are more likely to sit atop a larger, unreported, base of minor incidents in the pattern of the ‘Bird safety triangle’. An organisation that sees or hears of very few near misses risks simply being blind to the hazards accumulating below the surface.
Why psychological safety has to start at the top.
Psychosocial risk control frameworks are only as strong as the human systems that feed them. When capability to build and sustain psychological safety sits upstream, it becomes more than a culture initiative. The result is a genuine early warning system, giving organisations real visibility of psychosocial risks and a greater ability to act before harm is realised. Working on your upstream psychological safety capability should be a genuine strategic priority for psychosocial risk mitigation.
Intentional work on psychological safety as a core leadership capability is a substantive control measure for psychosocial risks. When psychological safety is high and led from the top, the framing of reporting shifts from a negative compliance metric to a genuine indicator of continuous improvement.
Here are three places to start, all of them upstream.
- Elevate leadership awareness of and capability to model psychologically safe behaviours. Do your leaders know what these are or what they look like in practice? This will reduce the gap between psychosocial risk control frameworks and how they are actually being used.
- Build the conversation skills and confidence to name, navigate and lead discussions around psychosocial hazards. This will assist leaders to have the high quality conversations needed to activate real problem solving and avoid the experience of employees feeling that their report is inconsequential.
- Ensure there is clarity and a shared understanding of what psychological safety is and what it’s not and how it differs from psychosocial risks. This acknowledges that one can influence the other without treating them as the same thing, keeping the psychological safety skill build separate from psychosocial risk mitigation.
Each of these three starting points comes back to the same idea, making conversations work. Real psychological safety grows through the everyday quality of conversations leaders have with their people, not through policy alone. That is the belief PeopleTalking is built on.
The conversation health check every leader should be doing.
Every leader believes their conversations are working. This health check tells you whether they actually are.According to SafeWork Australia, the most commonly cited psychosocial hazards in the workplace are:
Hazard identification, consultation, risk assessment and incident reporting all depend on the quality of the human conversations underneath them. Yet few leaders stop to consider how much their own conversations shape that standard.
The Conversation Health Check is a short reflection you work through on your own. Ten prompts across three areas. You score yourself honestly against each one, then see where the biggest opportunities are to make your conversations work better.
Enter details for your Conversation Health Check guide.
About the author.
Bronwen Downie is a facilitator of Team Dynamics and Sustainable Team Performance at PeopleTalking, a specialist team and leadership consultancy built on a single premise, making conversations work. PeopleTalking helps leaders and teams build the trust, safety and everyday conversations that drive real performance.
References
(Australian psychosocial safety climate research (Dollard, Uni SA))
Zadow, A., Dollard, M. F., et al. (2017). PSC predicting healthcare injuries and underreporting.
Cited in Sinval et al., ScienceDirect.
Dollard, M. F. & Bakker, A. B. Foundational PSC theory papers (Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology).
Probst, T. M. & Estrada, A. X. (2010). “Accident under-reporting among employees. Testing the moderating influence of psychological safety climate and supervisor enforcement of safety practices,” Accident Analysis & Prevention.
Bird, F. E. (1969). Management Guide to Loss Control. Atlanta, GA, Institute Press.
Edmondson, A. C. (1996). Learning from mistakes is easier said than done. Group and organizational influences on the detection and correction of human error. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32(1), pages 5 to 28.
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