By: Coleen Glessner, Executive Vice President, Quality, Ethics, and Compliance
As leaders, it’s important that colleagues feel that they can share their voice, ask any questions, and raise concerns, and that our environment is open, transparent, and allows for continuous dialogue.
At Emergent, our core value “Lead with Integrity,” is about establishing trust and confidence through a foundation of ethics, quality, and compliance. We want our employees to feel empowered to raise anything, ask anything, and feel confident that their feedback, ideas, and insights will be acted on appropriately.
At the core of this environment is psychological safety. Psychological safety is the feeling of security and trust that comes from being around understanding and welcoming individuals. It’s when you can share your thoughts without fear or worry about being judged, criticized, or disregarded. Creating an environment of psychological safety is easier said than done, but imperative to building a culture of quality and compliance where everyone can lead with integrity.
Here are some of the things we’re doing to build and sustain psychological safety at Emergent:
Taking inspiration from other industries
As we work to cultivate psychological safety at Emergent, we’ve looked at best practices from other industries, and have spoken to leaders that study these concepts. Recently, Jason O. Harris, a decorated US Air Force officer and expert on organizational culture, spoke to our team about No Fail Trust™.
No Fail Trust™ is a concept developed from his military service and describes an environment where every team member understands the mission and is empowered to make important decisions. One of the things Jason spoke about is how in a combat aircraft, the loadmaster – often the lowest ranking, and possibly the youngest member of the flight crew – is trained to identify and communicate when there is an issue.
In his career, Jason can recall countless times when the loadmaster recommended a critical action that supported the safety of the entire crew and the overall success of the mission. When everyone is empowered to speak up and make decisions in service of our mission, we increase our ability to address potential risks.
Empowering people leaders
While senior leadership plays a role in setting the expectation of ethics, quality, and compliance as an organizational priority, people managers are critical to building an environment where everyone feels safe to raise concerns and questions. In fact, a survey from MIT Sloan and Novartis found that 80 percent of employees who reported an incident of unethical behavior did so to their line manager.
We know that people managers are often the first line of defense in fielding employee feedback and concerns, but how can we, as people managers, create psychological safety within our teams so they feel comfortable coming to us? Research from McKinsey found that a positive team climate – one in which team members value one another’s contributions, care about each other, and have input on how the team manages its work – is the most important factor of a team’s psychological safety. When people managers demonstrate supportive, consultative behaviors, while appropriately challenging their teams, they are more likely to have a positive team climate.
At Emergent, we invest in our people managers through ongoing training, candid conversations with our executive leadership team, and community building initiatives. This month, programming for our managers is focused on how people leaders can cultivate a high trust/high accountability environment. All managers are invited to participate in conversations about how to build trust, confidence, and a positive team climate at every level of the organization.
Listening to feedback, and taking action
In addition to programming for people managers, we’ve introduced channels for gathering feedback and providing open communication between leadership and employees at all levels of the organization.
One of the ways we’ve done this is by launching new technology in the form of an employee app for crowdsourcing questions and issues. Through the app, every employee at Emergent has access to anonymously ask a question, or upvote others questions they’d like to have addressed. Our executive management team addresses the top questions and themes and reviews every question to make sure we’re acting on any issues or feedback.
In addition to this, we’ve hosted listening sessions with small groups throughout the organization to hear perspectives on what’s working, what we can be doing better, and how we can best support employees. We are committed to doing all these things. And most importantly, we will communicate the actions we’re taking to address concerns when they do come up. Through these actions, our goal is to ensure that the right mechanisms are in place to ensure that employees across the organization feel psychologically safe and are equipped and empowered to lead with integrity.