“Month On Month” In Your People Practice

The farther I get into writing my book “People Before Tech - The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teams in the Digital Age”, the more some things become evident. 

One, and the crux of the issue, is how crucial it is that we elevate the concept of “team” where we obsess with it enough to want to better its dynamic, but then, and equally important- how needed it is that we all intensely understand the topic of Psychological Safety as a “live” lever for performance. Live.

What behaviours it contains, both positive (e.g. speaking up) and negative (e.g. impression management) but more importantly still, what can be done to improve it (work on creating a People Practice and increase EQ). 

These are deceptively simple realisations and in a sense, the extreme relatability of the topic of Psychological Safety and Team are both their doing and their undoing, as there isn’t one professional out there who doesn’t completely “get it” when we say “team is family” and “Psychological Safety is when that team can do magic together” but often the “getting it” stays at “A-ha!” level.

This is partly because we have nearly no practice at all doing anything about the team’s wellbeing and partly because we feel so powerless to reduce some of what I call our “human debt” (all the bits we left unsolved regarding our employees’ happiness), so, even people who get the concept intently, who understand that where we lack Psychological Safety we can’t expect performance, they often remain at the awareness level.

“Well now I know” is good, but it isn’t nearly good enough. Reading enough Forbes article mentioning Prof Dr Amy Edmondson’s work and not reading her books, or devising a bespoke plan for your own People Practice is not good enough. Realising Psychological Safety matters and will make or break your productivity, counts, but is not good enough. 

As we have to tell the teams we work with at PeopleNotTech, even after taking the major step further of using our team solution for a while and finding out exactly how your specific team does on major elements of Psychological Safety, with cold hard data, not speculation or theory, all that is still “now I know” and it counts, but it is definitely not good enough.

What matters is what happens next. What you do with that information. Be it the mere awareness of the topic or the detailed awareness of your particular team’s wellbeing. How you put that to good use in a People Practice that is solid and sustainable. This is why the bulk of our work has been around deconstructing the concept into elements, components and behaviour indicators. So you can do something about them. So you can affect change. So you can see growth. 

In that spirit, we’ve just launched last week a simple feature I’ve been very excited about - we call it “Month-on-month” but of course the exact period is immaterial. What matters is that, visually, on the dashboard, the team leader can show the team how their group dynamic has changed from one period to another based on what they answered. The mere ability to see progress does wonders to the teams we tested this on.

Chief amongst the benefits - it reinforces the importance of making Psychological Safety a priority accompanied by a regular habit.

Even better, it reiterates the need for engagement from the part of the team (if there haven’t been enough questions answered about say - “Courage” or “Resilience” then those elements will be visually missing once the team leader clicks on “month on month”) and as a product designer, I find that a far more subtle and effective nudge than asking people to answer questions directly. 

Over the last year, we’ve had teams ask us for ways to remind their teams to answer questions and we’ve tested and considered and trialled many of the traditional ones from notifications of all descriptions, to incentives but to me, the holy grail of engagement is when we manage to create the impetus in the mind of the respondent not demand they do it, (or even ask them nicely). As such, our Rewards system plays a part, but I am a lot more excited personally about any means of increasing true engagement and encouraging personal responsibility hence any visual cue to achieve a personal and unprompted “I should answer more questions” realisation beats any kind of external push. 

Another blessed effect of the “Month on Month” feature is, that if the team leader does nothing else when they show the Dashboard in the team meeting but lets people look at the components and discuss the impression management alarms; then clicks on Month-on-Month and shows how they changed from last month then sets a Team Action together with the rest of the team, that is absolutely enough to keep them improvement-oriented and provide them with a clear human-to-do to carry to their Trello or Jira or team to-do list. These 3 simple actions compound to a solid People Practice. 

If a team leader then also spends time working on improving their EQ, is diligent about their 1-on-1’s and stays obsessed with their team then that’s just gravy and even if not, there is a very good chance that they can start seeing an increase in Psychological Safety by just doing the above. 

And here’s the kicker. “An increase in Psychological Safety” sounds like such a modest goal and it is anything but. For any team and therefore any organisation, to have a lick of hope to compete with the Silicon Valley darlings and the DevOps champions who, despite this VUCA-on-steroids recession climate will keep whizzing past while the rest stagnates or even disappears, that is a lofty and sufficient goal.  

So don’t leave Psychological Safety at “A-ha!” levels without any action or view of its never-done, always-evolving and “live” nature. You can’t afford to. 

Stay sane, grow more EQed and focus on your month-on-month People Practice to get Psychologically Safe. 

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