The Optimal Work Environment — Culture & Psychological Safety | Happier Work

Foreign public speakers and best-selling authors stay tuned to hear Paul Krismer and Jackson teach the practical science behind happiness and success. What is the optimal environment? Let’s break down this question. What do we mean by environment? When we say work environment, what does that refer to?

Well, there’s far more than just your physical environment or your office or even your work-from-home setup. You need to think about your cognitive environment. It’s the interpersonal, psychological, and emotional environment in which you work, and that is the environment that really matters. So, what are the ideal, optimal conditions and circumstances for work to be done?

Now, this seems like a really big question that really gets at the heart of a high-performing culture. And there’s actually a clear answer. This is not just sort of hearsay, or some anecdotes, or here’s what this business guru or whatever thinks. There is actually a common pattern amongst the best-performing teams and organizations. But before I teach you about that, just think about your experience.

When do you do your best work on the most effective teams you’ve been on? Or when you’ve been with leaders or managers that you really enjoyed working with and you felt like you were doing great work? Like, what was the dynamic, and what was the feeling? That’s important. What was the feeling? So, you probably felt I was supportive, open, maybe committed, maybe even inspired. What you probably felt was this optimal environment.

Thankfully, we don’t have to rely on just personal experience to understand this. Google did one of the most in-depth real-world studies of culture and business environment ever done. They called it Project Aristotle. They basically set out to first evaluate which teams were most effective. They measured effectiveness based on executive evaluation, team leader evaluation, team member evaluation, and then sales performance. So, you have this sort of top-down, bottom-up, and middle manager level qualitative analysis. Then you have some of the quantitative as well with the sales performance.

They assessed 180 teams and they looked at team composition and team dynamics. What researchers found, and there’s a direct quote from Google, is that what really mattered was less about who is on the team and more about how the team worked together. And there were five key ingredients they found for the optimal work environment, optimal work culture. Number five was impact, a feeling that the work you’re doing is making a difference to the organization. Number four was meaning, feeling a sense of purpose. Number three was structure and clarity within the team, so clear communication of who owns what. Number two, it’s dependability, taking ownership of doing quality, timely work. And then number one, which is the key principle that this video is about, psychological safety.

Again, quoting the researchers at Google here, psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. So, in a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish them for making a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

So, think back to how you answered before, when I asked you, what was your optimal work environment? How did it feel? That’s what this concept is, psychological safety. That is the key to effective teams and effective work in organizations. How do you create it? As we’ll talk about for the rest of this video, Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School was kind of the first person to introduce this concept. And she said there are three ways to cultivate it.

First, is to frame work as a learning experience, more than like a problem to solve. You should treat it as this ongoing learning experiment. Second, you should acknowledge your own fallibility as a leader, be open about making mistakes. And then the third is just to be curious. Ask a lot of questions. Foster an open, inquisitive culture within your team, within your department, within your work itself, and encourage other people to be that way.

Foreign. So, what is at the heart of psychological safety? We define this as feeling comfortable taking risks, feeling like your team basically will catch you and support you if you fail, rather than let you drop. And it’s really then about vulnerability. The feeling you want in your team or in your work is: Hey, this is all really comfortable and engaging. And I just feel like people are open and supportive about what I have to say and what I have to contribute.

As you think about cultivating this, I found this checklist from Daniel Coyle’s Culture Code about groups with high psychological safety to be very helpful. He said that whether it was a military group, a movie studio production company, or even an inner-city school, these were some of the common qualities that teams with high psychological safety showed. So, they had close physical proximity, often in circles. They made profuse amounts of eye contact. They had a lot of physical touch, a lot of short, energetic exchanges. They had high levels of mixing, people talking to one another, very few interruptions, but a lot of questions. Intense, active listening, humor, laughter, small little courtesies like thank-yous.

And what Dan writes is, he found that spending time in these groups was almost physically addictive. That feeling of safety, of psychological safety, of acceptance and openness, and support is critical. So, now that you know what the pattern is, you can think about how to create it.

And one last concept that I want to give you with that is thinking about things in terms of tough love. Because an important part of psychological safety is understanding that this does not just mean like it’s all sunshine and rainbows for lack of a better term. And we’re not going to be critical. We’re not going to hold people to high standards. That’s not the case at all. You are absolutely holding people to a high standard, but you’re doing it in a supportive way. So that people feel like if I make a mistake, that’s totally acceptable, but it’s unacceptable not to learn from it.

So, it’s not that you’re encouraging failure, but rather you’re acknowledging that failure is a part of doing exceptional, extraordinary work. And you’re going to learn from that failure and encourage others to be better. This last idea of tough love came from an essay I was just writing. And I said, what do a Zen master and an NBA head coach have in common? Well, they were both great leaders and they both established an environment of psychological safety.

Here’s a couple quotes that I think tie that together. The first one was Chip England, who is an assistant coach, describing one of the greatest NBA coaches of all time, Greg Popovich. He said, he delivers two things over and over. He’ll tell you the truth with no reservations, and then he’ll love you to death. The second quote was a student talking about Zen teacher, Suzuki Roshi, who is one of the great Buddhist teachers, and he always used to tell his students, “Each of you is perfect the way you are, and you could use a little improvement.” In both of those cases, those little quotes are a microcosm of this idea of what of tough love but in psychological safety.

Because again, it’s not that you’re saying, “Oh, you’re perfect. You don’t need to improve anything.” It’s not that you’re deceiving or telling people they don’t need to get better and not holding them to a high standard. You’re doing that, right? You’re encouraging them to be their best, but you’re doing it in a caring, open, supportive way, and that is how you create this optimal environment, right? One of psychological safety where people are held to a high standard, but they’re held to it not out of fear or out of the intense competition but because they’re cared for and supported.

And in doing that, you will unlock the power of vulnerability and create the optimal environment for you to do your best work ever. Thank you.