BLOGS & RESOURCES
Higher Purpose Podcast 92: Psychological Safety at Work with Adair Cates
What kind of energy do you bring into your workplace? Joining us today is Adair Cates, Self-Mastery Coach, Insight Facilitator, and Founder of First Lead You, and today we’re talking about employee experience, employee engagement, and the massive impact your workplace culture has not just on your organization, but on the people you serve.
Culture
Culture is the energy of the place and the people that you work with. It’s very intangible in a lot of ways, but one of Adair’s favorite questions to ask is: are you the type of person who lights up a room when you walk in or when you walk out?
When it comes to employee engagement and experience, it’s become really clear that when people feel inspired, cared for, and connected, they are willing to go to the ends of the earth for the organizations they work for. Conversely, think about how much time, energy, and money is wasted when your employees are unhappy. There’s so much more that can be generated from a positive place.
Ripple effects
Everything is connected. When the energy of the culture is good, then the energy of the people is good, and they’re going to be productive and engaged. You can tell that a company has a good internal culture by the way they treat their customers: take great care of your employees, and they’ll take great care of your people.
Psychological safety
What want psychological safety. If you’re a CEO or leader of a team, make sure that everybody feels like they can come to work, be themselves, and be fully accepted for that. If they can’t, they become stifled, and their full creative energy is no longer available to them.
So create that psychological safety by listening, believing that people inside your business are the best source of ideas, and taking out your ego. Once you become authoritarian and think you have all the best ideas, your culture will erode.
Engagement tools
Engagement tools are just that — tools. They aren’t solutions. So you can’t put something like TINYpulse in place and expect it to fix your culture. That’s like expecting a thermometer to bring down a fever. You need to have a solid, positive culture in place, and then measure it so you can make it next-level. You can’t just gather data without doing anything about it.
Happy companies
One of the organizations Adair was part of won an award for being the happiest company. Their CEOs had read a book called The Dream Manager about helping people achieve their personal goals at work.
They implemented this shift in the company and put a lot of energy on helping people achieve their personal goals, and as a result, people were so invested in the work they were doing that they went above and beyond all the time — not just for their roles, but for their team, and other teams in the organization.
There was a care and concern to help one another achieve their goals, which benefited not just themselves, but the business, too. They won Happiest Company through TINYpulse. They grew so much that they went from 65 employees to 100.
When people feel like they can show up as their full selves, it’s unbelievable what happens.
Final thoughts
Are you doing your best work? Are you being the greatest version of you? How are you becoming your best self every day? Because when we can be our best selves, we put ourselves in a position to make a massive positive impact for others.
Resources
Higher Purpose Podcast 91: The Pulse of Your Organization with David Niu
At any given moment, do you know the pulse of your organization? On the show today we have David Niu, a serial entrepreneur who, after a “careercation,” founded TINYpulse, which gives clients a pulse on how happy, frustrated, and burned out their employees are before they get that surprise two weeks’ notice out of the blue. We’re exploring the topic of employee experience and engagement, and how to make sure you’re creating a culture where your people can thrive. Listen to the full episode:
The Careercation
Burnt out by his own startup, David uprooted his family and bought one-way tickets to New Zealand. During this vacation, he had two main goals: to unplug and connect with his family, and to figure out what was next.
So he conducted a series of interviews with CEOs about their pain points, and from these interviews, a common theme emerged: the haunting feeling when someone would give them their two weeks’ notice out of the blue.
This became the inspiration for TINYpulse. What if we could take the pulse of our employees - in the moment - so leaders could get on top of issues ahead of time and resolve them collaboratively before they spin out of control?
Think tiny
Instead of one huge survey once a year, what about asking people one simple question at a time? For management, it’s much easier to get a picture of what’s going on as there’s much less noise than if you had asked 30 questions. It’s also easier to find themes and actually do something about it.
Characteristics of companies that flourish
One is the importance of recognition. Whether you use TINYpulse or something else, make sure that there are multiple avenues of giving each other recognition, and that it’s very easy to do.
The second thing is the perception of management transparency. One of the biggest drivers of how happy employees say they are is how transparent they believe management is. So David challenges leaders: given your role, how can you be more transparent?
Cheers for Peers
This TINYpulse feature allows colleagues to appreciate one another in real time. Recognition isn’t just a high five, it’s (1) What am I giving you recognition for, specifically? (2) What is the significance or impact of what you did? (3) How did it make me feel? Not only does this boost engagement and morale and build a culture of recognition, but a manager can also check the cheer scanners and see what’s going on. In TINYpulse offices, these cheers are publicly shared and visibly celebrated.
Values
You’ll know if a set of values are your values if it allows the people you want in your company to flourish and the people you don’t want in your company to self-select out. You should be able to make decisions by these values and hire and fire by them.
Here are TINYpulse’s:
Delight customers. This includes internal customers because if you can’t delight each other internally, you can’t delight customers externally.
Spread positivity. When you walk in the door, you can be positive, negative, or neutral. It’s a free choice.
Lead with solutions and embrace change. If you have something to complain about, offer suggestions on how to solve it.
Improve communications by being direct and transparent.
Go the extra mile with passion. It’s super hard but very rewarding.
Hold yourself accountable. You don’t need to be policed. You have the freedom, but you also have the accountability. Balance it.
Treasure the culture of freedom we have. Everyone who comes after you will take their cue on how to act from you.
Resources