Towards Psychological Safety in Virtual Teams
I recently came across this piece of research, on psychological safety in virtual teams:
How to create psychological safety in virtual teams by Alexandra Lechner, Jutta Tobias Mortlock
The study took place BEFORE the pandemic, so it gives us an idea of what online teamwork might look like in a sustainable environment. With a small sample size of 16, the learnings are broad enough to give everyone insight and guidance into what to pay attention to.
Here's a quick summary, with quotes from the paper in italics, and my commentary following them.
The Challenges
"Based on our interviews we first identified two common challenges that virtual teams seemed to be facing in relation to creating psychological safety:
1. Day-to-day processes took more time and effort.
Totally. We need to be more deliberate at all levels of teamwork and that takes a lot of time and effort, especially at the early stages of adopting remote work. "Documentation" doesn't need to be heavy and it does not take the humanity out of our work. On the contrary, it helps us create the time to have more meaningful interactions. (But you need to put in the work first.)
2. Team members communicated in ‘bubbles’ .
We're all human. We tend to feel more affinity towards certain people, and therefore end up asking for help, etc, from the same individuals. Listening to Alexandra Lechner in the People Soup podcast, she mentioned that indeed, this also happens in the co-located space.
In the office space, we might come into contact with a broader range of people by chance, and this expands our "bubble". In the online space, we need to be deliberate about it.
So, monitor who you're in touch with day to day, and evaluate whether you should be reaching out to others in the team. (And for a great example of how to nurture and expand your network, check out episode 262 from 21st Century Work Life podcast.) And consider asking questions in the open when you can, rather than sending private messages or emails.
Overcoming the Challenges
Second, we learned that three enabling practices helped teams to overcome these challenges and actively create psychological safety:
1. Accepting virtual team challenges
This is about accepting our new context and seeing challenges as opportunities. It's about understanding our habits and team practices, and evaluating whether they will be useful to us in this new collaboration space. And it's about accepting that we are working in a different context, that has its advantages.
If you're in a position of leadership, beware (deliberately or not) communicating that the online space is "second best". It's best suited to some interactions, and less to others.
2. Connecting as human beings
Yes, virtual coffees come to mind, but also, have you all got your profile pictures in your online spaces? Where are the small points of connection throughout the day?
And connecting as human beings doesn't always mean that you share your personal lives. What excites you about the work? What worries you about the industry? They might not help you move a task forward, but these insights make you more human.
And of course my own commentary needs a reminder to create both synchronous and asynchronous spaces where you can connect as more than a task-machine.
3. Discussing the rules of the game (from ground rules, to behavioural norms, to personal boundaries even meeting routines)
Align use of tools with the team's needs, agree on shared goals and responsibilities, (I would add: and make them visible online), develop a common code of conduct.
In a way, this validates everything we've been saying for years (phew!).
Unless you discuss how you're going to work together, it's not going to happen. There's often resistance to having these discussions, because they feel too formal - it might feel icky to say, "if I agree with you but have nothing to add, I'll react with an emoji". But discussing how you're going to work together, and writing it down in a document you revisit regularly, will help you in the long run.
It will also add predictability to some of your actions, which will help to increase psychological safety.
Coda
So no "best practices" here, but a whole load of mindset shifts: we need to be deliberate in building our relationships and explicit in how we work together. And the online space is a "proper" collaboration space in its own right.
Episode 284 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast - WLP284: What's Going On - Reframing Our Boundaries - includes some of these thoughts in conversation with Maya.
Meanwhile, if you fancy carrying on reading, check out:
Psychological Safety in Online Meetings
Key Mindset Changes for the New Remote Manager
and To Show Frustration, First You Need to Show You Care
(This article was originally published on LinkedIn — Towards Psychological Safety in Virtual Teams)