Leaders: Improving psychological safety should be at the top of your to-do list

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Employees in all sectors are exhausted. Hustle culture issues have been bubbling for years. Today, people are quitting their jobs in droves and demanding more balance from their employers.

As the world becomes increasingly digitally powered, business leaders face the challenge of driving new innovations that customers urgently need while managing transformational risks.

Some of these risks, such as outages, can be catastrophic for businesses. Events like the British Airways computer failure, for example, grounded all of the airline's planes and left thousands of passengers stranded. These turbulent events can be so disruptive that many companies have adopted aggressive policies to avoid even the remote possibility of an outage. But this extreme caution and risk aversion puts a lot of weight on employees' shoulders and severely hampers their ability to solve problems creatively.

My team recently conducted a developer survey that provides important insight into how a healthy relationship with risk, with forward-looking policies and processes, can dramatically increase a team's performance and overall business value. To summarize the findings: the only way to sustain innovation and retain top talent, especially in a software-driven world, is to have a culture with reasonable safety barriers for employees to feel psychologically empowered. security.

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Register now What exactly is "psychological safety"?

Psychological safety is the notion that team members are free to make mistakes and freely communicate their thoughts in the workplace without fear of being punished or humiliated. To create a psychologically safe environment, business leaders must recognize that each team member is much more than their job title, and create a culture that encourages innovation and recognizes that success can be measured in different ways. .

Psychological safety is key to job performance and happiness, especially for tech workers

For developer teams in particular, avoiding mistakes rather than promoting innovation creates an environment of fear and stress. It's not just an unsustainable workplace, it's also bad for business. Software developers report high levels of stress and pressure, with 67% saying they or someone they know left a company due to pressure to minimize errors. In a field that lacks skilled labor, developers must feel capable of doing their job and innovating effectively, without constant fear of failure, or teams will be scrambling to replace them.

The loss of talent due to increased pressure and stress has a domino effect on the entire organization, leading to recurring cost losses due to less productive and motivated teams and operational costs additional for recruitment and retention. As many organizations seek to dramatically increase their developer workforce, these costs are only accelerating, creating an urgency to address these issues before they explode.

By creating an environment of psychological safety, you will foster innovation and creativity and encourage team members to feel more inspired to achieve their goals and produce...