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How psychological safety fights back against bullying, harassment & discrimination?

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Whether a red flag is an “independent review” finding a toxic culture at play, a spike in grievances, or a staggering percentage of staff survey respondents recording to have witnessed or experienced workplace bullying, the challenge of knowing where to start will often create avoidance or no action.

A popular reaction is to immediately undertake workplace policy training or “tell” people what to do.  Both interventions can be helpful when correctly designed to nudge, or influence, specific behaviours in the moments that matter most.

In working with a client last year we created the below concept to help target our focus toward the moments that mattered most to strengthen culture and therefore performance.

Which zone do you think matters most to remove bullying, harassment, and discrimination?

Moments that matter most to our culture and performance

 

Psychological Safety

 

 

Key insights

One of many key insights from the concept is that the Challenging Zone represents the moments we experience that can have a disproportionate impact on removing bullying, harassment, and discrimination. Therefore, if we want to create a sustainable shift, our interventions must nudge our people to gently and non-judgmentally to challenge behaviours (e.g. what do you mean by that?) of those we feel most comfortable with.

 

 

While it may not make sense at first, this how human behaviour works and is important for our contacts, friends, and colleagues looking to create psychologically safe workplaces for everyone to understand!

Want more?

Join me at our upcoming webinar focused on building a leadership strategy that achieves a sustainable impact or check out our Trusted Leader Program that equips leaders with the thinking, feelings, and abilities to say the right thing, in the right way, and at the right time when they experience the challenging zone.

We ensure people experience this zone in our sessions!

Connect with us

For more information please contact us and one of our Workplace Strategists will be in touch within 24 hours.

Written by
Blake Redding
Blake’s consulting career as a psychologist has been inspired by his passion for people development and a fascination with how people impact an organisation’s performance and success. His broad business and industry experience, combined with the application of psychometric assessment measures and a focus on improving employee performance and retention, has allowed Blake to work in every arena of human resources.