It’s messy, but effective at building camaraderie, teamwork, and trust.Ĭan you really get the same results when you are never together in person, in real time? Best practices around core working hours, regularly scheduled check-ins, and structure around communication can help, but specific, learnable skills empower managers and teams to develop a measurably positive, caring culture and lay the groundwork for trust in and out of the office. As the CHRO of a major media company said to me, it’s like that time-worn example of people having a tug of war in the mud. Leaders, experts, and employees are still figuring out how to build trust and caring in any workforce, and remote or asynchronous teams face a serious challenge here. McKinsey research has found that companies lagging in innovation are often places where employees have fear and anxiety in association with the risks involved in innovation. Trust and caring in the workplace are integral to the fearlessness and flexibility companies need for growth. The critical need to build the skills of trust This is the core challenge that employers must address in order to successfully bring employees back to the worksite. A return-to-office mandate without measures to meaningfully address incivility and psychological safety will not achieve the productivity and innovation business demands. Yet an on-site workplace without psychological safety may be worse, tending toward fearfulness, rigid thinking, and anxiety. It is not always convenient or flexible, let alone healthy. But working remotely comes with real costs: back-to-back video conferencing and blurred boundaries between work and home life, along with working in endless isolation, sacrificing social interaction, and missing out on mentoring. These findings show a profound absence of psychological safety - and psychological safety is a key predictor of team productivity and innovation.Ī preference for convenience and flexibility can also motivate employees to resist return-to-office mandates. MeQ’s study further revealed that on-site employees are 66% more likely to feel like mistakes are held against them, 56% more likely to say that people are rejected for being different, and 36% more likely to find it difficult to ask teammates for help. Incivility is a serious risk to psychological safety, defined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson as “a shared belief, held by members of a team, that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” According to the research, psychological safety is most in danger among exclusively on-site employees. What’s more, as Christine Porath reported in Harvard Business Review in November 2022, 78% of frontline workers witness incivility at work at least once a month, and 70% witness it at least two to three times a month. Rising incivility and the need for psychological safetyĪccording to Brad Smith, Ph.D., meQ’s Chief Science Officer, research published in March 2023 found that 1 in 4 workers have experienced rudeness at the workplace. Wrestling with them, we can reshape our return-to-office policies and make them successful going forward. These are difficult questions, but I believe there is a way forward - through the following three interlocking trends.
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