Psychological safety at cloudmobility.
Tags: Psychological Safety, Cloudmobility, Team

In 2012 Google formed a group of researchers to find out why some of their teams worked together efficiently, and why others didn’t. They investigated on things like how often teams socialize or if they have common interests but couldn’t find any patterns. They moved on to topics like ‘unwritten rules’ and ‘team culture’. The researchers found out that group norms where the key to improving Google’s teams — Psychological safety is an important topic for high performing teams. It is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. People are not afraid of negative consequences like being criticized, ignored, laughed at, or punished for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

Psychological safety at cloudmobility.

At cloudmobility, we introduced the topic to the entire team in Q2 2020, during a highly challenging time. We were assessing the level of psychological safety with employee surveys at cloudmobility, achieving good results. As our team is growing constantly, it is important to us to establish a team culture to thrive as a high performing work environment.

That is why we scheduled a session with everyone during our virtual summit, dividing the team into cross functional groups of 6–7 people, that usually don’t work together. It was important to us to create those diverse teams to strengthen our team across cloudmobility. During this session we took our time to discuss our current team feeling, what everyone is experiencing in their teams and also how they feel about themselves. Does everyone feel comfortable to trust their teammates, admit and make mistakes or be confident to be themselves? We took our time to listen and share our individual stories. After this warm up exercise we continued with our team behaviours. The goal was to state what is acceptable and what is not for each team member in order to create our cloudmobility wide team charter, establishing our behaviours and rules.

How we will move forward from here.

After defining those team charters, we gathered all the charters from the 6 teams to come up with one for cloudmobility. Since we had such a lively and open communication, we collected a lot of behaviours. In fact too many to put into one version that everyone can live by. That’s why we started a ballot where every employee was able to vote for their most important behaviours so that we were able to create one cloudmobility charter. This charter was presented to the whole team during one of our weekly meetings.

4 things we have learned.

Psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking that we are looking for at cloudmobility to drive our success. People feel more comfortable to make and talk about mistakes they make when they feel safe in their work environment.

Setting the stage for talking about psychological safety is the first step to creating this safe space. We will keep on expanding those measures so that employees feel secure.

From our cross-divisional sessions, we realized that it is great to talk to each other where everyone feels safe, what we feel is important to us at work and that we feel appreciate at cloudmobility.

We uncovered topics we need to work on to drive our success further in the next months.

During our next summit in the beginning of 2021 we will come back to this topic and strengthen our team connection even more, improving our open communication.