Employment Protections and Psychological Safety

Employment Protections and Psychological Safety

You may recall back in issue 121, we released a small survey on employment rights, protections and policies. It was a preliminary, pilot study intended to see if there was anything worth investigating further in respect to a correlation between employment protections and degrees of psychological safety felt by employees.

Thanks to all of you who responded to the survey! I’ve shared the anonymised raw data with all the respondents who provided their contact details – I believe in reciprocity when it comes to research 🙂

In today’s issue we’re going to have a brief look at the results themselves, and see if there are any correlations between psychological safety and employment protections at work.

Research Rationale:

Psychological safety is both a foundational element and an outcome of organisational culture. It is therefore affected by the many different systemic drivers that influence organisational culture alongside the behaviour of people within the organisation. In this research, I was interested in the relationship between the presence (or absence) of employment protections and the perception of psychological safety in organisations. 

Initially I was wondering whether there would be a correlation between the strength of employment protections (either in law or organisational policy), and the degree of psychological safety people feel in their workplace. Legal frameworks and protections influence the way we behave, and organisational policies send strong signals about the things that the organisation does and does not value.  I wanted to also examine the sense of safety people reported in “giving the boss bad news”. Employment protections help to protect employees from unfair treatment, dismissal, humiliation and retribution and at a surface level, it would make sense if those protections also help people feel safe in admitting mistakes, raising concerns, or asking for help, due to reduced fear of the negative consequences of those interpersonal risks. 

Results:

We received 84 responses in total, from countries around the world. 21.4% of respondents were members of a union, 2.4% in a works council. 73% of respondents in the US worked in “at-will” states.

Key Findings:

• A moderate positive correlation (0.42) was shown between employment law protection and psychological safety. This suggests that employees tend to feel more psychologically safe in workplaces where there is stronger employment protection.
• A stronger correlation (0.63) was found between employment protections and employees’ comfort in delivering bad news to superiors. This indicates that employment protections could encourage more open and honest communication in organisations.
• “At-will” employment status in the USA did not show a significant correlation with psychological safety, highlighting the need for a more nuanced approach to understanding these dynamics.
• Union membership did not correlate with psychological safety, potentially due to the dual dynamics of union membership and relationship to psychological safety. Whilst union membership may provide some employment protections, people may also be more likely to join a union if the culture in the workplace suffers from low psychological safety. Additionally, unions are very different in different parts of the world – and may not always contribute to a positive work environment.

Employment protection and confidence in “giving the boss bad news”.

The 0.63 correlation shown in the chart above between the presence of employment protections and giving the boss bad news is relatively strong and is worth investigating further.

Employment protections and perceived workplace psychological safety

This chart shows a moderate correlation (0.42) between employment law protection and psychological safety. This suggests that employees tend to feel more psychologically safe in workplaces where there is stronger employment protection, however, this effect varied significantly between countries, particularly when USA data was removed, so more research and data is required to establish significant patterns here.

“At will” employment, unions, and psychological safety.

There wasn’t enough data to say either way whether there was a correlation between “At Will” employment status in the USA and psychological safety. A few respondents pointed out that different organisations implement employee protection in greater or lesser ways, regardless of the status of state employment law, so this needs a more refined approach. 

We asked if people are members of a union because union membership may provide employees with a degree of protection at work from unfair treatment or dismissal. However, what didn’t occur to me at first is that people may join a union precisely because they feel psychologically (or even physically) unsafe at work. Union membership appeared to show no correlation with psychological safety in the workplace. It may be that union membership has no effect on psychological safety, or it may be that there are both positive and negative relationships (union membership helps employees feel safe, but employees who feel unsafe are more inclined to join a union). More in-depth or longitudinal studies may shed more light on this.

Union membership and psychological safety shows no significant correlation.

Here’s a word cloud of the qualitative comments left in the survey on employment protections and psychological safety:

Summary:

These findings highlight the interconnectedness of legal protections, psychological safety, and the ability to communicate openly with superiors. As this was a pilot study, it only indicates potential correlations, not causality. 

Future research

We intend to follow this up with a more in-depth study based upon the below as an initial concept:

Research Question:

“How do variations in employment law and organisational policy protections across different countries, industries, and organisational structures influence employees’ psychological safety and willingness to give their boss bad news?”

Why are we interested?

As well as a direct relationship between employment protections and psychological safety, it may also be the case that more broadly, the simple presence and awareness of employment protections nudge organisational culture towards a more open, interpersonally safer environment. Equally, organisations that tend to foster more progressive leadership and cultures of psychological safety may also tend towards adopting more progressive employment policies for employees: thus correlating with, but not directly causing, higher psychological safety in the workplace. 

Of course, employment protections in law and policy, even if they do influence psychological safety, are not a panacea for fostering it in the workplace. If a manager openly blames people for mistakes, no amount of policy is going to make their team feel safe to admit errors or ask for help.

We’re working with Professor Sophia Jowett at Loughborough University to develop this research further, and we’re open to collaboration with folks in other institutions, particularly in the US, Europe, and Asia. It’s important for this research to examine differences in national culture, regulations and policy, and how they influence workplace psychological safety.

By focusing on the dynamics between employment protections and psychological safety, this research could offer valuable insights for leaders, policymakers, and employees. Hopefully, it will foster a more comprehensive understanding of how legal frameworks and organisational policies shape workplace dynamics, potentially guiding efforts to create more supportive and high-performance work environments.


If you’re interested in collaborating, get in touch.

Psychological Safety at Work

Retrospectives

In our workshops, we often focus quite heavily on retrospectives as a way of learning from work (remember, retros aren’t just for failures). We find that teams in different industries are often not aware of the range of powerful retrospective formats that other teams use, so we introduce teams to different types, such as real-time retros, Schwartz Rounds, Stinky Fishes, Sailboats, AARs, hot and cold debriefs and many more. And of course, we always do a retro at the end of a workshop too – otherwise, how can we continue to improve? Here’s a great article from Chris King, outlining some of the key fundamentals of any retrospective practice.


Productivity

Following on from last week’s piece about measuring individual productivity, here’s a fab little tongue in cheek article from Dan North, describing the “worst programmer he knows”.


Resilience Engineering

This is a really good episode of the Oddly Influenced podcast, on Resilience engineering with Lorin Hochstein, with a great discussion about how to handle a complex system that falls down, and in particular, how to prepare for the next incident. 


How To Fail The Right Way

And here’s an episode of UnSLIOed with Greg LaBlanc and Amy Edmondson, discussing her new book (Right Kind of Wrong – out now!) and “How to Fail The Right Way”. “…your responsibility is simply to take a look at what you can do. Look down or across instead of up.“

On “failing the right way”, I love this illustration by Rupambika, @twillostory, on Instagram. It’s only by finding a few wrong ways that we find the right way.

This week’s poem:

Fear, by Kahlil Gibran

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.