Without psychological safety, employees can’t speak their minds, provide critical feedback, resolve conflicts, or be themselves. This guide offers ways to create a safe and inclusive space for employees, how to deal with (sometimes divisive) political discussions in the workplace, dealing with an employee’s racist social media statement, and, to close, tips for conflict resolution.

Making the Workplace a Safe Place to Speak Up

Organizations across the country are asking themselves what they can do to make their workplaces more inclusive, diverse, and equitable, particularly for Black employees. They’re hosting conversations, acknowledging areas where they’ve fallen short, and identifying opportunities for improvement.

For these efforts to be successful, employees need to be able to speak freely, offering critical and candid feedback about individual behaviors, workplace practices, and organizational policies. None of this can happen, however, if people believe it isn’t safe for them to speak up.

It often isn’t.

Employees who report harassment and discrimination, speak candidly to their supervisors, or challenge the status quo often find themselves excluded from projects, denied a promotion, or out of a job. According to a study by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 75 percent of employees who spoke out against workplace mistreatment faced some form of retaliation. Given this reality, it falls on employers to show their employees that they can report incidents of discrimination, identify institutional failures, and recommend solutions all without fear of retaliation. Preventing retaliation is part of that. Here are a few other ways to establish a firm foundation of trust, openness, and respect:

Admit Mistakes and Make Amends

Employees will be reluctant to hold their leaders accountable if their leaders never admit fault or acknowledge areas for growth. If, however, leaders show a willingness to be
vulnerable and a desire to learn and be better, they can help put their employees’ minds at ease and more effectively solicit their feedback. For example, an employer might
acknowledge that they hadn’t previously made diversity a priority for the company, but that going forward, they will strategically place job ads where underrepresented job applicants are more likely to see them, and they’ll identify ways to make the workplace welcoming and inclusive. Statements like this, when followed by action, open the door to honest communication between employees and their employer. They build trust.

Reward Instead of Retaliate

Creating a real sense of safety takes more than preventing retaliation. Employees need to see that providing candid and critical feedback is met with appreciation, gratitude, and action from leadership. In other words, it has to be rewarded. Employees who identify problems in the workplace or propose solutions shouldn’t fear being ostracized or having their career derailed by a vengeful peer or supervisor. On the contrary, they should be recognized as leaders in the organization (informal or otherwise), given opportunities to make a further impact, and empowered to help make decisions that elevate the workplace, its culture, and its practices. Consider shout-outs from the CEO, company awards, strategic bonuses, promotions, and career development opportunities. These show sincerity.

Do Not Tolerate Retaliation

For some employers, the hardest part of building trust will be appropriately disciplining anyone who violates it, especially if the one being disciplined is a star performer or high up in the chain of command. One instance of retaliation, if not immediately addressed, can undermine months or years of work and ruin even a stellar reputation for diversity, inclusion, and equity. Any retaliation, for any reason, no matter who does it, must not be tolerated. Fortunately, swift action to discipline the offender and prevent future instances can help repair the damage and restore trust. It shows you’re serious.

Psychological safety takes time to establish, even in companies without a history of overt retaliation. Implementing the three strategies above, however, will lay the groundwork for a culture in which employees feel safe speaking up for diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Political Discussions in the Workplace

While a respectful debate over lunch or a brief remark tossed over a cubicle may not merit a response from management, what happens when political arguments at work turn ugly? Raised voices can disrupt operations. Feelings can be hurt. Team cohesion can suffer. Employees with political differences might refuse to get along. There are even potential legal issues: a political debate about a protected class can devolve into a hostile work environment. These serious matters don’t have a universal solution. Different employers have different needs and unique cultures. Some employers may want to restrict all non-work-related discussions in the workplace. Others may want a more lenient policy and choose to deal with violations when someone crosses the line.

Whatever approach you take, be careful not to give the impression that you’re trying to regulate the political beliefs of your employees. Generally speaking, a private employer can limit political expression in the workplace—as long as it doesn’t violate Section 7 rights or applicable state laws. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act gives employees the right to talk about the terms and conditions of their employment and the right to unionize. While this law protects some political activities, it doesn’t give employees the right to discuss politics that aren’t work-related during work hours or while on their employer’s property.

Some political discussions are work-related, however. For example, you wouldn’t want to try to stop employees from talking about their pay in light of gender pay equality laws or from building support in the workplace for a paid sick leave policy. You’d also want to avoid restricting any discussions of unions or unionization. Finally, you also don’t want to restrict off-duty political activity.

The trouble with heated political discussions is not that they’re political, but that they’re disruptive and potentially abusive. So if you have no objection to employees occasionally engaging in non-work-related discussions while they’re on duty, then you may want to allow political discussions generally while prohibiting behaviors that are disruptive or abusive. Just make it clear to employees that they’ll be disciplined for not working when they should be, or for disrupting the work of others or for harassing them—not for holding certain political beliefs.

Conflict Resolution Strategies

The recipe for workplace conflict is decidedly simple: bring two or more people together and assign them a task. Unless the stars have aligned in your favor, there’s going to be some cause for disagreement between them, and if conflict ensues, their ability to cooperate will suffer.

Regrettably, too often employers tolerate unresolved conflict because it isn’t a legal matter with potential fines, they’re busy with other things, they don’t know how to manage it, or because doing so is sure to be uncomfortable. But unresolved conflict is one of the most dangerous threats to an organization because it prevents people from collaborating and working efficiently, and successful teamwork is essential to your bottom line.

Causes of Conflict

Before examining strategies for resolving conflict in the workplace, let’s look at the common underlying causes of that conflict. Understanding how conflicts arise will help you determine which strategy to use in each situation.

Miscommunication: Often a conflict between people is more perceived than real—a result of a misunderstanding or miscommunication. A speaker is unclear, or a listener takes a statement the wrong way. Offense or frustration is caused not because of a real disagreement, but because of a perception.

Incompatible positions or priorities: Conflicts often arise because two or more individuals (or teams) can’t all get what they want. Their ideas about what to do or how to do it don’t coincide. Maybe a deadline that one person requires can’t be met without someone else having to rearrange their priorities, and maybe those priorities can’t easily be rearranged.

Emotional manipulation: Some people try to get what they want by manipulating the emotions of others. A regularly tardy employee might have a go-to sob story about their situation, which they use to garner sympathy. But once emotional manipulation is revealed for what it is, it breeds distrust, and people who distrust one another can’t work well together.

Internal competition: Competition can be healthy and good within an organization, but it can also incentivize people to play dirty, undermining or sabotaging the efforts of others. Like emotional manipulation, competition can create distrust. People stop collaborating, communicating, and sharing their work.

Poor performance: In some cases, issues develop between people in the workplace because an individual or a team isn’t getting their job done or doing it well. One person’s poor performance can be like the first in a line of dominos, leading to a chain reaction that eventually topples the whole operation. Distrust, resentment, anger, and other negative emotions are the result, and these feelings most certainly find expression—to friends at work in the form of gossip and often the offending party as a public scolding.

Solutions

Build a platform for collaboration: Before people can resolve their differences, they often need to find an area of shared interest, so they have some common ground to build on. That might be an important project or quarterly earnings goal that can be used as a point of focus. If nothing else, help your employees see that everyone wants the organization to succeed in its mission. They may be more willing to compromise or give alternative ideas a try if they know everyone is truly working for the same purpose.

Address behavioral and performance problems: These issues should be addressed whether they’re causing conflicts or not, but especially if they’re creating office drama. Tolerating behavioral and performance problems, especially when they affect the work of your good performers, will only hasten your most talented employees out the door.

Teach people how to communicate clearly and effectively: Communication is a skill, and not everyone is good at it. Being able to communicate well takes more than an understanding of grammar and syntax. It also takes empathy, candor, an ability to read people and anticipate how they might perceive and react to what’s communicated. Perhaps most importantly, good communication skills require the ability to listen. If an employee doesn’t have these skills, then you need to teach them (or find someone who can). Your employees will be much more adept at working through conflicts if they know how to communicate.

Practice conflict resolution techniques: There’s no better way to develop and maintain skills than to practice them. Set aside time at a company offsite or team meeting to role-play different conflicts; you can call this “working through scenarios” if you think your team will bristle at the thought of acting. These practice sessions will give your employees an opportunity to work creatively through impasses without stress and frustration—and without hindering their work. They can then apply these skills to the real-life conflicts that will inevitably arise.

In some cases, conflicting parties will not be able to resolve their differences, and no resolution will please them. That’s life. You don’t always get your way. And while you can’t— and shouldn’t—try to regulate people’s feelings, you can and should set high standards for professional behavior. But part of setting and enforcing those high standards will involve managers and HR professionals stepping in, setting the scene for conflict resolution, and accepting that the resolution might not always be comfortable. It will, however, make the organization stronger.

Emplova is a unique Professional Employer Organization (PEO) that helps small to medium sized businesses grow and prosper by providing benefits, payroll, technology, compliance, and HR administration. To learn how we can create a winning HR strategy for your business contact us today.

*Information in this overview is general in nature and not intended to replace legal advice in any particular manner.