Professional Ethics: Improving Psychological Safety in the Workplace
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As a keynote speaker at the 2021 ACFE Fraud Conference Canada, Garth Sheriff, CPA ,CA, CIA, and founder of Sheriff Consulting, turned the audience’s attention to the topic of psychological safety. Acknowledging that many audience members may not have heard that term before, Sheriff chose to define it through a number of examples that painted clear images of how psychological safety impacts a workplace.
As a concept, psychological safety has been researched extensively by psychologist Amy Edmundson, who authored the book The Fearless Organization, which chronicled her studies within teams of nurses and doctors in a hospital. Edmundson found that the teams that had higher rates of error had these rates because the members of the teams felt safe documenting errors. The teams that had lower rates were found to be under-reporting their mistakes. In the teams that were being honest and had higher rates of reporting, the nurses and doctors felt comfortable around each other and felt safe reporting mistakes to each other. In the teams that were under-reporting, Edmundson found that the nurses had a fear of the doctors, which led to a fear of bringing up mistakes. She also discovered that nurses were rationalizing their decision not to report mistakes by discounting the future: “This is not likely to happen in the future, or someone else will catch it in the future, so I don’t need to report it now.” This type of thinking can very quickly lead to serious ethical and practical problems.
This lack of safety in speaking up comes from a lack of psychological safety, which Sheriff defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk. Psychological safety entails a culture of respect, trust and openness, where it’s not risky to raise ideas and concerns. Quoting from psychologist Adam Grant, Sheriff noted that psychological safety is not relaxing standards, feeling comfortable, being nice and agreeable, or giving unconditional praise.
Sheriff engaged the audience by asking them to consider whether they had been part of an organization or team where they felt psychological safety was low. In order to contemplate this question, Sheriff offered up Edmundson’s seven-point scale to assess psychological safety:
If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
It is safe to take a risk on this team.
It is difficult to ask other members of the team for help.
No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
Working with members of this team, my unique skills and efforts are valued and utilized.
Sheriff moved into the next section of his keynote address by contemplating the repercussions of being in a team or organization with low psychological safety. “The research suggests that we as individuals cannot overcome an organization with low psychological safety,” he said. “Even with our professional code of conduct, even with our experiences, it is a very difficult psychological challenge as one individual to maintain a code of conduct within an organization. The fear and anxiety is so high in organizations with low psychological safety that it overrides individual decision making and ethics.” Even in individuals who have the best intentions and strive to support codes of conduct, low psychological safety can stifle willingness to speak up, leading to a higher risk for fraud.
To illustrate this, Sheriff brought up the example of Boeing, a company that initially prioritized safety but had a change in their workplace culture when their competition with Airbus ramped up. As a result, quality managers were made to feel unsafe bringing up issues if planes were in a late phase or production, which ultimately led to Boeing’s recent fatal crashes.
The benefits of improving psychological safety are numerous and include higher creativity among staff, greater employee engagement, and an atmosphere that is encouraging of and conducive to learning. As a leader within a team, Sheriff identified some steps to take in order to increase psychological safety:
First, asses the current psychological safety of your team.
Emphasize your team’s purpose.
Demonstrate situational humility by letting your team know when you’ve made a mistake.
Express appreciation and give positive feedback when it’s due.
Entire teams can work to improve psychological safety by doing the following:
Create a team mission statement that encourages the team to move toward psychological safety.
Set up structures and processes for reporting.
Measure performance in order to gauge progress.
Lastly, organizations as a whole can move toward psychological safety through these techniques:
Set the tone for organizational behavior at the outset.
Make sure the mission statement is clear.
Destigmatize failure.
In closing, Sheriff offered a Maya Angelou quote that rings true for all aspects of the anti-fraud profession: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
