When you’re in the presence of someone you like, consider like you and you believe they like you back, levels of oxytocin rise in the body. This leads to the establishment of trust. For any workplace trust is critical to its success, not just in regard to customer service, but for every relationship between all employees at all levels. Authenticity and vulnerability are key.

If you enjoy a good working relationship with your boss and your colleagues you are more likely to enjoy your work, take more care in how you do it, contribute more, collaborate more effectively with other members of a team and stay longer in the role. Sounds a good place to work, right?

The payoff for the business is lower rates of sick leave, stress leave, mental health issues, absenteeism, presenteeism and staff turnover. This has to be good for any business owner or leader.

We seek respect for ourselves in our own lives because it shows we’ve been acknowledged as a fellow human being, we’re valued, and it makes feel accepted for who we are.

But too often showing respect for others goes missing in action; overlooked because we were too busy to notice or hear the cheery ‘good morning’ from our colleague, too disengaged to really sense the intensity of the pain of a friend who shared how they had been racially abused on the bus on the way to work, too tired to care how our snappy and dismissive response to the effort of the most junior member of the team seeking to add their contribution to an important project was hurtful and unwarranted.

Building respect for ourselves, for our friends, family and colleagues demonstrates our humanity. It makes us better human beings.

Imagine, if every day you went to work expecting the worst, anticipating rejection, ridicule or public humiliation. Would you want to stay? Would you be motivated to deliver your best work? Would you have developed chronic neck pain from looking over your shoulder to see who’s coming next to stab you in the back?

It sounds ridiculous and yet for too many people this IS their reality. There has always been an emphasis on ensuring an individual’s right to physical safety on the job, far less on the need to include psychological safety.

Trust. It’s the foundation of every relationship in work and life. When present it fosters loyalty and motivates the desire to contribute to sustain that relationship. It creates a sense of belonging; we feel we’re in the right place with the right person(s) and we feel happy.
Some say we should just go with our gut feeling. Others that we should only work with our logic and reasoning. There’s a place for both because they operate concurrently. The route we follow is the one we take the most notice of.

Creating a culture of psychological safety at work takes time but is well worth the effort.
Google’s Project Aristotle so named for his quote “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” found that psychological safety was the single most important success factor underpinning high performance teams across the organisation. The ROI being it assists in reducing the human business costs of absenteeism, high staff turnover and stress related illness while boosting productivity, performance and happiness at work.