How to Foster Psychological Safety in Virtual Meetings

 

The epidemic raging across the world has forces almost everyone to work from home and this is expected to continue into the foreseeable future. It will take years to understand the impact of virtual work on people and companies. However, many have started to wonder about the impact of virtual work on psychological safety. 

In the virtual world and meetings, it is impossible to detect social cues or non-verbal agreement. Team members feel isolated without the support of a friend indicating his consent across the table. There are distractions when working at home - doorbell ringing, emails, texts, children and pets. Added to this, health threats, overwork, social unrest makes it all the more difficult. 

The good news is that technology offers ways to offset these shortcomings. There are various tools available, and here there is a brief discussion on the benefits and risks associated with these tools.

Raise hands

A fairly straightforward tool, it indicates that you want to speak aloud. This tool would not help to derive answers to a query as members may be reluctant to reveal personal preferences in the meeting. Yes/No or polling features are better suited to get answers to specific queries.

Yes/No

Typically this tool provides a quick answer from everyone. the team leader can ask the missing members to answer. However, not all issues can be resolved with a simple yes/no. To capture more nuances it would be better to opt for polls, chats.

Polls

Anonymous polls make it easier to express honest opinions without fear of being targeted and the results require thoughtful probing to identify diverse views. Setting up this poll requires great expertise to be of real value. This can further lead up to a more candid discussion, brainstorming and create an action plan to resolve the problem discussed.

Chats

Allowing everyone to contribute at the same time lowers the resistance to express opinions publicly. At times the sheer volume of the chat messages may cause some of them to be overlooked. Setting norms about brevity may help but they also distract from the spoken conversation. Chat may be selectively turned off when everyone's attention is required.

Breakout rooms

Creating smaller breakout rooms allows smaller groups of people discussing, providing a normal conversational experience. it provides a psychologically safe place to test out new ideas, concepts and build relationships. When the members return to the main conference they find it easier to share ideas with the confidence that comes from testing and sharing perspectives in relatively safe environments. 

Video

Seeing faces creates engagements but too many of them can be distracting am bad connections can cause visual disruptions. All these can hinder our ability to read social cues and lead to stress in subtle ways. Again, seeing oneself on screen may inhibit a person and make them awkward in front of the audience. 

Audio only

Similar to the traditional conference call, this requires full attention to avoid misinterpreting and ensure participation of everyone in the call. In the absence of non-verbal cues, a proactive inquiry is necessary to ensure everyone's participation. Also to ensure that members do not resort to multi-tasking it is necessary to keep them engaged through polls, questions, summarising, quizzes, short questions etc.

Before and after a virtual meeting

A few actions before and after a virtual meeting can help build psychological safety during the meeting.

• Team leaders should experiment with meeting tools to familiarise themselves and plan how to lead the discussion. 
• they should consider appointing a facilitator, a rotating member of the team, to help ensure participation. 
• Consider interacting with participants in advance vis polls, or one to one conversations.

After the meeting, the leader can reach out to participants who were quiet to give reinforcing feedback.

Working from home may make the members feel lonely. Building psychological safety in virtual teams takes effort and time that pays off in participation, productive dissent and idea generation. The tools and techniques to engage people can become habitual and serve managers well today and long into the future.

How to Foster Psychological Safety in Virtual Meetings

by Amy C. Edmondson and Gene Daley

HBR August 25, 2020