Safety in the Workplace

Help your organization to take the first steps towards psychological safety and high performance. Enable the culture of experimentation and learning.

Featured in:

• Agile Games 2018 Keynote, Boston, USA ("Team up to eradicate fear" slides)

• Agile Camp San Francisco 2018, USA ("Team Up to Eradicate Fear from Organizational Culture" video)

• Global Scrum Gathering Austin 2019, USA ("Team up to eradicate fear")

• Agile + DevOps West 2019, Las Vegas, USA ("You Can't Have DevOps if Fear Is Running Your Workplace" )

• Agile + DevOps East 2019, Orlando, USA

Why "Safety in the Workplace"?

Many of you have heard about the importance of psychological safety in teams and organizations.

Google's project Aristotle, Amy Edmondson, William A. Kahn in their independent research identified psychological safety as one of the most critical elements in enabling engagement, innovation and high performance. If you are following DevOps movement, you will recognize safety as a prerequisite for the Third Way of DevOps - "Culture of Continual Experimentation and Learning"

How do you start growing a culture of psychological safety?

This set will give you ideas and specific practices that can be applied at individual, team and leadership level. Because "it takes a village" to create the culture of safety, experimentation and learning!

Initially designed by Dana Pylayeva for her keynote session at Agile Games 2018, this set is a collection of tried and true "safety enhancers" that have been discovered in coaching engagements in US, UK, Ireland, Canada and Japan. In addition, the set includes a number of leadership practices inspired by Amy Edmondson's new book "The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth"

When is a good time to use "Safety in the Workplace"?

We used these cards in retrospectives, one-on-one coaching conversations, Lean Coffee and Community of Practice meetups. While this set can be use as a stand-alone coaching tool, it really shines when used in combination with "Fear in the Workplace" game.

"Fear in the Workplace" is a collection of organizational fears, fear symptoms and different scenarios where they show up. This game serves as a fun, yet serious "toxic culture" diagnostic tool.

Somehow, pointing to silly monster images, dot-voting, prioritizing them for further conversations helps to externalize feelings, to step back and to have deep discussions.

In one of the organizations, we even brought in the Fear deck to facilitate a conversation between a new remote manager and her co-located team. As one of the team members noted:

"It was so simple and SO effective, propelling the conversation forward in ways we never would have been able to otherwise."

Every card in this deck has a story. Together they give the teams a shared vocabulary, externalize fears and simplify difficult conversations.

"Safety in the Workplace" cards allow to build on that discovery and switch into a "Now what?" thinking, exposing the participants to a set of safety enhancers. As organizations need to attack fear from all fronts, this deck provides practices effective in fighting organizational fears at individual, team as well as the leadership levels.

The Fear in the Workplace and Safety in the Workplace duo will help you start the journey, build alliances and have serious conversations in a fun way.