Fostering Psychological Safety in the Hybrid and Remote Workplace: How Slack and Simple Poll Can Help

In the modern business landscape, where hybrid and remote work environments are becoming the norm, ensuring psychological safety is easier than ever. 

“Easier? Really?” you might be thinking. But it’s true! 

Psychological safety—the assurance that employees won't be penalized or humiliated for sharing ideas, asking questions, or making mistakes—is essential for a productive and innovative team. For SaaS companies and other modern businesses navigating these new work models, communication platforms like Slack and its integrations, such as Simple Poll, make supporting psychological safety easy. 

What is Psychological Safety and Why Does it Matter?

Psychological safety, as defined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, is the belief that one will not be penalized or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It’s an essential component for a healthy workplace where employees feel valued, engaged, and motivated to contribute their best.

A safe environment fosters creativity, innovation, and collaboration, leading to better problem-solving and team cohesion. On the flip side, a lack of psychological safety can result in disengagement, reduced collaboration, and missed opportunities for improvement.

Leveraging Slack to Enhance Psychological Safety

Slack is more than just a communication tool; it’s a platform designed to facilitate open and effective communication within teams. For hybrid and remote teams, Slack helps bridge the physical distance, making it easier to stay connected and engaged. 

And it seems to be working better than expected. New data shows that remote and hybrid employees perceive their team environments as having a much higher degree of psychological safety. 

Best Practices for Ensuring Psychological Safety in Hybrid and Remote Teams

To effectively foster psychological safety in a hybrid or remote environment, consider these best practices:

1. Promote Open Communication: Encourage transparency and openness in all communications. Regularly solicit feedback and make it easy for employees to share their thoughts.
2. Encourage Participation: Use Slack channels and polls to involve everyone in decision-making processes. Ensure that all voices are heard and valued.
3. Provide Support: Be approachable and available for one-on-one discussions. Address concerns promptly and constructively.
4. Recognize Contributions: Acknowledge and celebrate contributions and successes. This helps build a positive and supportive team culture.

Leveraging Simple Poll to Execute Best Practices

How should you actually put these practices into action? Here’s some ideas, using Simple Poll:

• Make polls anonymous: Anonymity has a number of benefits for psychological safety. It encourages more honest feedback, reduces the fear of repercussions, and builds trust in the process if feedback is followed up on. 

• Hide responses: Making results hidden can have much of the same effect as anonymous polls, but with this feature, respondent names and answers are shown only to the poll creator and the select people the creator chooses to share results with. This means you can follow up appropriately with individuals, but their responses aren’t public to everyone in the channel. We suggest this feature for managers who want to do regular pulse checks with their teams. 

• Run an “Ask Me Anything”: Specifically combined with the “make anonymous” feature, AMAs are an amazing way to encourage participation in townhall meetings. The most popular questions can be upvoted by others, so the most time is spent on the questions that really matter. 

By utilizing tools like Slack and Simple Poll, and implementing best practices for communication and support, you can create a psychologically safe environment where innovation and collaboration thrive.