Housing First
I was listening to a 99 Percent Invisible podcast titled Housing First. In the podcast, Sam Tsemberis talked about a couple of different programs to help homeless people. One program was called "Housing Readiness" and was about getting people to be housing ready and get their life together before they got into a home. The second was called "Housing First". This one was about getting people homed first and then working with them on their problems. To check for program effectiveness, they ran a randomised controlled trial, where people got into each program randomly. People in both programs got support, but the controlled group got it before the housing, while the study group got support after housing. After a few years, the results of the trial showed 34% in the control group still had housing compared to 80% in the study group. Also days people were homeless went down for both groups, but the Housing First group had a much bigger decrease.
There are parallels between this story and psychological safety. When people are worried about where they are going to sleep tonight, they do not have a lot of mental capacity to deal with other issues. When people experience emotional stress at work, they do not have mental space to learn and grow at their work.
Google re:Work identified dynamics of effective teams. They found five factors that matter in how effective teams work together in order of importance. The first item, that all the other factors rely on, is psychological safety. Psychological safety means that team members feel safe to make mistakes without being afraid of repercussions. It is the foundation needed before everything else. It is the first step in having impact. Before asking your team to do good work for your organisation, it is imperative that each team member feels safe in their work surroundings.
How do you fare? Do you know how your team members feel about their work environment? Do you know how to improve the work environment?