Name: How to Cultivate Psychological Safety in a Time of Cultural Change
Uploaded: 2026-10-15T20:00:45.955Z
Duration: 1 h 4 min 12 s
Description: How to Cultivate Psychological Safety in a Time of Cultural Change

Transcript for "How to Cultivate Psychological Safety in a Time of Cultural Change": Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Paycor's fall twenty twenty six virtual summit. I'm your host, Ava Duran, and we're so excited to have you here at this amazing gathering of HR professionals and business leaders from all over. We know your time is valuable, and we deeply appreciate you choosing to spend it with us. Thank you for being here and investing in your own career development as well as in your team and company culture. We have an outstanding lineup of speakers this year ready to share their insights into the top challenges HR HR professionals are facing today. We've also got some exciting giveaways planned at the end of the session, including Amazon gift cards and Apple AirPods, so make sure to stick around to the end to see if you've won. Before we begin, we're going to go over a few quick housekeeping items. So please use the q and a tab for any questions you have during the presentation. We may not get to all of them, but we will do our best to work through as many as we can. The chat tab is also available for networking with fellow attendees. It looks like you all are utilizing that already. And don't forget to check out the docs tab for supplementary marketing... Supplementary materials as well as a copy of the slides for the presentation just in in case you'd like to follow along. And, also, all of our sessions qualify for HRCI and SHRM continuing education credits, so be on the lookout for an email with your certificate after the webinar concludes. So now without further ado, let's get started. Please join me in welcoming our speaker, Hannah Friedman. Hannah is a content developer at Paycor creating engaging resources that help HR leaders navigate the challenges they face every day. You may recognize her from her work at the HR Center of Excellence or one of our previous webinars. Her background also includes marketing writing, advocacy, event production, and public speaking. Welcome, Hannah. Thank you so much, Ava. Thanks for the intro, and it's great to be here. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for spending your time with us today, and thank you especially for sticking around for the last session of the day. Just gonna see if I can pull the slides back up here. Give me just one second. Yep. There we go. Great. So today, we will be talking about how to cultivate psychological safety in a time of cultural change. And the reason I wanted to talk about this today... So in case you don't already know or you haven't heard one of my webinars in the past, I am a writer, researcher, and workplace culture expert. And before joining this team to work in the HR industry, I specifically worked in the health and wellness field, both as a writer and also as a health care provider for clients directly. So that work gave me years of experience researching and writing about the connection between mental health, physical health, and a third dimension of well-being I don't think we talk about enough, which is social wellness. And psychological safety is really key for all of those things. I am so excited to have this conversation. Thank you for prioritizing it. Thank you for being part of it. I also wanna say before we start, just a couple of quick disclaimers. This is a very complex topic, and it's not fun necessarily to be talking about mental health to be sort of shining a light on some of the more difficult parts of building a strong culture, which is always HR's responsibility in any work environment. Right? So thank you for making space for that difficult conversation. We really appreciate it. I really appreciate it. And finally, I wanna say, we're gonna be talking about some sensitive subjects today. That's that's why we're here. Psychological safety itself can be a pretty sensitive subject, and I wanna make it very clear that I am here with the intention of approaching everyone else in good faith. And I would strongly encourage you to do the same in the chat, in your comments, in the q and a. Let's all assume best intent. Let's all assume that we are all here to learn. This is a learning space. In learning spaces, people make mistakes, but they do that out of out of good intentions. And I wanna make it very, very clear. I am not here to talk about politics. I'm not here to talk about my political opinions. This is not a place to argue about politics. Whatever you think, however you vote, whatever your beliefs are, you have those beliefs. That's wonderful. This is not the place to debate whether that's the correct belief to have or not. What we will be talking about is the Venn diagram of what's true for literally every single person in the room. Right? Literally every single person in the room has an experience of politics, Whatever your beliefs are or not, whatever you agree about or disagree about, we're gonna be talking about that shared experience. So just to put that lens on this as we go into it. So first, let's talk about today's agenda. Great. There we go. First, we'll be talking about... We'll be defining psychological safety. Are you all looking? Yeah. You are looking at the right slide. Sorry. Just making sure this is going correctly. We'll... We will be defining psychological safety. We'll be talking about what psychological safety means at work, the impact of cultural change on psychological safety, why it starts with leaders, and how HR and leadership teams in general can cultivate psychological safety. So to kick us off, I'm gonna share this quote from Amy Edmondson, who is an Harvard professor, and she first coined or certainly she first popularized the term psychological safety at all. This dates back... This research from her dates back to 1999. So at this point, it's a pretty established idea. Thank goodness. I'm so glad that's true. And I'll talk more about how it really gained popularity in a minute. While we... She started using the term in 1999, we didn't really hear it popularized until 2012, and you'll see what I mean in a few slides. But... So this is her definition. She says, psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. So team could mean anything here. It could mean work. It could mean school. It could mean home. It could be a literal sports team. Whatever, any meaning of team. But today, of course, we'll be focusing mostly on what it means at work. So in the original study, which is closing in on 30 years old at this point, but it's it's still really strong data. We're still building on it. The scientific community is still using it as the basis for more research. Amy Edmondson particularly found that psychological safety was strongly associated with something she called learning behavior. Basically, that means psychological safety created the conditions for teams to learn from their mistakes, to innovate, and to grow. So it's not just about feelings and soft skills. Right? A lot of folks... I feel like, especially a lot of very business minded folks, maybe folks who don't work in the HR industry but work adjacent to the HR industry, hear psychology or psychological safety and think like, oh, like, that's that's just feelings. I don't need to worry about hurting your fee fees. Right? It's not that. It's actually about how we innovate, how we come up with new ideas, new products, how we drive business results, how we drive financial growth. So this is the original. Right? And it's become a buzzword as many of you probably know, and I think that's a great thing. We're getting all kinds of insights into it beyond academic research. For example, it's been this... The subject of a lot of work by McKinsey, and here's another quote from them that I really love. This article says, psychological safety is the absence of interpersonal fear. Feeling psychologically safe allows people to perform their best at home, school, and work. So really similar to Edmondson's work, but not identical. This is just another layer of information on top of that. Basically, what this quote is saying is when you trust the people around you, you can be your authentic self. Because, ultimately, if you don't feel safe, you end up needing to lie. And lies could be big or small or medium or difficult to spot in the first place. Right? Like, I think about situations where somebody might lie about their family structure. They might lie about the gender of their spouse because they don't feel safe being honest about that in certain situations. Or you're lying about your health history because you're worried that somebody's gonna judge you because you had this big health experience a couple years ago. What does that mean for what PTO you might need in the future? Right? So you're keeping that back. You're sort of dancing around it in conversations. Or these could even be lies that you might not even think of as lies right off the bat. Like, I don't wear high heels. I wear high heels maybe three or four times a year. If I worked in an office where there was a social norm that everybody who looked like me showed up every day in high heels, and if I didn't wear high heels, people would sort of look at me funny and be like, what? Like, that's that's too casual. What are you doing? There's a universe in which somebody in that position would wear high heels every day, be horribly uncomfortable, be in physical pain, and still be sort of muscling their way through it because they don't wanna be looked down on by the boss, and this is the cultural norm of the office. Right? And that's... That takes effort. Think about all the effort it takes to do any of... To commit any kind of a lie, to hide anything about yourself. And lies aren't always bad either. I... The example I always think of here is I think one of the most fun lies I have ever told was a couple years ago, my kid's birthday was coming up, and I was hiding all of her presents in my craft closet. And so she was going through a very crafty phase. So every time she wanted a glue gun or she wanted some yarn or, like, she needed a new kind of measuring tape or something because, you know, they're the hard ones and they're the fabric ones, whatever it was. I would lie to her. Excuse me. And I would say something like, you know what? It's a mess. I gotta... I would rather dig through it. Or, you know, I think that's actually in a tall place. Like, I'm gonna I'm gonna get the step ladder. It's a whole thing. Don't worry about it. Just wait right here for me. I'll be right back with that glue gun. And that took a lot of effort. Those were absolutely lies, but it was fun, and it hurt no one. It was like having this constant Easter egg hunt going on in my house that I was the only person who knew about. It was great. And at the end of the day or really at the end of the season, when her birthday came around, I gave her all of the gifts. The fact that I had told that lie had made it more fun rather than causing me harm or causing me pain or causing me, like, not to be able to focus on what I was doing because I was so worried about her seeing where her gifts were. Like, no. It was cute. But doing that at the office, doing that in a work environment where the worst thing that can happen is much, much worse than your kids seeing a present three weeks early. Right? The worst thing that can happen is maybe you get fired. Maybe you get harassed. Maybe you're no longer safe at work. Maybe you're no longer safe on the walk from work to your car. Whatever it is, That takes so much more effort, and it is so much more stressful. And what that means is you're putting all of this time and energy and focus into the performance because it is a performance, so you're not as focused on your job. And it's easy to see how that has a major impact on HR's outcomes. So let's talk about the specific impact that psychological safety has on the workplace. It has a direct effect on your ability to to achieve some of HR's most important KPIs. For example, twelve percent of employees with low psychological safety are likely to quit compared to just three percent of employees with high psychological safety. That's a 400% increase. Of course, there are other factors that go into retention rates. As I'm sure you know, that's a hugely complex topic, but psychological safety is a big one. This one factor can make such a big difference. Motivation. Psychological safety more than doubles motivation at work, and it more... And it nearly triples happiness at work. Happy people do better work. It's really that simple. There are all kinds of studies out there. I feel like I run across one every couple of months where some great big research institution will gather all of this data and talk to all of these psychologists and psychiatrists and look at all of these charts and say, like, you know what? Happy people are better at their jobs. Of course, they are. In other news, water is wet. But knowing this is a big win for HR and having the data behind it that you can share with leadership if you're trying to get a budget or if you're trying to change the culture, bring in a consultant, whatever it is, that can be really helpful. And speaking of which, if you really wanna get executive buy in, psychological safety increases profitability. So there are a lot of there are a lot of different datasets you can look at that imply that. This is one that says it directly. This was an example of a company that they made one change. Their one change was that they trained managers in the skills they needed to promote psychological safety. We're talking empathy. We're talking communication. We're talking better listening skills, all of that stuff. And after making that one change, this company achieved 25% above their annual revenue target. That's huge. And this detail is is extremely important too. It wasn't that they just fixed psychological safety. It was that they trained their managers because leadership is really key. We already know from years of research. I think everyone... I hope everyone knows that Gallup stat about 70% of engagement is due to managerial effectiveness. Excuse me. You probably heard that one. Right? So great leaders drive results. We know this. Again, this is not rocket science. This is established fact based on decades of data and research done by a wide variety of research institutions. And in fact, done by Paycor. We've seen this in in studies that we've done in the past as well. This is yet another example of what big a difference a leader can make. And we'll talk about that more in-depth on a later slide, but it's an important call out here as well. So next, we're gonna look at the why behind the what. We know psychological safety makes a huge difference, but what's the mechanism? What is it about psychological safety that is having all of these incredibly powerful impacts? So first, I'm gonna share an example about something called Project Aristotle. So back in 2012, promised you we'd talk about 2012, Google launched an internal research project for... About Google employees, and they called it Project Aristotle. They wanted to find out why certain teams were performing better than other teams within the company, and they measured all kinds of factors. They measured the balance of personal attributes like gender or education or tenure at the company. Right? Is it true that if everybody in the room has a PhD, you do better work? Is it true that if you have an even mix of men and women, more work gets done? Right? Like, all kinds of questions. They measured whether or not teams socialized outside of work. They measured how much people spoke in meetings, whether they were talking over each other or whether they were waiting for each other to finish. They measured all kinds of things that not being a data scientist, I would never have even thought to measure, and they found no patterns. One researcher in the study is actually quoted as saying, at Google, we're pretty good at finding patterns. There weren't strong patterns here. And this is... That's... When you consider the source, that's hilarious. This is a company who changed the world because they reinvented what it means to find and capitalize on patterns and pattern recognition. They are one of the most innovative and impactful companies in the history of companies and in the history of data. Right? They specialize in pattern recognition, and they're admitting they didn't have a clue. So the researchers are racking their brains. They're trying to figure out what's going on here. And then one of them came across Amy Edmondson's idea of psychological safety, comes back around. And this is how one New York Times reporter described their findings after they found the idea of psychological safety and started looking at that dimension of the research. The quote from this New York Times article is psychological safety, more than anything else, is critical to making a team work. More than anything else, That's huge. They just came out and said, psychological safety is the reason for success. It's really that simple. And this is a company that values innovation. Right? Not just in the work they do, but in the way that they do it. When you think about Google's offices and the massage therapists and the creme brulee and the chauffeurs that bring people home so they don't need to worry about driving when they're too tired to be safe on the road. Right? All of these things, they're incredibly profitable. They're incredibly successful. The creme brulee is not driving results. The psychological safety is what's driving results. So why could that be true? Let's look at some context here. So 71% of people say authenticity. So not needing to lie, being psychologically safe at work makes people feel more confident. If you feel confident in your own abilities, it's much easier to think outside the box to come up with brand new ways to solve problems and even say develop new products. Right? New products and services. If you believe in yourself, you're not gonna dismiss your own ideas. You're gonna spend the time pursuing them rather than saying like, oh, that could be cool. No. It couldn't possibly. I'm not smart enough for that. No. You have confidence in yourself. You're gonna write it down. You're gonna look it up. You're gonna share it with a friend. You're gonna talk about it. Next, authenticity builds relationships. This relates back to confidence in ways that can make a huge difference at work. Because in a work context, let's say you're trying to come up with new and profitable ideas, confidence is an interpersonal experience. It doesn't matter how much I believe in myself. Right? I have that idea. I write it down. I think it's really cool. I fill a whole notebook with notes about it, but I know for a fact that Cheryl is gonna laugh at me if I say it in public. Apologies to anybody on the call named Cheryl. I'm sure you're lovely. I am not talking about you. If I'm absolutely certain that Cheryl is gonna laugh at me, why would I say that? I don't feel safe. I don't have trust in the team. I'm I'm gonna let my great ideas... Maybe they don't die on the page, but maybe I take them with me to my next company. The company doesn't benefit from this. People need to feel psychologically safe in relationships with their peers and in relationship with their managers in order to suggest new ideas. Because, ultimately, what... What's happening here is people feel safe to take healthy risks, and innovation depends on risk. The problem we're facing in this era, talk about times of cultural change, is that just getting through the day feels risky right now. We're not cultivating... As HR leaders in this era, in this moment in time, we're not cultivating psychological safety for a group of happy people with easy, simple, boring lives. Show of hands. Anybody have a boring life? Is anybody bored right now? You remember boredom? Yeah. I I don't see any raised hands, by the way. So our biggest problem is not that Cheryl is gonna laugh at us. Our biggest problem is much bigger and scarier and more I know that's true for me. I imagine that's true for most, if not all, of the people on this call. The world has gotten so much more complicated, and people's problems have gotten bigger. And what that means is people need more support, and HR can give it to them. So let's talk about what sort of issues people are facing in a little bit more detail. So So we are living through a time of massive cultural change. Excuse me. Specifically today, I will be talking about three factors that play a role in our current experience of psychological safety, not just psychological safety at work. And I wanna make it very clear. First of all, any one of these could be an entire session. Any one of these could probably be a series. And second of all, obviously, this is not an exhaustive list. I picked the three that I felt were the most important to talk about in this moment with this community. The list is endless. Right? But this is what we'll be talking about today. First, political tensions, AI adoption, and ongoing stress and the impact of ongoing stress. Because, really, what's happening right now is, yes, we're stressed about change. Sure. Been there, done that. I was eleven twenty twenty. But we're not just stressed about the fact of change. The rate of change is also accelerating. And on top of that, we can't expect it to slow down. Right? This is an endurance game. We have been living through unprecedented times for such a long time that they're precedented now. That's... This is just the reality we live in, and we need better and more sustainable ways to support each other through this ongoing period of of upheaval. So I'm gonna briefly touch on these these stressors that people in The US are facing right now. I'm sure people globally are facing similar, if not identical stressors, but located in The US as I am, hello from Chicago, all I can speak to is this shared experience. And I wanna make it very clear too, it's not just your workers, it's everybody. It's your boss. It's your customers. It's your shareholders. It's the random people you talk to on the phone when you're having a computer issue, and they don't even work for your company. It's everyone. So if we can take steps to address these issues for our teams, then that's gonna have this ripple effect that... I don't know. Is this how we save the world? Wouldn't that be nice? Little little grandiose, but, you know, I can dream. So first, let's talk about political tension. This is an era of political tension and political change. Whatever your political beliefs are, whether you're left, right, center, you don't pay attention to politics, I literally do not care what you think for the purposes of this slide. I know for sure that the political tension in The US has an impact on your daily life right now. That's become very clear to me over the past few years, especially since COVID, that political tension and discord impact everyone whether or not you choose to participate in any of that stuff. The clearest example of this, this really came home for me when... So one of my very best friends lives in Europe. She travels around. She's not always based in one particular country, and she's been there for years. She's actually a Canadian expat. I've lived in The US my whole life. So she and I have really different... Just like we had really different upbringings in terms of the political things we learned about and the political things that, like, shaped the way we look at the world coming from different countries. And there are things that take up a lot of space in my life and a lot of space in my head that she doesn't think about very often. They just don't really have an impact on her and vice versa. So a couple years back, there was something huge happening in the news, and I don't even remember what. I feel like there's always something huge happening in the news these days... These decades. And we have a video call every week. And she looks at me and she goes, Hannah, I can tell how stressed you are just by looking at your shoulders. Like, they're not supposed to be up here. What's, like, what's going on? And I told her and I told her what the news issue I was thinking about. And she goes, you know, maybe you don't know this, but it's it's different over here. At the time, she was living in Portugal. And she said, I can just go about my day and not think about who voted for who. I have no idea who these people voted for, and I don't care. I'm doing yoga on the beach with my community of 75 year old ladies, then I'm gonna go home and knit. That's my day in Portugal. I'm not thinking about what's happening in US politics. Like, there's a whole world out here. And that kind of boggled my mind to realize that, like, wow. Can you imagine walking down the street and not knowing or caring what anybody thinks of you based on who they voted for or who they think you voted for? Right? Like... And that's, again, true for literally everyone, literally all of us, whether whether or not you vote. There's that tension in the air that just exists here right now that... I mean, I'm sure it affects kids too, people who can't even participate in politics in the same way yet. And this is not this is not a comment on what's actually happening in American politics. Not here to express an opinion about that. But our experience of politics as people who live in The US has become a major source of stress, and that's been true for years. The American Psychological Association or the APA conducts an annual study or an annual survey called the stress in America survey. They usually run it in the fall. So this one is from last year. This is the most recent available data. So in late twenty twenty five, seventy six percent of people said that the future of our country is a major source of their stress. If that number is big enough, 76% of people don't agree about anything. 76% of people don't agree that the sky is up. But this many people are hugely stressed by the future of our country. And I wanna know here that in October 2024, right before the last presidential election, that number was seventy seven percent. So it was a little bit higher, but it... It's only dropped one point. Stress levels have not meaningfully improved after that big moment, which tells me it's not about the big moment. It's not about any one event. It's not about an election or a court case or any single political effort. It's about our culture. We have developed this culture of being stressed about the future, and it shows. I'm dating myself a little bit here, but does anybody remember the great celebrity die off of 2016 where it was... I mean, it was Prince and it was Carrie Fisher, and it was it was too many people to name. It was everybody. And people started saying, like, ah, 2016. And then 2017 came around, and everybody was saying, ah, 2017. And that continued. It really stopped after 2020 because, like, 2020 won that round. But it was still true that we were looking for something external to blame that's like everybody's experiencing the same year. Right? Like, let's be mad at something. There's something bigger than us to be mad about. And I think even though we're not blaming the year anymore in the same way, thank goodness, it still feels like we have this shared culture now of just being upset and concerned about the future, and the data backs that up. What's also interesting about this APA study is they found that the... This seventy six percent of people are more likely to be lonely. And that makes a lot of intuitive sense to me anyway. Because if you're so focused on the division that's happening, the tension and the division that's happening between you and your neighbors or your colleagues or your friends or whoever it is, of course, you feel isolated from people. You feel isolated from the group. You have a hard time bridging those divides or looking past those divides or wondering if there is more to life than how much tension there is in the air. And what we're talking about here, another word for that is interpersonal fear, I e, the opposite of psychological safety. Right? Loneliness also, it increases the risk of various health issues, including physical and mental health issues. And as any HR professional knows, that increases the rate of absenteeism. It increases the rate presenteeism. It reduces engagement. It reduces productivity, so on and so forth. Right? You've heard this list before. And here's why your CEO should care or your CFO really should care. Loneliness is associated with people having a hard time making decisions. That could be important at any job. And also associated with neglecting their responsibilities at home, at school, and at work. So there you go. As many of you probably know, SHRM has been doing ongoing research on incivility starting in q one of twenty twenty four. And throughout that time, they have consistently found that politics are a top contributor to incivility both in and outside of work. The percentage of incidents of incivility caused by politics spiked in 2025, and it has gone down since then, but it is still one of the number one reasons that incivility happens. That impacts workplace culture, and it impacts our national culture. And what that means is even if your workplace is perfect, everyone loves each other, everyone feels safe, there are no bad relationships. First of all, congratulations. Please tell us your secret. We desperately want to know. And second of all, it is safe to assume this is still a source of stress for people who work at your company. Maybe they go to work and they're having the best time of their lives, but they go to the grocery store and they're witnessing instability that's somebody else's place of work. Right? So one HR department cannot solve problems on a national scale nor should you try. Please get some sleep. But what you can do is you can try to improve the culture for the specific people on your specific team regardless of their political beliefs. So whether the stress is coming from work or it's coming from home or it's coming from their families or school or walking down the street, whatever it is, you can make work a safe haven where they can experience psychological safety at least while they're there. Right? And we're gonna share... I'm gonna go through a lot of solutions for this. But before I do, we're gonna look at the other couple of stressors that I promised you we would talk about a minute ago. So going forward, Kyle Reagan, I'm not your supervisor. I can't tell. I can I can tell you that sleep? I can tell you that an appropriate amount of sleep is a healthy thing to do is what I can do. So there. Alright. Moving on to talk about AI at scale. So I'm not gonna spend too much time here. I know that people are tired of talking and hearing about AI, but TLDR, the numbers are going up. It's having an impact on your workplace culture. If you really don't wanna talk about AI, go get a drink of water. I'll see you in, like, two minutes. Alright? So here are the numbers. First of all, 89% of organizations use AI in at least one business function. It's taking off. But this is the vast majority of companies using AI for at least one purpose. Second, 44% of respondents to one survey said that AI is scaling across their organization, up from 38% of respondents who said that a year ago. So it's not just AI adoption by companies. It's also the way that people use AI within their companies, which... What this tells me, reading between the lines a little bit, is leaders are encouraging workers to use it for more and more different types of tasks and different types of work. And finally, last stat on this slide, approximately fourteen percent of US workers report decision fatigue and brain fog due to managing too many diff... Too many disparate AI tools. Scaling at this rate is hard. Right? I I firmly believe that the Internet changed the way our brains work. Like, I believe that from my own personal experience. It feels true that AI is doing a similar thing for better, worse, or indifferent. Not here to weigh in on that. And what it what it really reminds me of is... So quick show of thumbs. Has anybody here had an immersive language experience? Like, for example, when I was in college, I was so fortunate. I got to study abroad, and I lived in Italy for, like, six months. Has anyone had an experience like that? Yeah. I'm seeing a couple of thumbs. So you might know what this is like. When you are have... So just to describe it for folks who have not had that experience, when you have an immersive language experience, you're learning something new, and it's not just that you're learning the language, it's that you have to get good at the language in order to live your life. Right? Like, it's not, I have to learn how to say groceries in order to pass my class. It's, I have to learn how to say groceries or I'm not gonna eat tonight. Right? Like, it's... There's... The stakes are much higher. You have no choice but to figure it out quickly in real time. It's exhausting. I have... I actually have a friend who's doing this right now. She just moved to France. She's... Has lived in The US her whole life, is now living in Paris. So lucky. And, she's she's just exhausted all the time, and she's doing a regular reasonable amount of things that a person might do in a day, but it just takes up so much space in your brain. It is so much effort simultaneously learning the thing, implementing the thing, learning from your mistakes, needing to pivot, and all of it just so that your life can carry on. Right? That's pretty similar. It's not identical. It's pretty similar to the experience these approximately 14% of folks are having trying to implement AI at work. Because it's not just playing around with AI. It's using these tools we've never used before because they've never existed before and trying to use them to accomplish important tasks that people are relying on you to do takes a lot of energy. And this is a massive shift that is going to occur. Right? Like it or lump it, this is currently happening, and employees need support from HR in order to get through it because it's a massive shift. Best case scenario, this is gonna turn into an investment of time and energy that pays off in huge ways. We can't even predict what that's gonna mean in the future. Right? It's so hard to predict even five minutes from now. I am not even gonna try. Bottom line is people need extra support from HR in order to successfully navigate this process. Even the most positive outcome is going to include a period of ongoing stress. So let's talk about ongoing stress. Here's the interesting thing about stress. It's not necessarily bad. The World Health Organization or WHO describe this... Defines stress as a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation. Stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives. Everyone experiences stress to some degree. The way we respond to stress, however, makes a big difference to our overall well-being. So that sounds scary at first. Right? But let's look at look at it a little bit more closely. Stress is a natural human response. It's evolutionary. Stress serves a purpose. I like to think that all feelings serve a purpose. I'm still looking for the purpose for some of them, but I'm trying. Stress is what empowers us to do great things. By itself, it's not positive or negative. It's about the way they respond to it. Right? Like, I will I will die on the hill of, like, no feeling is a problem. It's feelings about feelings that'll get you in trouble. So researchers say that short term stress can actually be very positive. It makes you more alert. It improves your memory. Preliminary research shows that it might even stimulate the production or the generation of new brain cells. Super interesting. I actually just saw this with my kid. She was studying for this great big test at school, and she was... It was like, for the last two weeks leading up to the test, it was, like, I was watching her brain change. It was incredible. Like, she would wake up in the morning not knowing something and then, like, spend an hour doing... Working and go to school and come back and be like, what? Like, I I know how to do this new kind of math now because I put a little bit of effort into it. It was incredible. Your your body kicks kicks into high gear. Right? You're like, okay. Like, there's a threat. How can I respond to the situation in a new way, in an effective way? Like, who do I have to become to make sense of this moment? So that's that's acute stress. It's a sort of rosy view of acute stress. It's not always that way, but it's often that way. On the other hand, if it lasts too long, it has the opposite effect. In a situation of ongoing stress, you kick into high gear and your brain's like, what can I do? How can I change? Who do I need to be in this moment? And you become that person, and it doesn't fix anything. So you can't close the loop. You receive evidence on this, like, biological level. You receive evidence that your heightened responses aren't improving the situation. You're just... You're up here, but you can't come back around and be like, okay. I learned it. I fixed it. Now I can assimilate that. It's like you're hungry and all you get is a small snack, and you're like, I... Now I don't wanna eat dinner because I just snacked, but, like, I'm not... Like, I'm still... What do I do with this? So you stay on high alert, but it doesn't have the same positive impact. So that sort of starts to become a dangerous spiral. Ryan, did I just call stress cute? Maybe I did. I think I think learning can be cute. How about that? In the same way of, like, you can look cute. I don't know. Anna, you're always hungry. I I feel that. Alright. Acute. Alright. So ongoing stress. Unfortunately, unlike acute stress, ongoing stress decreases attention span. It interferes with memory. It can lead to poor communication. It makes people less adaptable rather than more adaptable. It negatively impacts physical and mental health. It can even damage relationships as I feel like a lot of us may have experienced. Like, you you snap at somebody and you're like, oh, no. I'm so sorry. It's not your fault. Right? Like, that still has an impact on that relationship, and it contributes to burnout. So as you can see, stress where your heightened senses don't have a direct visible positive impact on your situation ends up being really damaging in this huge variety of ways, pretty much from every angle. It's easy to see how these effects could show up at work. Right? If you have a shorter retention span, it's gonna be hard for you to engage in meetings or engage with customers. If you have memory problems, your workflows are gonna get interrupted. Poor communication, less effective work relationships. Maybe it even damages a customer relationship, has an impact on profitability. If you're less adaptable, you're gonna be less innovative. It's harder for you to pivot and manage new budget priorities in, you guessed it, this time of accelerating change. Adaptability has never been more important. So all of these issues as a whole, they impact productivity, engagement, company culture. Now you see the spiral. So if you're doing less well at work, you are stressed out about the fact that you're doing less well at work. That stress makes it harder for you to focus on work. Right? How do you get out of that? As we've talked about, some of the stress employees are experiencing these days is work related, and there's a lot that HR can do to support them through that. But some of the stress that people are experiencing right now is just a function of living in the world. And you can quit your job. Right? Sometimes one must quit one's job. What you can't do is quit participating in the culture that you are living in. You can opt out. You can be like, I'm I'm never leaving my house again, but, like, the culture is still happening to you. You're still part of it. It's still occurring. And, clearly, leaders have a huge responsibility here. Right? Like, if leaders wanna make any kind of an impact, this is this is a mountain to climb. It is really up to HR and up to leaders across the company to create as safe an environment as possible even in the stressful context that we're living through. This is... Again, you can't solve this on a national scale, but on a company scale, this is absolutely HR's problem to solve. So now let's talk about solutions. I promise it's not all doom and gloom. So thinking about leaders, why am I talking so much about leadership? Because... Well, okay. Maybe a little more doom and gloom, but just for a second, I promise we're almost through. Forty nine percent of US workers report feeling no psychological... Excuse me, low psychological safety at work. That's a pretty distressing number. That's nearly half. What I do like about this number, I promise there's an upside, is that's very clearly a to do list item. Right? If that that number could mean... It probably means some percentage of people on your team. Maybe it's nobody on your team, which would be wonderful. Maybe it's everybody on your team, which means this should be a very high priority for you. But now that we have the data about psychological safety on this scale in The US, clearly, it's... It should be somewhere on everyone's priority list. So this is something we can change. If you stuck with me this long, thank you so much. I assume this is already a priority for you. How do we make executives care? I feel like this is the number one question I personally get when I come on and do webinars on this program is I care about this. I agree with you. Wonderful data points. How do I make my c suite listen to me? And here's how. You tell them that higher psychological safety decreases burnout. The more your people trust each other, the less they're gonna experience interpersonal fear and the lower their burnout rates will be because they're gonna be able to receive support from each other. They're no longer putting in that effort to hide. They're no longer trying to be authentic in order to fit in. They don't need to to work so hard to protect themselves from the real or perceived negative consequences of showing up as their whole selves at work. They can just be, and then they can think about the work at hand instead of thinking about how do I... Like, what performance do I need to give in order to not get yelled at, in order to be safe, in order to not get fired. Right? They freeze up their bandwidth to focus on the projects that really drive the business forward. And if you work in HR, you might think, well, this is obvious, and I might agree with you. But you still have to earn emotional buy in from from executives because they're not seeing it. And here's how I know that. Executives report significantly higher psychological safety than other workers. 93% of executives report psychological safety compared to 86% each of managers and individual contributors. And so in that 93% and in that 86%, some of those are high psychological safety, some of them are low psychological safety, but it's they have psychological safety. And for executives, that's still significantly higher. That's a seven point difference. What this means is it's likely something they don't see as a problem. It's likely something they don't know is happening for the people underneath them. So HR needs to communicate that to executives, which is a win because it puts you in a strong position as an insightful truth teller. You have this information that they need in order to improve the way work happens at the company in order to drive retention, in order to drive innovation. They need to know this, and they might not know it yet. So what can they do right now today? That's gonna be their first question. Like, okay. I believe you. This is a problem. We have to work on it. What do I do? And the headline that you can share with them, and we'll share a lot more detail in a minute, is that empathetic leadership drives psychological safety. And I don't just mean being a leader who has empathy. That's wonderful. Please do that if you can. That's a great place to start. But empathetic leadership is more of a technical term. Specifically, the McKinsey survey that this term comes from explains that empathetic leadership drives psychological safety while authoritative leadership does not. That means focusing on more soft skills, making room for people to express their opinions, leaving space for people to share ideas and work more collaboratively, generally equipping your leaders with communication and interpersonal skills instead of only focusing on results. Empathetic leaders empower team members to take responsibility, whereas authoritative leaders expect them to be caused in the machine. Like, you do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it. There's a time and a place for both that I've actually spoken about on other webinars in the past, but empathetic leadership is really what paves the way for psychological safety. Ironically here, I think a lot of people in leadership positions get really focused on product because that's what's gonna drive the business forward. Right? But, ironically, focusing more on process is gonna get you to the product in a much more sustainable way, especially now as we are living through a time of change because sustainability is key. The biggest win here is to give your employees a sense of safety and security, and that means moving slowly and encouraging them to do their best, not shutting down their ideas for the sake of a quicker result. And that approach really pays off the approach of being more empathetic, giving people more space to share their ideas because psychological safety correlates with leader effectiveness. So in one study, employees were asked to rate their sense of psychological safety and their sense of their manager's effectiveness, and the correlation was abundantly clear. To quote the researchers' findings, they said that when managers' skills are rated a nine or a 10 by their employees, they have an average psychological safety score of 84%. Those whose overall skills are rated a six or lower, conversely, have an average score of 36%. Unsurprisingly, right, managerial effectiveness is also linked to higher revenue. So to draw a line from a to b to c here, teams with higher psychological safety, more effective managers, more profitable. That's a pretty big deal. So brass tacks. How can HR and leadership put all of these big ideas into practice? How do you support your team and not... You're not just stemming the tide of stress, but actually improve psychological safety, make people feel more motivated to come to work during this time of massive change? So it all comes down to two things. Before I talk about the specifics on this slide, I wanna share I wanna share the structure of what I'm talking about, which is funny, and you'll see why in a second. Those two things are structure and connection. You need to create an infrastructure that makes people feel safe. And then within that infrastructure, you need to give them opportunities to connect with each other in reasonable, sustainable ways. That means peers, leaders, executives, customers, within that support structure, everyone needs a safe and reasonable container. I always think about it like this. Once many years ago, I was on a meditation retreat where someone did a workshop on healthy boundaries. What does it mean to hold healthy boundaries? And so we're on a meditation retreat, and we had been doing yoga all day, and we're sitting around this beautiful campfire in this incredible rural retreat space. And she's standing by the campfire, and she says, okay. So let's imagine I wanna make tea. I've got this water right here. What do I do? Do I just pour it on the fire? No. Absolutely not. If you pour water on a fire, that's not tea. That's ashes and steam and mud and smoke. Right? Like, that's not... That is not how you that's not how you get from point a to point b. What you need is a container. You need something to put it in so that these two things can work together, can support each other, can potentiate each other without getting in each other's way, without everything being on top of everything to the point where you just have this giant mess. So so HR needs to do a similar thing here. It's not about dividing anyone. It's about creating healthy containers that people can work within to achieve shared goals. So what are the specific containers you need to create and the specific actions you... Or cultural aspects you need to promote in order to achieve psychological safety more effectively? So first, cultivate soft skills. Train your managers in empathy, communication, problem solving. All of these skills are gonna make them better leaders and empower them to foster a psychologically safe environment for everyone on the team. They can't support their teams if they don't know how. And in a situation like this, I strongly recommend microlearning. It's not about checking the box on some annual training or just, like, clicking through something, right, to be like, ah, yes. I saw the video on empathy. I empathy now. No. It's about giving them tiny little lessons and saying, okay. Now go do that for a week. Now in every in every one on one that you have for the next week, why don't you listen more than you talk? And then they do that to the point where it becomes a habit, and then they layer on a new skill. Right? That makes it a lot more sustainable, and sustainability is the name of the game right now. Next, foster relationships. Give your team the opportunity to build real relationships with each other. They may or may not take you up on those opportunities, and you certainly can't force them to. But what you can do is maybe set a company norm of everyone taking lunch at the same time. Invite people to team building activities. My favorite meeting of the week is I've got a meeting with, like, three or four people where thirty minutes once a week... Kayla, you know this call. And we just chitchat. There's no agenda. There's no goal. We just hang out. And there are YouTube videos. There are vacation pics. Right? It's... And it's my favorite. And I have probably some of the strongest relationships with the people on that weekly meeting. Those are some of my strongest relationships compared to any of the other work relationships I've had in years because we make that time for each other. Next, invite feedback. So create spaces in which employees can share their thoughts in a meet... A respectful way, but a meaningful way that doesn't shy away from hard truths. They're not gonna do it on their own. Even if you work for the greatest company in the whole history of companies, everyone loves each other, everyone trusts each other. First of all, once again, please tell us your secret. Second of all, you're still gonna have new hires coming from toxic environments. People need to be trained and supported in learning how to do this. So that could mean you set the standard for weekly one on ones between every direct report and their boss. It could mean that you have quarterly performance reviews instead of annual ones, which I highly recommend. That's how we do it. I love that. You could also run surveys to gauge how employees are doing. If you do that, make absolutely certain that you act on whatever information you receive from them because if you receive information and then it goes nowhere, the survey ends up having the opposite of the desired effect. Next, celebrate curiosity. So curiosity and authenticity go hand in hand. Asking a question is a vulnerable act. You're admitting you don't know something and you're opening the door to potentially being incorrect about something. People need to feel safe before they can do that. And creating an environment where people can be curious and can take those risks means creating an environment of innovation. You could do this by rewarding people for their failures, rewarding people for taking big swings even if they miss. Right? Whether that's just shouting them out in a meeting or sending them a Starbucks gift card or whatever it is. Make space to celebrate the win of learning even if it doesn't have a direct business result. Next, define reporting processes. In this time of change, everyone needs to know what to do when problems arise. Problems will always arise. And maybe those problems are within your company or they have nothing to do with you. Let's say you have an employee whose spouse loses their job suddenly or quits because they had no psychological safety at work. And all of a sudden your employee has all of these urgent questions about health insurance, they shouldn't need to wonder who to call. They should know exactly who to ask so they can find the answer to those questions as quickly and easily as possible and focus on solving the problem at hand. And finally, document everything. New documentation has always been important. And in this era of change, it is just getting more important every day. If you were on some of the earlier calls in the in the summit and you saw... I think it was just the last session with Julie Pew, you know how important documentation is. I'm I'm just... There is an echo in here. It's me. Please save as much information as you can. Keep your information clean and neat and orderly because as things change, you're gonna need records to be able to support your team through whatever processes come our way in the future. And finally, I'm gonna leave you with this metaphor. So the idea here is connections build resilience as you can see on the slide. So what does that mean? So the thing about bridges in general, the Golden Gate Bridge in particular, is they are these incredibly strong structures that depend on tension. They depend on... Like, I don't wanna get too nerdy about this. I have... My dad's an engineer. I could talk about this for days. But, so the way tension bridges work is the the part that you drive across is actually hanging from those cables. So if you've ever driven across the Golden Gate Bridge, it sways in the wind. So it's... I have some early memories of this when I was a little kid, and it's it's like the world's strangest, slowest amusement park ride because you're, like, literally, like, you're swaying back and forth on this bridge surrounded by cars. And it's a little terrifying, and it's a little exhilarating. But the thing is, it's not a bug. It's a feature. That is what allows this giant structure to maintain its integrity no matter what happens with the weather, no matter how many cars are driving across it. Right? The flexibility is the resilience. And so say you're driving across the bridge and you trust, like, okay. Like, I know it's gonna hold me up. I can see all the other cars. We're in this together. We're doing it safely. Nobody's freaking out about the fact that it's swaying. Right? You're gonna be a much safer driver. And at the end of the day, the architects of this bridge are HR. You can't control what kind of driving people do across the bridge, but what you can do is you can give people the structure they need, literally, in this metaphor, that they need to connect with each other and to connect the dots of their own careers to show up at work and be supportive of each other and be their authentic selves and continue to move the business forward no matter what stress they're facing outside of work. All you can do is give people the tools they need to build these connections to support each other through this incredibly complex time that we're all navigating together. That's really HR's role right now, and and I believe in our ability to do it. We can get through this together. We already are. We already have. So thank you all so much for spending this time with us today. I will now hand it back to Ava if there are any questions. Great. Thank you so much, Hannah. That was, an amazing presentation. We do have a few questions that came in. The first one is from Ryan Farmer. So you did share a little bit about, how to kind of approach the situation if it is a manager or someone in c suite, and you give a great response, as how to approach that. So how would you respond if they were to kind of just brush it off, laugh, and say, oh, I'm just hard to work with? That's, you know, that's a great question. And, Ryan, I am so sorry to hear that you might be experiencing this or maybe you have in the past. Nobody's nobody's commenting on your current CEO. I think the thing to do here is collect data. And whether that means you ultimately end up working with an outside consultant or it means that you're bringing in the head of your HR team. Right? You need to be able to walk into the CEO and say, no. It's not just that you're hard to work with. It's that your attitude is impacting our ability to achieve the goals, whatever the goals are. Right? Whatever is important to your company. I know for some people, it's... Some people are all about sales. Some people are all about number of clients served. Right? Whatever the metric is that your CEO is gonna care about, find a way to collect data that draws a straight line and says, this inappropriate behavior prevented us from reaching these goals. Because maybe they don't care about the psychological safety of the team. If they're the CEO, they probably, hopefully, do care about the success of the business. Okay. Great. Thank you. We have. another one. This question asks, how should leaders respond in the moment when someone shares bad news, admits a mistake, or pushes back? Oh, great question. You know, I have spent years, learning how to fix my face, learning how to, like... Especially coming... Like, working in the health care space. There's a skill you develop as a health care practitioner where you just... You have a you have a no judgment face. Right? And people will come in and say some of the wildest things that I am never allowed to share publicly because those were confidential spaces. And you just look at them and you say, oh, okay. I understand. Right? So how can how can we work with that? How can we work through that? Right? And I think coming from a place of nonjudgment can actually end up being a lot more supportive than sometimes we try and validate people's feelings in a way that is... Ends up being invalidating. Right? Like, if somebody says I'm having a really hard time and your response is, oh, but you're doing right. And this this can apply to pushback as well. If somebody says, like, actually, I don't wanna do that in that way. You can say, oh, how interesting. Tell me more. Right? Like, just drop your facial expression. When in doubt, gather information, and then you can decide what to do with it after you've had time to process your own response in private. Great. Thank you. That's a great approach. One more question we have time for. This one is from Elena. She says, what is one practical thing a manager can do when an employee disagrees with them or raises an uncomfortable concern to ensure the employee still feel safe in speaking up in the future. Oh, that's a great question, Elena. Thank them. Just say thank you. Say thank you for saying that. Thank you for sharing that with me. Thank you for trusting me with that information. Right? We can... I mean, I'm I'm teasing our our next month's webinar series a little bit, but we can always express gratitude for people being vulnerable enough to share information even if we have even if we have issues with the actual information they're sharing. It's still vulnerable for them to speak up and say that. Yeah. Totally agree. I think that it's very important that you're able to feel comfortable even bringing that up. So that is awesome. With that, that's all the time we have for q and a. So before we get into the prize winners, we do have an announcement. Let's see. Kayla, if you wanna take over. Hi, Kayla. Thank you, ma. Hi, Anna. Yes. We do have an exciting announcement. So Paycor just launched our first ever talk show, y'all. Is kind of a big deal. Right? Like, it's new. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal. So HRIRL is actually the name of it, and it is co hosted by myself and Hannah. So if you like us, come hang out. Come. spend so some some extra. time. We have so much fun over there. We sure do. We really do. And so we. would love for you to, tell us what you think. So go on over to YouTube, use that QR code, and, let us know what you think. K. Bye. Awesome. Thanks, Kayla. Alright. So now the moment we've been waiting for. So I'm doing announce the prize winners. So the winner of the 25 Amazon gift card is Kyle Ragan. Congrats, Kyle. The next winner of the $50 Amazon gift card is Elena Lazar. Congrats, Elena. And finally, the Apple AirPods winner is Shalise Wiltshire. So sorry if I'm mispronouncing the name. Congrats, Shalise. So you may see a survey also pop up on your screen. We'd love to hear your feedback. It will help us improve for the future. So if you could respond to that, that would be amazing. And then don't forget that all sessions will also be available on demand after the virtual summit. So you can still revisit the content or share it with your colleagues. But with that, thank you guys so much for joining, and thanks for enjoying our summit.