Cultivate…SAFETY by Measuring Your Family’s Emotional Safety

This is our sixth and final week in a series on emotional safety! We’re looking at the six strategies of Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. Google did a two year study on high-performing teams, and they found that the number one factor in performance was emotional safety. Today, we are looking at emotional safety #6 tip: Measuring Psychological Safety.

Businesses that cultivate emotionally safe workplace cultures don’t just assume their team feels safe; they ask, evaluate the results, and improve.

What would this look like for a family? Maybe we wouldn’t actually sit down with a paper survey (or maybe we would???)…but we could ask the questions and be open to the results? What could we learn and how could we improve if we intentionally sought out ways to make the people we love most feel safer?! Families could do just one or two questions per night or per week week so it’s not overly burdensome, especially for younger family members. We suggest setting up some ground rules such as using “I feel…” statements rather than “you always….” statements. If communication is a challenging area in your family, you could agree to hear your loved ones answer and not respond for 24 hours in order to allow time to process without judgment. Remember, this only works when all members are open and non-accusatory.

Here are are a few of the true/false questions from the survey used by Santagata’s team, and a link to the full survey below. Just remember the “team” in this scenario is your family! When you find an area where a family member doesn’t feel safe, brainstorm ways to improve. Remember the tip from Week #1: Approach Conflict as a Collaborator, not an Adversary.