HR and learning leaders are being tasked to improve employee performance and ultimately operational excellence. It’s strategic. It’s imperative.
But it might feel overwhelming. How do you know where to start?
Nowadays, organizations have so many options to develop their employees: They can select a learning vendor promising to improve employee skill sets. They can revamp their in-person training to bring people together. They can continue providing e-learning or virtual instructor-led training. They can lean into new technologies. And the promise of personalized learning and development weighs heavily.
The truth is, the best learning solutions won’t matter if you don’t have these two essential elements: Trust and psychological safety..
What do we mean by trust in the workplace?
Trust in the workplace isn’t the only foundational part of a people team’s success. A successful team also needs psychological safety. The Center for Creative Leadership defines psychological safety as “the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”
Why is this important for L&D?
Good training creates a space where learners can take risks, ask questions and share ideas, and prompts them to take these new concepts and new behaviors and use them in their job. With any new skill, it takes time to develop and we often make mistakes. If you decided to learn how to rebuild an engine tomorrow and you’ve never rebuilt an engine before, you will likely make mistakes as you tinker. Your end product might be a working engine, but it took time, practice and mistakes to get there.
If our employees don’t feel comfortable asking questions, sharing ideas and making mistakes, they won’t have the confidence to try.
McKinsey and Company points out that psychological safety brings many benefits to the workplace, including”
- Fostering diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.
- Improving team effectiveness.
- Enhancing learning.
- Increasing employee retention.
- Improving decision-making.
And ultimately, psychological safety results in better performance. So, if psychological safety is so important, how do L&D leaders foster it?
Identify the skills learners need
L&D leaders must first know what skills staff need in the organization. Identifying skills allows L&D leaders to align solutions to the organizational strategy. A competency model is one way to identify skills.
First, L&D leaders should determine which competencies are right for their organization. This is often done through external research, including a review of current trends and potential disruptors to the way of work.
But competency models must also be tailored to the organization to be effective, so the process must also include reviewing internal documents, such as organizational strategy, core values, DEIB commitments and job descriptions.
Once the research is completed, it’s also important to hear from staff directly. What skills are they using on a regular basis? What skills do their supervisors wish they had? What do the top performers do without even realizing they are doing it?
Having these conversations can build trust, if the organization follows through on what they hear.
It also allows L&D leaders to synthesize the information and identify themes to help them prioritize their work in a way that aligns with the needs of the organization.
It should be noted that in some organizations, the competency model development may fall to HR, but L&D still has a role to play and should be involved in the process.
Create the training to develop those skills
Once L&D leaders have a clear picture of the skills employees need to be successful in the organization, they can begin to create the training or other solutions to develop those skills.
In a recent study, McKinsey found that nearly nine in 10 executives and managers recognize their staff have skill gaps or will have gaps in the next five years, and a third of respondents ranked closing those skill gaps as one of their top three priorities.
Senior executive leaders recognize the need to close these gaps, so L&D is in a good position to be a strategic partner.
This is where organizations may choose to reignite their in-person training, continue to enhance their online options or lean into new technologies.
How the solution is delivered isn’t as important as tailoring the solution to the organization’s specific needs. And, with personalized learning, L&D leaders can take this a step further and tailor staff development to individual staff using role-specific learner journeys.
One way to do this is by using the competency model as a fundamental resource in L&D. And, if employees have been engaged in the process to create that model, they will already have some buy-in to the skills the organization is seeking to develop.
Embed trust building into the training
Buy-in from staff is often based on trust. But L&D leaders can take some additional intentional steps to create trust and psychological safety.
How can you embed trust-building into learning experiences? It often starts beforehand.
L&D leaders can visit with other teams and share what they have to offer while also collecting feedback about their current offerings. As your L&D teams seek this feedback — and make changes — employees will entrust more with your team.
Another piece of this is to engage staff directly in the learner needs analysis when developing a new learning experience.
Finally, when designing the learning experience, L&D teams can build trust building activities into any synchronous lessons. This works because staff are building cross-functional relationships in an environment where they are challenged to reflect, create, share, practice and even fail.
Trust-building activities include:
- Allowing learners to co-create group norms.
- Connecting learners to a shared purpose that answers why the training is relevant to them.
- Building a collective understanding of the issues and needs so learners understand how the learning will benefit them in their roles.
- Providing time for learners to share their lived experiences and alternative perspectives because adult learners bring years of experience and expertise to the learning.
- Prompting learners to challenge existing ways of thinking by engaging in higher order thinking.
- Designing opportunities for learners to build self- and group awareness.
- Allowing participants to practice giving and receiving feedback in the safety of a learning environment.
- Prompting participants to create a shared vision for the future so they can imagine what the organization will be like if they implement the intended behavior change.
Building trust can be done through self-reflection, group discussion, research, hands-on practice and even play.
Provide ongoing support
While all of these approaches allow L&D teams to build trust in the workplace, it’s also important to note that building simply trust takes time — just like rebuilding that engine.
L&D teams can provide ongoing support to staff to help them implement what they learned in the formal training sessions.
This can be done through day-to-day conversations, such as coaching, mentoring, supervisor feedback or peer feedback. Ongoing support can also include suggesting additional learning or providing resources to help them further their learning experiences. Ongoing support can also include creating reward systems to help motivate employees to make the change.
Providing this support shows employees the organization cares about them and their success, and this goes a long way to build trust.
Conclusion
L&D teams are critical to the success of the organization. They are often busy creating learner journeys or strategic skills development roadmaps to help advance the organization’s strategies. But the thing is, it won’t matter if the organization doesn’t have a culture of trust and psychological safety.
By being intentional in engaging staff in their work as they identify the skills staff need and as they develop learning experiences, L&D teams can pave the road to trust. And, with intentional trust-building in training and ongoing support after the training ends, L&D teams can connect staff to the organization’s strategies, themselves and each other so they can continue to learn and grow in a trusting and psychologically safe environment.
