Speaking of Psychology - Why psychological safety matters in a changing workplace, with Dennis Stolle, PhD

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

APA’s 2024 Work in America survey found that younger workers are more likely than older workers to feel stressed, lonely and undervalued at work. Dennis Stolle, PhD, senior director of APA’s office of applied psychology, talks about why that might be and how employers can create workplaces where all ages can thrive; as well as other key findings from the survey including the state of remote work, hybrid work and four-day work weeks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic upended work life in the U.S., companies and workers are still adjusting to the new normal. In June, APA's annual work in America survey found that many workers

are doing well and feeling satisfied with key aspects of their jobs, but some younger workers are struggling. They're more likely than older workers to feel stressed, lonely, and undervalued at work. Today we're going to talk about that as well as other key findings from the survey, which examined some of the biggest issues facing employees and employers today. Why are younger workers struggling? How do employees feel about remote work, hybrid work, and four-day work weeks? How is artificial intelligence affecting the workplace? Are workers using it and are employers prepared to handle the changes it may bring?

Overall, how are workers feeling about their jobs? and what can employers do to create supportive workplaces where employees can thrive? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Dennis Stolley, Senior Director of APA's Office of Applied Psychology, which focuses on applying psychological science to help solve real-world problems. It looks at areas including the workplace, human technology interaction, and leadership to name just a few areas.

Dr. Stolley holds a PhD in social and personality psychology as well as a law degree. He's discussed workplace issues with media outlets including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN.com, and has published widely in both academic journals and popular media. Dr. Stolley, or may I call you Dennis, my colleague, thank you for joining me today. Well, thank you very much for having me. So I mentioned in the introduction that there was an overall trend in this year's work in America's survey that found younger employees are struggling more than older employees feeling undervalued and underappreciated at work. Can you tell us more about that? What did the survey find and

why do you think we're seeing this trend? So one of the topics that we asked about in the survey was whether workers felt that their co-workers who were outside their age group appreciated and saw the value in the ideas that they were presenting at work. And what we found was that almost half of the workers who were aged 18 to 25 said no, meaning that they were saying the coworkers outside their age group do not see the value in their ideas. Now, work, it's interesting is when you compare that number to workers who are age 65 and older, among that age group, only 16 percent.

said that coworkers outside their age group don't see the value in their ideas. So we see a big difference at the two ends of the working adult age spectrum. Now, the survey also found that younger workers are less comfortable than older workers working outside their own age group, as you said. Why do you think that might be? Well, it's interesting. I have a lot of opinions about that. One of the things about a survey like this one is that the data tells us if something is happening. It tells us how often it's happening, and it can even tell us whether two things are happening together so frequently that it's unlikely to just be a coincidence. But it doesn't ultimately tell us why something is happening. For that, we have to kind of go beyond the data

and look at the teachings of psychology as a science and the literature as a whole. And one of the things that I think really may be at work here is the concept of psychological safety. Psychological safety is, it's a term of art that gets used within psychological science, and it refers to the feeling that people have at work that they can truly express themselves and share their ideas and opinions without any negative consequences. And when I say negative consequences, I'm talking about things like, you know, maybe being laughed at for their idea or maybe being belittled for an idea or just ignored for the idea that they're sharing. When people have psychological safety at work,

they're able to really express themselves. My sense is that among young workers, they may still be developing that sense of psychological safety. And so when they look around, they may be feeling more comfortable working with other people who are in their own age group because that's where they feel safe. And they haven't yet begun to expand their horizons of psychological safety to the entire workforce. What can employers do to help these younger workers get that sense of psychological safety? I think that there are, I can name at least five things that a manager could do that are simple and that you could start tomorrow. One is giving constructive feedback, including for a job well done.

A lot of times I think when we think about constructive feedback, we go right to, well, this is when I have to kind of coach somebody who's made a mistake and I'm going to have to, not offend them, but teach them how to do it right. I think it's so important to go beyond that. When somebody does a good job, even on something very small, to bring that up and celebrate especially with somebody who's new to the workforce. Those little reinforcements begin to give people the sense that, hey, I can make a contribution here and I'm important. And then another thing is to really celebrate teamwork and celebrate collaboration, especially when that teamwork and collaboration spans across the levels of age and experience in the workplace.

Another thing is emphasizing skills over corporate hierarchy. So if there's a young worker who maybe has a job title that is lower down, so to speak, on the organizational chart, that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have a certain skill. And really celebrating those skills over the corporate hierarchy is another way to just begin to make people feel safe about making their contributions in the workplace. Is it a question of mentorship? Do we find that a lot of workplaces don't value the whole idea of helping the more senior employers to really, really help the younger employers in that way? I believe that it is an issue of mentorship, but it goes beyond just mentorship. So the mentorship is critically important. I think that the one-on-one meetings with managers can be critically important. The relationship between a direct report and a supervisor or manager can be

critically important in determining the overall experience that a person has in the workplace, which is yet another thing that our data showed in the 2024 survey over and over again, just how important that direct report manager relationship is. But again, I think it goes beyond just that mentorship to a broader organizational culture. There are some organizations, some workplaces that really foster a culture of everybody matters. And everybody's ideas are important. That doesn't mean that we're going to do everything that everybody suggests, right? But we'll consider it.

And we'll celebrate the fact that you're offering ideas, even if there are ideas that we're going to ultimately reject. And on the other hand, there are some workplaces that really just don't foster that kind of a culture. They are hierarchical and chain of command and people are fearful that if they step out of their small zone, that there might be a negative consequence. Well, let's talk about some of the good news that APA found this year. Many workers are feeling pretty satisfied with key aspects of their jobs. What were some of the areas where employees said they were feeling good about their work? Sure. We saw a lot of positive sentiments.

And we saw them across a range of aspects of the workplace, including things that I think are just deeply important and some things that are more superficial. When I say superficial, I'm talking about things like people generally reported that they were happy with their work schedule. Not that that's not important, but it's superficial compared to, for example, being proud of the work that you do or feeling that you're contributing to society. And that's where I really was happy about some of the numbers that we were seeing. We were seeing 93% reporting that they're proud of the work that they do.

86% reporting that they feel that the work they do has a positive impact on society. 81% who would recommend their place of employment as a good place to work. Those are the kind of numbers that really go to the core of our being. You know, why do you get up every day? Because you want to go do work that you're proud of. And it has a positive contribution. And so when I see those kinds of numbers, I feel very good. about the state of the situation.

One of the biggest shifts in the past four years has been toward remote and hybrid work. What percentage of workers are working remote in person and hybrid these days? And how does work location affect people's job satisfaction? Okay, so these were some really interesting numbers because what we saw is that 59% of the respondents reported that they were working in person. We had 24% reporting that they were working hybrid, some mix of in-person and remote, and 17% reporting that they were working remote. Now, those numbers are mildly interesting on their own,

but where it gets really interesting is then we ask the next question of where would you most want to be working? And then we see the numbers break down quite a bit differently, almost an even split of a third, a third, and a third. Now, it's not quite that. It was 38% in person, 34% would prefer a hybrid and 28% would prefer remote. But those numbers are so close to one another that it's almost equal thirds. That's fascinating to me because sometimes I hear people just in casual conversation talk about,

well, what's the best way to work? As if there's one correct answer to that. The reality is that different people have different opinions, different personalities, different positions in their life at a given point in time. They might prefer remote work, somebody else might prefer in-person work. That may switch 10 years down the road. And then what's a bit troubling is when you think about the difference between equal thirds versus where people are actually working, we ran the statistics and found that 33%

of people are not currently working in their desired location, either in-person, remote or hybrid. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all-season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price in valid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. What about four-day work weeks? Are many employers offering them now? Did four-day work week increase employees' happiness at work? Do we know? I don't know that we could say that a lot of

employers are offering four-day work weeks, but there are certainly a meaningful percentage who are. And that number is increasing. So just to give you a sense of the trend, we asked the question in 22, 2022 in our survey of whether or not your employer is offering four-day workweeks. And we had 14% of the respondents say yes. In 23, that number went up to 17%. In 24, that number went up to 22%. So now we're approaching a quarter of the workforce

who's reporting that their employer is offering a four-day work week. Now, it's still early to be able to know the complexities of how a four-day work week would affect people's happiness and how it would affect productivity. It's going to take a little while for that idea to expand so that we can fully study it. What we can study right now is what people think it will result in. And there we see that 81% of workers who are polled say they believe they could be just as effective at their job if they only worked four days a week. 79% say they'd be happier if they were working only four days a week. And here's what really struck me is 67% of our respondents reported a belief that it is going to become the norm within their lifetime that Americans will work.

four days a week. Now, we didn't really dig too deeply into that. So a four-day work week, you may still be working, say, about 40 hours a week, but it'll be spread over four days instead of over five days, right? That's potentially where we're going. Correct. We're not talking about necessarily working fewer hours or switching to a part-time model. And in fact, that's a really important distinction that I'm glad you brought up because there are many people who work four days a week right now and they work just shy of what the law considers to be a full-time job, which then cuts them out of some of the benefits that full-time employees would receive. That's not what we're talking about. The folks who are in that situation are not necessarily

happy about that situation. We're talking about people who are considered full-time employees are getting all the same benefits as a full-time employee, but are putting their work into four days instead of five days. The survey also asked whether employees are using artificial intelligence on the job. What did we find? Are people using things like chat, GPT, and other AI tools, and are employers prepared to deal with this? Yeah, so this is a tricky thing to study,

because AI is in some ways everywhere. And it's been around for longer than this. sometimes we may think of it having been around. You know, chat GPT made everyone aware of AI, but it's been around for a long time before that. So there are a lot of workers who use AI, perhaps unknowingly while they're at work. So we didn't want to study that. What we really wanted to do in the survey was get at people who are intentionally using

artificial intelligence specifically for the purpose of helping themselves with their work as part of their employment. And when we asked that question, we found that there were about a little over a third who reported doing so at least monthly, many of them much more frequently than monthly. And there were also differences across the type of workers. So we saw that younger workers were using it more. And perhaps that's not surprising. But we also found that younger workers were also more likely than older workers. workers to report being worried that AI may end up taking some or all of their job duties.

So you've got this situation where they're using it more, but they are also more concerned that they may lose some aspects of their job to AI as it progresses and we move into the future. And my understanding is that the survey also found that a lot of these employees reported that their employers didn't have policies in place. Is that right, too? That is absolutely correct. So we asked whether or not, their employer had a policy in place on the use of AI to help them with their work, and only 18% reported that they know that their employer has a policy. 50%, 50% said that their employer has no policy, and 32% said that they are unsure. And so when you look at that

data, it paints a picture of a world in which employees are moving faster. in the adoption of artificial intelligence than perhaps a lot of employer policy manuals are moving. And so there's a bit of a mismatch there. And that's something that I think is clearly going to need to be addressed by employers. Now, the survey also looked at the experiences of workers with physical and mental disabilities and found that on average, they are facing more challenges at work and aren't as satisfied with their jobs. What did the data say? We've talked about a number of things that the data showed that are really positive trends.

This is one that is very much not a positive trend. There's a robust and troubling trend throughout our data. And it shows time and time again that people living with a disability, especially people who are living with a non-physical disability, such as a cognitive, emotional learning disability are more likely to report things like having a toxic workplace experience. They're more worried that their salary is not keeping pace with inflation. They're more worried that AI is going to end up taking away some or all of their job duties. In general, there's a trend across so many aspects of the workplace experience where people

who are living with a disability are just not. doing as well emotionally and psychologically in the workplace as people who are not living with a disability. And we also dug in and tried to ask questions to find out, you know, what could help? And among those who are living with a physical disability time and time again, what they pointed to was access to resources in the workplace that could help them to get their jobs done. They said that's what they need and that's what could help them have a positive impact on their productivity and just generally be a better worker and a better employee. Was there anything in the survey that really surprised you that just jumped out because you weren't expecting it? One of the things that really surprised me is the extent to which the concept of psychological safety just pervaded the entire survey.

And again, when I say psychological safety, I'm not talking about, you know, sort of analogous to physical safety. It's not some kind of a hard hat to protect your emotions. Instead, it's this concept that people feel comfortable and safe speaking up in the workplace without fear of negative consequences. And when there's a culture that encourages psychological safety, it has a tremendously beneficial effect. on a lot of things that perhaps you might say, well, that seems reasonable. That makes sense, such as people are more willing to contribute, they feel more like they belong in the workplace, this sort of thing. But it also seems to have a spillover effect into zones where maybe you wouldn't think

that psychological safety has anything to do with a person's sentiment about the workplace. To give you a concrete example, people who were reporting a culture of hire, psychological safety at their workplace were also more satisfied with their salary. Now, from this data, we can't say that one causes the other, but we know that they're both co-occurring at a rate that's not just a coincidence and sort of it screams out for additional research on exactly that point. And what a wonderful thing that is, that people who feel safe at work are happier with almost every aspect of their work, even the income that they earn from it. What about for those employees who are struggling with burnout or a toxic workplace?

Are there any things that they can do to cope on an individual level? How can employers help with that? I would focus first on what can an employee him or herself do. And as a first step, I'd suggest that they need to talk to somebody who they can trust. It could be really difficult to work through these kinds of issues by yourself. in isolation. So talking to somebody who they trust, maybe it's a family member, maybe it's a friend, maybe it's a therapist, that can just really help a person process the situation and begin to sort out reality from misperception. And if those conversations are beginning to reinforce a person's

feeling that, wow, this work situation that I'm in is actually toxic or it is adversely affecting my emotional and mental well-being, then it might be time to start considering their options. And that can mean a lot of things. It can mean evaluating your own habits or your own habits contributing to this. And what I mean by that is there are folks, and I think we're all guilty of this from time to time, who fall into the trap of obsessively checking our email and our messages and so on, even when it's not necessary, and we know it's not necessary. And if we can break that habit, it could be one small step toward getting out of this burnout trap. But, you know, in some instances, that may not be enough.

It might be looking beyond their own habits and looking at the workplace itself and asking themselves, is there some way that they can get relief in their current workplace? Is there some way that by talking to their manager, talking to their HR department, raising these issues, they will get some relief, get some looking at their workload, figuring out how they can be happier in the workplace. And in some workplaces, even that may not be possible. And it just might be time to think about exploring other employment options. And certainly I'm not encouraging people to make a rash decisions or put themselves in an untenable economic situation. But it's also untenable to just continue to work year after year in a situation that is harming your own health.

Are there lessons that employers can take from the survey? So the number one lesson, when you look at the totality of the results, is that just so many things in the workplace seem to function much more smoothly when you create an atmosphere and a culture where everyone feels safe to express themselves. and to contribute their thoughts and their ideas without any fear. We don't want people to be afraid at work. And so fostering that sense of psychological safety is just absolutely key. And if there's an employer out there who's listening to this podcast

who is not familiar with the concept of psychological safety at work, I really encourage them to get familiar with it. There are tons of resources available to help employers learn about, what it is and to learn tips for fostering it in their own organization. It's as simple as a Google search to get started on this journey of learning about psychological safety. Now, I have seen personally absolutely no evidence that it does any harm, at least not when it's implemented correctly. And I see lots and lots of evidence that it improves so many aspects of the workplace experience, which ultimately means it's good for the bottom line. And it means it's good for

humanity. It's good for the workers. And that's not just at work, but what happens at work spills over into the rest of our lives. It affects us when we're driving home. It affects us once we walk in the door and we interact with our families and with our friends and so on. And if we can make everybody just 10%, 5%, 15% more psychologically safe at work, that's going to spill over and make us all a little bit better in our everyday lives. Now, this is a survey that, APA is doing every year? Have you started thinking about next year? What are some of the areas that you think you might want to be probing? That is a great question. I think that there are a number of things that we want to drill down on a little bit more. I think that the data with regard to

physical and non-physical disabilities is striking and troubling, and we need to drill down, not just to learn more about what the problems are, but to begin to try to figure out what are some possible solutions? And how can we really begin to embrace people who are living with a disability in the workplace so that they're achieving the same level of psychological safety that other folks are? I think that we also need to start taking a hard look in the survey about some of the relationships that employees have beyond just their manager relationship, but the relationships that they have with employees in other departments, relationships that they have with HR, what are the levels of trust that they have with an HR

department, with an accounting department, different aspects that are typically found in an average workplace. I think that would just really be interesting to delve into, we're trying to get at what is the experience of working in America? What is the experience of working in America vis-a-vis all of the other co-workers who you tend to interact with throughout the course of your day, your week, year in the workplace. Well, Dennis, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been very interesting, and I'm sure it's going to help our listeners, most of whom I think, have to work.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I've enjoyed it. If you want to read the full survey and the results, you can find that information on our website at APA.org. Just search for work in America. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology. or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you like what you've heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week.

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