Here is an excerpt from a conversation led by Aaron De Smet, and including Amy Edmondson, Richard Boyatzis, and Bill Schaninger for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Amy Edmondson: Psychological safety means an absence of interpersonal fear. When psychological safety is present, people are able to speak up with work-relevant content. For many people during the pandemic, the explicitness of the physical lack of safety has been experienced as a shared fear, which has allowed them to be more open and intimate and more able to voice their thoughts and concerns with colleagues. This collective fear thus becomes a potential driver of collaboration and innovation, further contributing to an open environment for producing and sharing ideas that under normal conditions may have remained unshared. As counterintuitive as it might seem, in many settings I’m seeing more psychological safety during the pandemic because of the greater collective fear about something very real—and, by the way, very external.

This is clearly different for essential workers—many of whom may not feel physically safe while still being required to show up at work, and they may not feel able to speak up about that. So we have these two very different populations.

De Smet: Recently, I joined a videoconference for a US client that had just reopened its campus to a few employees. What I found striking was that although they were all sitting separately in their own offices on Zoom calls and not actually meeting face-to-face with their colleagues, they had all shown up, on day one, eager to get back to their workplace. They seemed to take a lot of comfort that they were at least back in their offices. What do you make of that?

Edmondson: I suspect for many people, the days of the week are muddling together. And, whether or not you see people in a conference room face-to-face or on Zoom, simply being able to return to your workplace may become a reassuring step toward normalcy, even if it’s not fully back to normal.

Richard Boyatzis: Interestingly, the stress induced—whether from the current uncertainty or even in normal times with the preoccupation on goals, metrics, and financials—can cause the activation of the psychophysiological state of the negative emotional attractor. This defensive state fills your brain with negative thoughts. And what becomes very clear in times like these is that once stress is aroused, even mildly, it can cause disorientation and cognitive and perceptual impairment. One study showed how our peripheral vision drops from 180 degrees to 30 degrees [during times of stress]. Which means we may soon start to see things as potentially threatening that aren’t.

The disruption of our lives, the loss of normal familial interactions, and the economic and financial fears of losing our livelihoods all become a bigger source of threat than the virus itself. That’s why going back to routines and doing things that were normal really helps counteract this defensive state.

De Smet: To what extent is technology aiding or hindering our emotional and psychological well-being?

Bill Schaninger: So much of our work life that previously led to belonging and identity has been disrupted and replaced with technologies like Zoom and Slack that have become our new tethers to connectivity. It may be that our interactions with our teams and colleagues need a different pacing and cadence. Even though face-to-face interactions allow for a level of intimacy and understanding that may be lost on a monitor, with video formats like Zoom you can still pick up cues and detect whether someone’s in some period of mild distress. Leaping into task orientation too quickly may almost feel like a violation to the person on the other end of the call. Taking a pause to acknowledge where the person is and what they need can build trust and confidence over time and make the shared interaction emotionally less risky. Yet this might also make the actual exchanges themselves even more draining as you pause to doubt the interactions.

Boyatzis: On the positive side, we are seeing greater adoption of these new tools by broader audiences that are finding it useful to reach out and connect with a wider network of friends and colleagues more often. This can help people feel part of a broader human experience and regain some sense of the human identity. Yet electronic means of communication—all forms of social media, email, texting, even Zoom—are more alexithymic ¹ than face to-face interactions. So we not only have this greater uncertainty that arouses more stress, we’re exposed to fewer opportunities to tune into the emotions of others. Ultimately, we are minimizing emotions from what we are used to.

Edmondson: Another aspect of social media is that it sets up an evaluative context. When we spend our life online—as so many of us are currently, more so than in the pre-COVID-19 days—we are entering a more explicitly evaluative domain. And that creates another source of anxiety as well.

Boyatzis: In fact, the neurological and neuroimaging studies of people while using various forms of social media and electronic media support that, Amy. They activate parts of the task-positive network, which is directly linked to the stress response. When we’re in this social comparison or evaluative mode, nobody feels good. Even the top performers worry.

De Smet: For decades, many leaders have taken to wandering through their workplaces or factories to chat with employees and get a better sense of the ongoings of the company. How can leaders re-create these informal and organic conversations when they are not physically in the space?

Edmondson: What makes management by wandering around so successful is the ability to make a genuine link between a task or job and a larger overarching purpose. For example, consider the classic story of the NASA employee who understood how his cleaning the floor helped to get a man on the moon. That link, which might not be immediately obvious to a person cleaning the floor, can become exquisitely clear with a little bit of leadership that helps people look for, and then make, those connections.

And now, with tools like Zoom, communications have become more explicit and structured; leaders must ask direct questions about what’s working and what isn’t, and they must engage in thoughtful discussions on how—in a rapidly evolving context—the vision for what we expect to happen is shifting accordingly. Although not as spontaneous as walking around, these Zoom chats, when kept to relatively small sizes, can still develop the connective tissue linking actions to a shared vision for the future.

Boyatzis: One of the benefits that I think was left out in Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s book In Search of Excellence ² is the wave of positive affect that management by wandering around can have on an individual and organization. For example, when Herb Kelleher was still running Southwest, once a year he would show up at Boeing’s headquarters and ask [to set aside] two hours to walk one of the production lines. As he walked, he would stop to greet different workers and ask them which parts they were working on. Whether it was avionics or a flap or something in the brakes, Herb would find a direct link to how that mechanism helped their customers live their lives better. As a former senior vice president at Boeing explained to me, “Walking with Herb down the production line felt like a tidal wave of positive affect.” Workers walked away feeling heard and with a new sense of connection to a bigger network and purpose.

Imagine now the beginning of a Zoom meeting, when everyone is checking in on each other, and the only highlights shared are all horrible, negative things. This would drop everyone’s morale. Leaders need to listen, but they are also responsible for adding positivity. It could be as simple as showing genuine excitement over something you’re working on to lift the mood of the team even on Zoom.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

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