Creating Safe and Brave Spaces at Work

Leah Roe

Thank you. We're being recorded. Welcome, everyone, to this month's edition of Culture Community. This is truly my very favorite day of the month because I get to spend it with all of you. I am in California today, so it is 6:35 AM here, but I woke up just very excited for today. Who is a first Timer at Culture Community? Raise your hand. Welcome. We love having new members of Culture Community. You might be wondering, who is Culture Community? At Culture Community, we are a group of people who are passionate about being great leaders, passionate about intentionally building great cultures, and passionate about not doing it alone and in silos. We're passionate about coming together as a community to learn, develop, and grow together. We've intentionally created this to be a space for you to learn, to develop, to grow, to connect with each other. Also something we talk about here at Culture Community is that it's important that. We learn, we take in the information, we get that inspiration, but also that we get activated and we go and do something about it. We make a commitment. We say, okay, based on the learning we've had here today, what am I going to go do in order to make my life better, in order to make my leadership better, in order to make my organizational culture better, in order to make my community better. So we meet monthly right here online. There is no application process or anything like that to become a member of Culture Community. Everyone is welcome. Everyone belongs. So please feel free to come every month and we cover topics that help us to become better leaders and also help us to build better culture. So if you want to speak on a topic or you have an idea of a topic you'd like to have the group talk about, please feel free to email us. We can put our website in the chat for you. But just any topic that will help us to become better leaders and to build better cultures. And next month, we have the amazing Sarah Tilkins from the KPI Lab coming to talk to us about problem-solving.

Leah Roe

Sarah truly can help us solve any problem in our personal or professional life. So she's going to teach us about problem-solving 101. So please come on December 14th for that. And so we at the Perk, we are the host of Culture Community. We are so grateful to get to run Culture Community. At the Perk, we are a premier leadership and culture development studio, and our mission is to build the world's best leaders. I usually do a longer intro on the Perk and some of the things we have going on, but I really just want to get to the good stuff of our conversation today. I'm so excited and so grateful that Beth is here and speaking about... The next slide. Speaking about creating safe and brave spaces at work. Creating safe and brave spaces is such a core element for the work that we do at the park in terms of being leadership coaches and culture consultants. It's such an important part of what I want to do as a leader is create a safe and brave space for my team. And I'm also really excited. I know that the title is at work, but I always am able to take pieces of what we learned here and apply it to my personal life as well. So I'm really excited to also learn how to create a safe and brave space as a mom and for my children and at home.

Leah Roe

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Emily to intro the incredible Beth Ridgeley.

Emily Smit

Yeah. Thanks, Leah. So I'm sure some of you have had the amazing opportunity to meet Beth already, but for those of you who have not, I just wanted to give her just a quick background about Beth. So Beth Ridgeley is a corporate executive turned organizational transformation consultant, speaker, author and CEO of Redley Consulting Group. Beth combines 25 years of global experience and management consulting experience with expertise in diversity, inclusion, and positive psychology to help organizations transform their. Workplace culture beth's work is featured in national publications, and she frequently delivers keynotes and workshops at events around the world. Absolutely amazing. Without further ado, I'll turn. Things over to Beth.

Beth Ridley

You can take it away. Okay, hi. Good morning, everybody. Really excited to be here. I have been to culture community before, so excited to come back. And I see some friends. Hello, everybody. So what I want to do today is talk to you about some of the ways I've been working with my clients to intentionally create safe and brave spaces as part of a larger culture transformation strategy. I want to first give you an overview of how I talk about safe and brave spaces as a strategy. I thought it would be helpful to actually go through a couple of case studies and then to share with you some best practices and lessons learned. I do want this to be a conversation. I have some slides that I'll use to talk through, but I think we're all learning and growing in this space. And it's like each time I work with a client to create a safe and brave space, we learn something new and get smarter and better. And I know you all are doing a lot of this similar work in your organization, so hopefully we'll have a chance to share and I would like to learn from you as well.

Beth Ridley

And, Leah, I especially want to learn from you because if you can figure out how to apply this successfully at home, please, I'll be your first client because I've got three teenagers and creating safe... Well, first of all, just getting them to want to be in the same room with me, let alone having it be a safe and brave space room. I'm not even scoring on that one. I'm all ears for that. So before I get started, let me just give you a little bit of background of the type of work my firm does. So we do focus on culture transformation within organizations to support business outcomes. And so generally, clients come to me, they fall in one of these four categories. Either they want to improve their culture to improve retention. They want to improve their culture to improve engagement of employees and just how they work together. They want to improve their culture to be a differentiator for attracting top talent, especially if they're thinking about attracting talent from different, broader, and more diverse candidate pools than they've been doing in the past. Or they just really realize culture is just fundamentally important for their business, and they always want their leaders to be upskilling in terms of more modern leadership behaviors to support a culture that needs to support just the growing complexity, the sheer complexity of the work that businesses have to navigate.

Beth Ridley

So before I jump into the actual case studies, with that as a setting of the type of challenges and opportunities related to culture that we work on, let me also give you a little bit of grounding in our approach, because that'll help put safe and brave space into context. So for me, any type of improvement to culture is rooted very much in creating a foundational culture of belonging. I'm very much rooted in belonging as a best practice because belonging is that fundamental human need. That is really the layer for anything else that you want to improve upon in your culture. And so this is really how I break out and define belonging and identify the levers that contribute to belonging that we can actually develop strategies around. And you can see with each of these levers, I call them the four Cs, psychological safety is very much woven into this. And safe and brave spaces really is around psychological safety, right? So how do we create an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up and sharing what's really on their mind because they feel safe to do so, but also they're okay taking a risk of stepping outside of their comfort zone.

Beth Ridley

So belonging is rooted in people first feel just more confident being who they are at work, comfort. They don't have to feel like they work extra hard to fit in, or they're afraid of standing out in a bad way. They also feel a sense of connection both to their work, a shared sense of higher-level purpose and meaning that makes them feel connected to their work, but also generally warm relationships with their colleagues. They feel connected to the people who they work with. Contribution is a big piece of psychological safety. Again, people feel that they can speak up. Their opinion matters. They feel that their ideas are taken seriously and everyone feels like they matter. And then the fourth C, the commitment is the one that really speaks to the sustainability of the other three, which is everyone is committed to creating this type of culture, especially leaders who are setting the tone. But at the end of the day, all of us influence the culture just by showing up. So it really is also the opportunity and responsibility of all employees. So as that is the foundation for understanding safe and brave spaces, I also want to just highlight, I focus a lot on behaviors that are rooted in inclusion, diversity, equity, inclusion, especially the inclusion piece, in order to, again, leaders and employees contribute to a culture of belonging and safe and brave spaces, psychological safety is all embedded in that as well.

Beth Ridley

So really briefly, I'm going to cover the three inclusive behaviors I really focus on that everyone can apply truthfully in their day-to-day is, again, creating that cultural belonging, psychological safety. First, just be self-aware of I have diversity of background and life experiences, identities that are truly meaningful to me that influence how I see the world. I should be proud of that and also humble enough to know that my way of seeing the world is only just one way. Other people are coming with their own lenses. Because I have limited life experiences, as we all do, we have to be curious of others and be willing and courageous to ask questions just to fill in the holes in our own biases and assumptions. And then when we start to hear things that maybe go against our own ideas, beliefs, values, we're not changing our minds, we're changing our behaviors, and we're working hard to seek to understand even when we don't agree. To me, these behaviors rooted in diversity, equity, inclusion are the foundation for our cultural belonging, and a cultural belonging is also the foundation for creating safe and brave spaces that really support psychological safety.

Beth Ridley

I'm just going to pause there. That's just the background, a little bit of how I'm using words, terminology, concepts before I launch into what does this look like to create those safe and brave spaces and a strategy? I'm pausing. Questions, comments so far? Okay, my show of thumbs up, thumbs sideways, or thumbs down, or is everybody tracking with me? Okay. Yeah, it's early. That could be a good thing or a bad. Look at the fireworks. How did you do that?

Dan Roe

I found it out on Monday. But if you hold two thumbs up for. I don't know, five seconds. It does it.

Beth Ridley

No, it does not. I don't know. Is it to go to anyone else? That's so weird. Yeah, so weird. Okay, so with that as the background, so when I talk about safe and brave spaces, I'm actually talking about how do we create, curate experiences at work that enable employees to practice those three inclusive behaviors that I just talked about as a strategy, as an actual tactic in order to inspire collaborative problem-solving, because at the end of the day, we're focusing on culture to solve a business problem and foster a sustainable culture of belonging that includes psychological safety. It's really creating safe and brave spaces as a tactic, as part of a bigger strategy around why are we investing in culture? We want the culture to support the business outcomes, and we want to do it in a sustainable way. So here's case study number one. This is actually the first one where it really led to creating these spaces as a strategy. So this is probably going back maybe three or four years ago. We were just turning the corner on the pandemic. We weren't out of the woods yet. Everything was still remote, but people were feeling like we were transitioning and hopefully maybe going back into person.

Beth Ridley

The job market was opening up a little bit and that sense that people felt more confident, and that confidence led to leaving their jobs to seek other opportunities. So it was a really super duper challenging period. I don't know if anybody remembers that. But this particular client is a nonprofit organization, a health and human service agency. So they do operate some clinics and programs, but they also do a lot of care coordination. I would say these are front line people during the pandemic, really large organization. They span a couple of states. And as we were turning this corner, they were just bleeding people, really high attrition. And mostly what they could tell was burnout was just a factor. And so they actually approached me to focus on their culture. And independently, they were also going to tinker around with some policy things. They were actually really seriously going down the path of a four-day work week because how do we just alleviate the pressure of too much work? It was like a vicious cycle because as more people left, the people who remained were just overwhelmed. And so that was one of the things that they wanted to do.

Beth Ridley

So as part of the process, we did a culture belonging survey. And again, those four Cs, we can ask questions to find out among all the things that aren't working to create a culture belonging, where would we focus? And one of the things that's very common with nonprofits is they tend to focus or score pretty high with connection. People are super passionate about the work they do. It has deep meaning for them. So that really wasn't a problem. But what we started to see, and I'll just jump to the punchline, people just didn't feel confident speaking up, especially speaking up with managers and leaders. And we use this, the survey won't tell you anything, but it's the launching pad for doing deeper dive conversations. We did a series of listening sessions, and it made what we were seeing the survey super real and clear. And it was really interesting because what we heard, without a doubt from employees, is I don't necessarily need to do less work. In fact, the work is so meaningful for me, it energizes me. I love helping people. And yes, the volume of work, it's a lot, but we also know that that's not going to be forever.

Beth Ridley

So the question isn't really or the solution isn't, go down to four days a week so I can do less work. Work is so meaningful to me. It's just that when it's hard because of the stories that we hear from the families that we're serving, it takes an emotional toll on us. Who do we talk to without sounding like we're Debbie Downers? The challenges, both health and emotional challenges that the families that they serve are new and evolving and becoming more complex. They're not experts in that necessarily. Who do we talk to to say, I'm going on a limb here, and I don't feel confident in my work without my manager feeling like I'm not up to the task. They were bottling so many things in that that was causing the stress and anxiety, not necessarily the volume of work. This was really good to know. We actually pivoted and said, don't go to the four-day work week. That's too much change for them to absorb. But it became loud and clear we actually need creating safe and brave spaces to have conversations as a strategy. That was the first aha, instead of safe and brave space being the outcome of a culture belonging, how do we center it?

Beth Ridley

It becomes the actual thing that we do. Does that make sense? We had a small working team and we came up with an idea. We're going to curate these experiences where people can come and talk about and share what's on their mind. And the leaders panned it. They were like, That's not happening. Are you crazy? Their biggest fear was it's going to be a complain-fest? What if they bring up things that honestly, we're not prepared to fix? And we're just too busy. We can't be talking about our problems. So we went back to the drawing board, finetuned the approach a little bit and said, well, would you be open to just a pilot? Just to the pilot. We're going to try to minimize that it's not about complaining, but it's about, again, collaborative problem-solving. We're going to streamline it so we're not taking people out of their work too much, but embedding it in their existing team meetings. And eventually they said, okay, let's give it a try. So the pilot was three months. And the plan was we first had an all-staff meeting where we reported back to them. This is what we heard from you from the Culture Belonging Survey.

Beth Ridley

You are desirous of the ability to speak up and to share what's on your mind without fear of retribution. We would like to create the experiences for you to do that, but to show up and for this to have a positive outcome so it doesn't become a complaint fast. We're going to anchor ourselves in those three inclusive behaviors. We do a workshop on that. Then so we're not taking you out of work. All teams had weekly team meetings. We were just asking the leaders to repurpose one of those once a month to have these curated conversations where we're intentionally practicing these inclusive behaviors that will hopefully lead to more of logical safety. So that was the plan. You can see the themes for the three months and example questions. We wanted to start really positive and safe, right? So start easy and safe and progressively get a little bit more challenging. But what unites us? We started there because again, on the cultural belonging survey, connection to their work, higher purpose and meaning was something that everybody was energized about. So let's talk about that. Then let's get into a little bit of like, well, how are we different?

Beth Ridley

How do we come to work differently? And given our differences, what are we experiencing at work? What is success for us? But then what do we need to be successful? So it's not like, tell me all your problems, but what do you need to be successful? It did put a little bit of a more positive wrapper on it. So we did that and we did the first one. And it was honestly, I would say mixed. I would say out of all the teams, two-thirds, it went really well. Employees were super appreciative of it. They just enjoyed, frankly, just even the opportunity to talk was really meaningful to them. But the other third, it didn't go so well. So we're trying to diagnose the difference between the ones that went well and the ones that didn't go well. It really came down to leadership presence. So in the ones that did go well, leaders showed up. They were enthusiastic. They didn't try to dominate, but they fully participated as a participant. They they chimed in when they had something to say, but they didn't try to orchestrate it. When it didn't go well, leaders either opted out.

Beth Ridley

We had a leader who just opted out. They didn't do it. We had a leader who overled wanting to steer the conversation and orchestrate it and didn't give people the chance to talk. And then we had a leader who attended and was super fearful of this and so sat in the back and actually did work and sat like a really bad time. So we had to go back and we did some leader intervention. And then we did our second one. Leaders showed up better, and the second one went better. And by the time we got to the money question, which was, what do you need to be more successful? Which is another way of saying, what's not going right? What support and help do you need? It went really, really, really well. So I will share with you. So anyways, long story short, after the third one, it went so well, they just continued it, and they have been continuing it. So this is now, I think, three and a half years, same process. And they have an internal committee. Each team takes a crack at coming up with what are the questions that they want to do every quarter progressively going from safe to more brave.

Beth Ridley

And they just completed. And it's actually a problem-solving collaborative, problem-solving, ongoing strategy. But let me fast forward to what did we see after doing this for 18 months once we worked the kinks out? We did to go back and do their culture belonging survey, and they increased in ways that mattered. But the most one that I like to look at is the index question, the overall question, your net promoter score for your employees. Would you recommend this organization as a great place to work due to the culture, up 20 %? Attrition did get back to at least pre-pandemic levels. They're not quite where they want to be yet. They have a lot of openings that they're starting to fill. But the good thing is because they have a higher net promoter score, employees are tapping into their own networks to suggest new talent to be recruited. Probably most importantly, leaders are saying, and this is something that we couldn't really measure in the survey, the culture-belong survey, but just anecdotally, leaders are sharing that employees are coming to them in private and speaking up and sharing maybe what their challenges are. And in a lot of cases, it's not anything that they want their manager to fix.

Beth Ridley

It's just that they want their manager to be supportive and morally supportive and feel heard. And leaders actually really appreciate that because they say we're not mind readers. We can't even begin to fix anything if people aren't speaking up. So they're glad that people are at least speaking up and actually coming proactively with not just here's a problem, but how can we partner to maybe make things better? People are just more talkative in team meetings. We definitely noticed that. Leaders overall have been really rethinking the way that things could be done. So what leaders now do is because they're all part of their respective conversations, they get together and just carve out 20 minutes in their monthly executive leadership team meetings to talk about what are they seeing, hearing, and could that translate to any type of policy or different changes. One small example that came out of that is, it's funny, they have a bunch of new employees who definitely feel like they have a lot to learn. They're not confident speaking up and like, Oh, my God, I don't understand this because they're new in their careers. But then through these conversations, they also learned that there are more tenured employees don't feel valued and respected because they're hiring so many new people and the focus is on them.

Beth Ridley

And they're starting to feel like, what am I, chop liver here? So that was a great opportunity. Leaders, as they talk, this is coming up in their conversations. Well, why don't we pair the two? And they formalized mentoring onboarding program. Newbies are connected with senior people, and they love it. It's a great way for the more tenured people to give back, feel a sense of usefulness. And the newbies have a place to go where they can just talk about like, oh, my God, I have no idea what I'm doing outside of their chain of command. And then the other thing that we're hearing anecdotally from the new people is I like to say new people give you the best perspective on your culture because they're coming into it fresh eyes and they're always comparing it to where they came from. And because this is now part of their process, all the new employees are like, I've never worked for a company that does this. It's so helpful being new because I get to know people and strengthen those relationships right away. So I'll share one more thing, and then we're going to pause and just, again, feedback questions before I maybe do two more case studies if we have time.

Beth Ridley

The other ones are much shorter. So what did we learn from this? A couple of things. Creating these safe and brave spaces as a strategy, it has to be really clearly communicated how it supports broader outcomes or business outcomes. I think people are reluctant to do it if they feel that it's talking. So it has to be really clear. In this case, it was very clear, employees said they need a valve to just express how they're feeling so they can be more energized, feel that they're not alone, and go back to do the really hard but important work that they enjoy doing, but they can go back to doing it with more confidence. So once we anchored it in that, people got it. So spending time upfront to show that it is a strategy is important. Really anchoring people in, this is not magic. It's not going to work if we don't all be mindful of how we come into these conversations and we're good, upstanding citizens of a safe and brave space community. So really talking about doing education on these inclusive behaviors, what does it look like? Coming up with rules of engagement and then pulling leaders aside because they have a really unique role.

Beth Ridley

Most leaders are going to feel uncomfortable about some leaders because it really is a different way of leading, again, whether or not the expert in the room, but also means that they don't do nothing. They have to set the tone on what does that look like. We went back and forth because remember, we had the one leader that they didn't participate, and we didn't want to force it because it was experimental. I'm leaning towards make participation required. Otherwise, you just get unevenness. You have some employees that have this rich experience and others who don't. And then the truth is, once you start doing it and people realize not only is it harmless, it's helpful and quite frankly, enjoyable, most employees, even as reluctant as they might be, eventually get on board. So I like to say sometimes you got to push people and make it something collective as opposed to you can opt out. What we've seen is that you need three of these experiences for it to really click because you're introducing two new things, new topics to talk about that they don't normally talk about at work, also just a new event or process.

Beth Ridley

Let them get used to the process. And once they get used to the process by the third time is like, Oh, this is how it works. This is how it's introduced. This is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then they can get comfortable with that and focus more on the dialog. Smaller groups is better. So even if you have a big team, you have a team of 12, have people work in small pairs and then come together even in your team. Smaller is safer and better. But then at some point, people are really curious, and you have to have some mechanism to share broadly what individual teams have talked about and how does it roll up to the whole organization. So sometimes in this particular case study, they are weaving just a summary of what they did in their quarterly all-staff meeting. I have other clients that are using more of a virtual discussion board to bubble up, and so people can see everything that's taught because people are curious and nosy and they want to know what other people are talking about and build from there. All right. So that was case study number one.

Beth Ridley

That was the first one where we worked out a lot of kinks. I'll pause and then just open it up for your own experiences, questions, comments, and I can give you two more case studies that are actually really quite different. It's me, Wendy. Hi, Wendy. Good to see you. I was wondering.

Participant

If you could talk a little bit more about.Tackling the challenges of leadership presence, especially in the event that it might be the hindrance. I know you can't necessarily just take someone aside as a leader and be like, look, here are the inclusive behaviors we're practicing, so go do it. If there is a potential, I don't want intimidation from a leader in order to open up in those spaces, how are. Some ways that an.Organization could move past that or still encourage that participation from that group that might be feeling that pressure from their leader?

Beth Ridley

Really good question. I guess from what I've seen, it's more positive peer pressure from peer leaders. I think having some time for senior leaders to check in, how is it going, and to share their own best practices to realize it's actually not that hard. Oh, my God, this leader is having positive outcomes. A little jealous. I don't want my team to feel like they're on a losing team from that regard. What are you doing? Or even just the vulnerability of like, I tried this. I opened up with a different way and it didn't really work out too well. That's okay. We're learning and growing. It's like an evolving thing because as the team... My second case study I'll share, I really do say start where the stakes are low. You know what I mean? Don't put leaders, don't throw them out there. Start with something easy. I don't know, like an easy question. Start safe and then build up. But after they've been doing this for years, they're challenging me. Beth, this is too easy.

Beth Ridley

I've come up with the content. I go, no, we need more hard hitting stuff. I'm like, are you sure? Yeah, no, we're ready. I guess the main thing is consistency. I just can't stress that enough. Consistency, consistency. It doesn't have to be a huge time suck, but I like to tell leaders, if you could just put this on your senior leadership team agenda for 30 minutes once a quarter to talk about it, there will be some of that positive peer pressure that rubs off and they learn and grow in their own way. Any other questions? Hi, Beth. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was just going to say what time do you want? I just want to maybe prioritize which case study do you like? What time do we wrap up here?

Leah Roe

We have until 7:30, and then people could stay for another 15 minutes if they-.

Beth Ridley

Okay, 9:30.

Leah Roe

I'm sorry. I'm in the West Coast. I don't know. It's 9:30.

Beth Ridley

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. Okay. Sorry, and I think there was going to be another question coming up. Yeah. Hi, Beth. My name is Mikaela. Thanks so much for your presentation today. I had a question on metrics. One thing that I really struggle with in my position and just in general in this work is how to measure success for leaders. I work for leaders that really rely on data and they want to see numbers and say, Well, show me that this is going to be effective, or how are you going to measure that this is effective? When I say survey data, they just shut down. Everyone has survey fatigue. We're not doing surveys. I work in healthcare, so I fully live that and I breathe that, I understand it, but it's like, how else can we do that? I'm wondering what your strategies are for maybe other metrics or at the very least, how do you accommodate for that survey fatigue? Yeah. Okay, so this is a good one. Actually, that's perfect because my next case study actually speaks to that. I'll run through that real fast and hopefully your question with a real live example.

Beth Ridley

All right, so this example, we didn't even do a survey. Okay, so this is a marketing consulting firm, smaller, 50 employees. We didn't even bother with a cultural blinding survey. The deal with them was... Well, they transitioned to fully remote because again, a little bit like past pandemic, employees just didn't want to come back. So they were like, okay, fine. But also in the process, they were losing proposals. They were just not winning proposals in the same way that they were doing in the past. And some of it was... They intuitively knew... They weren't integrating their service offerings the way that they should compared to the competition. They had all the right pieces. They just weren't coming together with strong proposals, and the leaders felt like employees were just doing their job. They wanted employees to act like owners. They wanted to see opportunities and be proactive and not just do their piece of the work. They felt like they were no longer being innovative compared to the competition that they were losing out of. Honestly, their metric was business development. Can we land more? Canour Landmore business, basically, by working together differently? We didn't even do a cultural planning survey.

Beth Ridley

We went straight to the... I'll back up. They experimented with, okay, if we're not winning proposals, let's do postmortems on what went wrong. They had regular weekly team meetings with all 50 people virtual. I sat in a few of those, Oh, my God, it's so painful. No one spoke. I mean, it was just crickets. It was so painful or people just said a little bit and it just wasn't like, we weren't figuring out what's the problem? What could we do better? Because people just weren't speaking up. There was something there that was preventing them from speaking up. So we decided we're going to do these cross team dialog pods if we want more collaboration across the different teams silos. They had digital, they also had print, and they had just a lot of different teams. So cross teams dialog pods of five to six people made up of people from different teams. Leaders were plugged in to each of them. And we just actually want to get people talking and feel safe just talking. So that hopefully that translates to when we have to do the post-mortem of our proposals, people actually speak up because we know that they know what didn't go well or that they see opportunities.

Beth Ridley

We just want to, again, create a safe and brave space so that they actually share what's on their mind. Again, we started out again, a little bit of pilot, like at least three months started out positive, easy, progressively got a little bit more challenging, but we really focused the questions on the value proposition. So first month was, what makes you most proud about working here? And you can see how we progress a little bit. And so we just did that. We did that for at the beginning of the quarter. Then at the end of the quarter, at the all-staff meeting, they bring in a case and they'd want to do a post-mortem or they talk about a client and have people present and talk. And it was a little bit better. And then we went back to the top of the next quarter, have them meet in their small pods, and then once a month, and then we come back. And you could progressively see people were talking more. They were really getting into the weeds. People weren't shy about speaking up of what went wrong, or even if it was, I feel like the other team could have done better, those conversations were happening, but in a way where everyone was on the same page. At the end of the day, we want to showcase our value proposition. How do we do that better?

Beth Ridley

So the end result was they did end up having more collaboration on proposals. Before proposals actually went to the client. There was a lot more checking in with the other teams. Hey, could you have an eye on this and what are we missing? Is there a piece of what you do that we need to integrate? Whatever. There was a lot more of that happening. They actually won a major client. They were so excited. It was a big national client, a premier client in the field that they do. They were super excited about that. I think the other thing that happened, so that was a metric, actually. They wanted to increase business. They increased business. But again, a lot of this has spill-over effect. One of the things that happened out of this is because people were speaking up, they showcased themselves in new ways. The leaders, when they were like, well, we don't have anyone who's thinking like an owner, when the owners like, no one else is thinking like an owner, they're just doing their job, people were more empowered and they were speaking up. They actually saw talent that they hadn't really recognized or hadn't emerged.

Beth Ridley

And so from this, they ended up doing this whole leadership development program, also anchored in safe and brave space. And then also they decided no need to even come back to the office. We're cool with fully remote. That just took off the table because we're working together. We're working together really well. So if you want to continue to work at home, that's not our barrier to success. So that was number two, where again, it had nothing to do with the survey, but again, really identifying the business problem and how working together in a different way can solve a business problem. I don't know. Hopefully, that example addressed the question for the... Mikaela, I think that was your question. Was that helpful? Yeah, thank you. I think analyzing business metrics is certainly useful. I think it's just... Forgive my exacerbation. I'm just feeling like a little bit... I'm dealing with a lot of not pushback directly to me, but just culture change in general. It's like, oh, yeah, it's a priority, but then it's not. It's a part. It's like, Well... It's just everything that we all live and breathe every day. I think today I'm just a little like...

Beth Ridley

Yeah, I hear you. The one thing about this is once you get it going, it just fits in with your process. It just becomes something that you do. And then I guess maybe you're doing it, and it doesn't feel like you're doing anything. So in both of these case studies, they just continued it. So that client, remember I said they're challenging me, now they've gotten full tilt really into DEI. That's not where they started, but they're also realizing. So what happened is as they're starting to get more clients, their clients are looking at them and saying, diversity, equity, inclusion is a priority for us. It doesn't look like it's a priority for you. What are you doing in this regard? And that's a differentiator for the service providers that we choose. So then they were like, could we use our pods and go full tilt DEI and again, starting out smaller. I don't know what you mean by that. And then now they're having me come up with super challenging things that they want to talk about and that they're up for the task and they want to feel super confident, super confident in conversations across differences that they have no expertise in, which is actually my third case study I'll share too before we wrap up.

Beth Ridley

But anyways, I'll pause for more questions, comments or other examples that you all have: challenges, wins. Let me give you one more and maybe I'll spark some thoughts. The last one, this one I'm really excited about. We just finished this. We wanted to be super, let me back up, strategic. Anyway, it's a recruiting firm. They have about 100 employees. Their thing is they wanted to become more confident talking, having conversations across differences for two reasons. One, internally, they're really, really growing like gangbusters, and they're bringing in more diverse talent however you want to define it. Right? And being competent in this space is important to them because they're recruiters. So their clients are asking them questions as they're trying to recruit more diverse talent. What do you do about this? Have you ever had this example? And they just felt like, Oh, my God, I don't know. We have to lead by example in our industry and we don't feel confident. So we took all the best practices. We streamlined it as much as humanly possible. And it wasn't, I said it's pilot, but it was more like, this is the program. We got three opportunities.

Beth Ridley

We're bringing everybody together once a quarter, in retrospect, I feel like that was spaced out too much, but whatever. So once a quarter, we are going to focus on each of those inclusive behaviors. Because really, bridging across differences, you can't learn about all the different cultural, ethnic, race, gender, gender identity differences. It's really about, do you have the ability to be courageous and be inquisitive to learn about differences in a way that you can then take what you're learning and turn it into a different behavior or whatever? So we really wanted to master that and also practice it. So everybody comes together, all team, this is virtual. I did some education about belonging one of the inclusive behaviors at a time, and then we broke them off into either small groups or pairs at this point. So there is diversity in the organization, and they really have to just practice about how do I have the courage to get to know someone when I'm waiting in territory where I have no reference point for their life experience or their point of view, but practice being self-aware of my lens and how I see the world and work, be curious enough to ask questions, and then be flexible enough to seek to understand.

Beth Ridley

So this is one example of how they practice that in pairs, like actually practicing putting those inclusive behaviors into practice to create that safe and brave space so that they can emerge more confident. Like, oh, I can do this. And I didn't put my foot in my mouth, or if I did put my foot in my mouth, I know how to recover. Or actually, this work is far more enjoyable and less scary, and it's just about getting to know people, and I have the confidence to do it. So that was the thing, three cracks at it. So our metric of success, we had won, and it was really clear, which is how confident are you discussing topics around diversity, equity, inclusion at work? And at the end of it, we did that survey in the beginning. So the orange is the beginning and the blue is at the end. And we just wrapped up the last one last week, actually. So you can see in the beginning, most people were not confident. More than 50 % were not confident. Less than 10 % were very confident. Having any type of conversations about any element of diversity, equity, inclusion or cross differences.

Beth Ridley

And then you can see in the blue, just with three interactions, a lot more extremely confident and very confident. And that helps them not just internally, because again, they continue to grow and intentionally are bringing in more diversity and creating a culture where diversity is really leveraged as an asset because they're not afraid of it or let's avoid it. And and they're showing up and can speak authentically to their clients. Here's how you client who just hired someone who doesn't look like who you already have, how you can bridge across those differences. Because here's how I'm doing it. They actually can talk about it. And that's leading by example. So that's my third case study. Questions, comments. How does this resonate with any of the work that you're doing? Are you taking different approaches, similar approaches?.

Leah Roe

So everyone knows. I'm taking notes like crazy. I think one of the things here very much aligns with how we go about it too, is the element of curiosity. I love that you're pulling that into creating a safe and brave space because I think that is such an important curiosity, something we teach leaders as well, but it's such an important element of creating that safe space of not just sharing is one piece, but then also being genuinely and authentically curious and being open to hearing the other person's perspective and ideas and experiences. I really just resonate with that piece a lot.

Beth Ridley

I think I have one more thing just to recap, which is like zooming out. It's like creating these safe and believe spaces. In the past, it used to be a potential strategy as part of their culture building work, but I wouldn't necessarily go there. I feel like I have a lot more confidence in it now and a lot more experience of how to curate it, especially for the client, to be super meaningful. But here's my takeaways as a lot of examples. I shared three, but there's a lot of examples. One is it really does support employee wellbeing. I just feel like with that first client and digging deep and when employees were honest and they were saying, It's a culture where I can't make mistakes, I can't share bad news. Everything has to be good. That is a source of stress and anxiety. I feel like that's really universal, hence this whole theme of psychological safety. But it never really goes addressed. Just creating these spaces, I don't know, it just gives people that little bit of valve. And they do actually find it really refreshing to be able to talk about themselves and not just the work that they do and to also get to know colleagues.

Beth Ridley

It's really joyful. So I think even when curated really well, and I've learned along the years, even if you're dragging employees to this mostly, it was a refreshing way to spend 30 minutes. And might be just that one thing that gives them that sense of, hey, work's not so bad because the people I work with are interesting. And yeah, it's supportive. It does lead to better problem solving. Again, you're building trust, relationships. People will go to each other outside of these curated opportunities. People are speaking up more again. Leaders are really happy that now I actually at least know what's on their mind. At least I'm not operating in a vacuum like I felt like before. And then also I think the days of challenges or problems being addressed by one person or even one team are over. The stuff that organizations are dealing with are so complex. You really do need that collaborative, even sometimes in outside views, someone who works for the same company is familiar with their work but can bring a fresh perspective to just pivot things because stuff is moving so fast and it's so complicated. And then the other thing is a lot of times this becomes like a Keystone to their talent acquisition strategy and onboarding.

Beth Ridley

Again, employees come into this with fresh eyes like, I love that you do this once a month. This is great for me. Think of all the relationships I'm building. The company I came from didn't do this. And so it is like a piece of onboarding without having to have a separate onboarding strategy. They immediately fold new people, join a little pod or new people join the safe and brave space monthly conversation as part of their team. And it just really helps to onboard them into a really strong culture. And again, a lot of times you don't appreciate how this small little change made a big difference until someone who didn't work there comes and was like, I've never seen this before. This is super exciting. I'm so glad that you do it. Those are my aha's. It's good for emotional wellbeing. It is, at the end of the day, good for business in terms of different ways of working together and problem-solving. And then it is a cornerstone for onboarding.

Participant

Beth, I think this is amazing, and thank you for all of your shared learnings with us. I do have a question, and I don't want to go completely down a different rabbit hole, but I work in a fully remote environment, which I'm really not used to. I was used to a strong culture of teamwork and buzz and energy and collaboration pre-pandemic. I'm curious if you have any… I know you could probably talk for hours about this, but. Any quick. Things that you.Can share for people that are in Fully remote environments and.How to create that sense of belonging in that world because it is.Different when you don't physically see each other barely ever.

Beth Ridley

Well, with the last two examples, it was all fully remote. And part of it is one of the companies, the marketing firm, they were fully remote. And then the other one was hybrid. But because it's hybrid, it almost has to be remote or virtual because that's the only way you're going to get everybody. It was just the first example where they actually did have people come in because they could. Okay. Now with the ones that are fully remote, after you've been doing this long enough, because like I said, people really do like to know and tap into what the other groups or teams are discussing in their safe and brave spaces. So sometimes they'll build company retreats around this. So I actually was just in North Carolina last week, and they've been doing these safe and brave spaces in their teams. And the teams are all separated across the state of North Carolina. But then it culminated into a big retreat where they brought everybody together, actually, for the first time probably since the pandemic. Interestingly enough, they have a new office space and everything.

Beth Ridley

And it was a time for them to reconnect and to check in with how has it been going? What have they been learning and where do we go next? So I would say I've seen it work really well remote. In fact, it's a way to build connections across remote. But it's also nice to use this as a reason to culminate into something in-person because I do think in-person also matters. It just may not be feasible to do in-person weekly or monthly. Thank you.

Participant

One approach we've taken we have a fully remote workforce where while we are a Madison based organization, we have people from all over the country. Got some people here today who are not in the area we do a lot of collaboration. We're super deliberate about having highly collaborative teams the teams are remote, but we're spending a lot of our day together and working together every day for some part of the day. That helps break down some of the loneliness and isolation that you can feel if you're working remote and you don't have that time to work with your teams. So it's been highly effective to help people who are really seeking that human connection to have a chance to have that through, again, just highly collaborative work. We're using this ensemble problem-solving technique often we're using it in a fairly structured way that engages everybody on the team and the work.

Beth Ridley

I like that. Tom, I don't mean to be rude, but I know some people had to go, so I at least wanted to flash up my contact information. I'm happy to share these slides if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you scan the QR code, you can get on my newsletter. But yeah, I like what you... What did you call it? Ensemble. Ensemble. Ensemble. What did you say? Ensemble problem-solving? -sure, yeah. -i like that. And the funny thing is I feel like just people are craving, I think craving two things. One, just connections. I think sometimes pausing from work to build connections does energize you to go back to work. Sometimes, even though we try to keep the discussions that we curate on point with business in some regards, sometimes they just want to talk. I'm like, Can we just have a month where we're just connecting personally? Anyways, it just energizes people. Then also, I was going to say something else based on what you shared, Tom, but I forgot what that was. But anyways, the thought might come to me.

Beth Ridley

I'm just curious, do folks have other approaches that have worked well or other lessons learned when you're trying to foster psychological safety?

Dan Roe

I just think creating space for people to talk, it sounds so easy, but it's not I mean people work in the same office for decades and don't even know that someone has kids or anything about them. Just creating a space, it's amazing what? Like 10 minutes, you can do decades of progress just by creating a space.

Beth Ridley

Yeah. There was a pre-question that was submitted. How do you know people are actually being more honest? I guess to be honest to answer that, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I just can look to the outcomes. I think over time, people... And people have different set points. I think we also have to appreciate in terms of just how much they want to talk. We also have to be mindful of that. But at least there is the opportunity. Again, with one example, for things that people really want to be honest about, they are still going forward on a one-on-one with their manager, but they're actually now going forward on a one-on-one with their manager. It may not be something that they want to share in a big group, but at least they know while my manager is taking this seriously. We have practice. We're investing in this. We know that we really do mean that we want to get better at these inclusive behaviors to create that cultural belonging where psychological safety is a piece of it. But let me go to my manager now and they feel safe at least doing that on a one on one.

Beth Ridley

Well, okay. In the interest, I'm just I'm going to throw something else out there. One of the things part of this work, somebody mentioned it's exhausting. It can be. But what can we do to spice it up, literally, and make it fun? For my clients, I don't like to give material gifts like chocolate or whatever. I like to give them experiences because that's what this work is all about, right? Help them step outside of their comfort zone, learn something new, but in a fun, low pressure way. This year, my experience gift is my good friend, Grad, for sure, we used to work together, combat veteran in the Marines. We worked together at Northwest Mutual. He started his own barbecue company. So it's a virtual live stream event, free and open to the public. A lot of my clients bring their teams because it's like team building. It's short, sweet and simple. It's just 45 minutes. But he's going to do a cooking demo on how to make the best barbecue sauce and then creative ways that you can use barbecue, rubs and spices to plus up your traditional holiday dishes. Then we're going to talk about his experience around what it takes to attract, engage and retain veterans in the workforce, which is a huge piece of diversity.

Beth Ridley

And so he's going to talk a little bit about his experience transitioning from combat into corporate. And he does a lot of bridge-building between veterans and helping them transition into workplaces. So he'll just talk about what he's learned. So hopefully it's an opportunity to step outside your comfort zone. We do some virtual discussions, and you can win a prize. But again, it's like presenting this work around safe and brave spaces, belonging, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and a fun factor, because if you can bring some people in where the stakes are low, then hopefully maybe you can keep them in and grow together as the stakes get a little bit higher. I offer that if anybody's interested, follow me on LinkedIn to get the links or just share with me whatever, but keep that in mind. I guess that's my holiday gift to the culture community. Does that work, Leah?

Leah Roe

I'm obsessed with this. I love it. Absolutely. What a great idea of gifting experiences. I love that.

Beth Ridley

Yeah.

Leah Roe

Thank you so much. Does anyone have any final questions, thoughts? Confetti to throw at Beth? I'm throwing major virtual confetti at Beth. Where's my confetti? I can't do the cool fireworks like Dan. He's the only one.

Beth Ridley

That- Look, it's not working for me.

Leah Roe

Look at that. Of course, Dan gets automatic fireworks. That's amazing. Any other final questions or thoughts? We will send out this recording to everyone who registered to everyone and who's on here will have the recording as well. But I hope to see you all. I will see, I'll see Beth, at the barbecue experience. I hope you all are coming too. I'm very excited.

Beth Ridley

Awesome. Thank you for having me, everybody. A good one.

Leah Roe

Thank you, everybody.

Beth Ridley

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.