Google’s Secret Every Team Can Use To Boost Productivity

For the past seven years Google has been studying the factors that drive their most successful work teams. Here’s what they found.

“Psychological safety was far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found — it’s the underpinning of the other four,”

– Julia Rozovsky, People Operations analyst at Google

Here’s a snippet from the Business Insider article that summarized the research.

Psychological Safety is a term that Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”

It sounds simple, says Rozovsky, but establishing an environment where no employees are afraid that one of their questions or suggestions will reveal them to be “out of the loop” requires work.

“Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives,” Rozovsky writes.

At Next Element we call this Openness, and it is the first step in building trusting and effective teams, transparent work cultures, and for engaging in compassionate conflict.

Click here to learn more about Openness?

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