Why cultivating safe spaces in the workplace is important

Employees at all levels must have the relevant skills, characteristics, training, and resources to be effective and successful in their roles. However, these factors aren’t enough if the environment in which they work doesn’t genuinely engage and support them by promoting belonging, mutual trust, connection, and safety. This is the premise of cultivating safe spaces.

Cultivating safe spaces not only fosters employee engagement, it also provides the foundation for creating systemic change within organizations, including policies and procedures that aren’t grounded in fear, control, and exclusion.

Image from https://www.cultivatingsafespaces.com/

What’s necessary to cultivate safe spaces?

Based on Elaine Alec’s (Indigenous Leader, CEO and Founder of Cultivating Safe Spaces) work, cultivating safe spaces is about providing the tools for leaders and employees to develop inclusive, respectful, and emotionally safe environments. Elaine describes the following as being necessary to cultivate a safe space:

  • Understanding Self: It all starts with you. Regardless of the circumstances and environment, YOU need to be a safe space. To create this, you must be aware of the impacts on yourself, your own triggers, and how you react. Others’ emotions can startle and disarm us, and how we deal with them requires self-understanding so that we don’t default to taking them personally. This awareness allows you to be present for others. First, know yourself.
  • Love-Based Practice: This is about understanding whether you are working, making decisions, asking questions, etc. from a place of fear or a place of love. Are you directing and telling versus asking open-ended, curious questions from a good place? A love-based practice is rooted in decolonizing work, whereas colonial systems are based on fear and control.
  • Patience: Take the time to understand – not just the situation, but perspectives, stories, and diverse ways of thinking and being. Make efforts to work and communicate with people not just from your own understanding, but theirs too. This is also about having patience for people on where they’re at in their journey and understanding that people aren’t “bad” or “wrong” if they aren’t where you believe yourself (or others) to be.
  • Discipline: This isn’t discipline in the sense of punishment, but rather around accountability – which is the most difficult factor in cultivating safe spaces. In the realm of ceremony, when one is called to witness, they are called to be present, to really hear, and to be disciplined with listening. In a work context, it’s about calling for a “witness” or support of what was said/heard. Each person in a conversation has a responsibility to what was talked about in the space, and/or agreed to. To cultivate safety, trust, and accountability, where it makes sense, formally agree on how you will hold the other (or you, or the team) accountable to what was discussed and shared.

Four protocols for promoting safe spaces

Elaine Alec further outlines the following ways we can promote and foster safe spaces at work and/or in our personal lives:

  • Promoting Wellbeing: Taking care of each other, and yourself. Understanding that building trust is a mutual and reciprocal responsibility.
  • Promoting Inclusion: Ensuring that everyone has an opportunity to speak and be heard, and that all voices and perspectives are valued (including those of people you agree with or don’t agree with).
  • Promoting Validation: Practicing patience, active listening and witnessing. Acknowledging the reality of others (e.g., if they are upset or concerned), even if you don’t understand it.
  • Promoting Freedom: Acknowledging that people need to have agency and a choice. For example, in meetings or at work, this may be about inviting everyone to take breaks and provide self-care when they need.

Awareness of power imbalance and establishing trust bonds

An important part of cultivating safe spaces is establishing trust bonds between you and others. While we will ideally enter relationships with people from a place of ‘trust before distrust,’ that can be difficult for people for a variety of reasons – especially if there’s a power imbalance (e.g., more junior team members meeting with managers, or those from equity-deserving groups meeting with those from ‘dominant-culture’ groups).

Power imbalance exists in any relationship where one has control (or perceived control) over another, especially when one has the power to hire, promote, performance manage, evaluate or validate skills, provide corrective action, and/or fire. In a work setting, one’s experience of power imbalance is impacted by many things, including how assertive they are (or can be in each situation), the level of autonomy within their role, their own self-esteem, and fear of rejection or disapproval.

As a manager, it’s important to know and acknowledge that power imbalance does and will exist, in addition to what the sources of power are. Be compassionate to others’ fear and/or concern and listen with care and curiosity. Having ‘power with’ (versus power over) is about sharing power and agency.

There are many ways we can all work to establish trust bonds with and cultivate safe spaces for those we work with. In all cases, it starts with an understanding of ourselves.

Our accredited Cultivating Safe Spaces Facilitator can support you to build trust and safe spaces within your teams.