5 Ways to Inspire Your Colleagues to Speak Up

When your teammates aren't talking, are they actively listening or self-censoring? According to Gallup, only 30 percent of employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work. The vast majority holds their ideas to themselves.

Unfortunately, silence is usually unnoticed. It could be a sign of focus or disengagement. Silence is necessary for listening and reflection–many people to understand and think before they talk. However, it can also indicate that your colleagues don't feel safe voicing concerns.

Psychological safety is the antidote to silence. It's the shared feeling that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. People feel safe to be themselves, participate, speak out, and challenge groupthink without fear of retaliation. Building a psychologically safe culture is everyone’s responsibility. The shared feeling is the result of collective behavior, not just what leaders do.

Psychological safety is a spectrum. It's not whether you have it or not, but how much. Your team must learn to climb the Psychological Safety Ladder, as I explain in my book Remote, Not Distant.

To encourage your colleagues to speak up, master the three levels:

• Level 1: Welcome. It's about feeling safe to bring your whole self to work, connect at a personal level, actively participate, and build strong relationships. Belonging is vital for building high-performing teams.
• Level 2: Courageous Conversations. Dissent and debate are critical for teams to perform at their best. Courageous conversations are possible when we feel that our unique skills and perspectives are accepted.
• Level 3: Innovation. Creativity can only happen if we first feel welcome and safe to have courageous conversations. Level 3 is about feeling safe to share fresh ideas in the open and challenge the status quo.

Climbing the Psychological Safety Ladder is a progression. The following ideas will help your team members speak out and increase psychological safety–one step at a time.

1. Check in with your colleagues often.

The first step to encouraging others to speak is to check how they are doing. Reaching out to your colleagues to say “hello” feels like a minor gesture, but new research shows that casually reaching out to people via text or email means more than we think.

Invite people to share how they're doing or use more intentional prompts. Carve time out at the beginning of a team or 1-2-1 meetings to empathize with your colleagues.

Check-in rounds became more common when teams were forced to work from home. However, many have gone back to normal and are missing this powerful opportunity to check in with each other.

Some questions you can use:

• What's got your attention?
• What words would you use to describe where your head is? And where is your heart?
• What was the weather like for you at work this past week?

Metaphors and images are potent stimuli, especially for those colleagues who struggle to talk about their feelings.

2. Manage for equal participation.

Conversations are your team's currency, and their value depends on everyone's participation. Tapping into collective wisdom is one of the key benefits when people speak up. To achieve this, you must find the balance between taking space and making space for others.

Conversational turn-taking is a simple way to ensure equal participation. Facilitate dialogue, giving each member their turn to speak and the rest to listen. Invite quiet people to take up space by going first. Louder voices should make space for others by holding their urge to speak and becoming better at listening.

Building a psychologically-safe team requires everyone to adjust their preferred style. Introverts need to practice speaking more often, and extroverts must learn to make room without feeling censored. The idea is not to silence one's voice but to listen to what both introverts and extroverts say.

3. Take care of interruptions.

Women, minorities, and introverts are often victims of interruptions. When people feel constantly silenced by others, they will default to silence to avoid the pain of being interrupted.

Often, we don't realize when we cut someone off. However, there's a pattern behind many interruptions: the pain and anxiety are caused by the same old folks.

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Institute a "no-interruptions" rule. Invite your colleagues to become more aware of how painful interruptions are. Moving on, everyone should pay attention–interruptions are not okay. Interrupt the interrupter to make everyone feel heard.

Encourage the interrupter to "hold on" so the team can fully understand what one member was saying before moving on.

The no-interruptions norm improves the quality of conversations. Deal privately with repeat interrupters.

4. Keep meetings small.

Size matters, especially when it comes to encouraging conversations.

One of the key reasons meetings are not productive is that too many people are involved. When airtime becomes scarce, people quickly disengage and pretend to multitask. Also, a large crowd intimidates many people into staying silent.

Productivity and creativity are size-dependent: they tend to decrease as you increase the number of participants. Keep your meetings small for more productive discussions and conversations–ideally, five to seven participants.

Break-out rooms are a great way to keep meetings small. For delicate topics, a conversation in a duo creates more intimacy and psychological safety. Brainstorming is more effective when you have five or fewer people working together as everyone has time to participate, and there's less competition about whose idea gets approved.

5. Model speaking up.

What about you?

The best way to get others to speak up is to model that behavior yourself. Are you asking encouraging questions? Are you being vulnerable in front of your colleagues? Do you address sensitive topics in public even if it feels uncomfortable?

Psychological safety is a two-way street: the team supports each individual, and each teammate should contribute to making the team safer. Just like trust, someone needs to take the first step.

Model the desired behavior by speaking up. Don't wait for others to do so; set the pace and expectations. When someone crosses the line and shares what everyone is thinking, but no one is saying, it becomes easier for the rest to follow suit.

Modeling behavior requires sharing the air time–remember the take and make space rule.

Speaking up is not easy, but silence is always more harmful–especially when teammates keep relevant information to themselves. Try these five steps to encourage your colleagues to voice their opinions and concerns more often.