Cultivating Connection: Building a Supportive Work Environment

In today's fast-paced, often demanding work landscape, a supportive environment isn't just a "nice-to-have" – it's a necessity. It's the foundation upon which productivity, innovation, and employee well-being are built. But how do we move beyond buzzwords and actually create a workplace where people feel valued, heard, and empowered? Let's delve into the key ingredients of a supportive culture: psychological safety, trust and communication.

The Foundation: Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is the cornerstone of a supportive workplace in which people feel comfortable expressing themselves. It's the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. An environment where mistakes are embraced, diverse perspectives are welcomed, and people feel safe to take risks and communicate openly.

Foster a Culture of Vulnerability: Encourage open dialogue and create regular spaces for honest feedback, both positive and constructive.

Embrace Mistakes as Learning Opportunities: Avoid slipping into a blame culture by shifting the focus from blame to problem-solving and growth.

Promote Active Listening: Ensure that every individual feels heard, understood and that their views are valued.

Encourage Diverse Perspectives: Value different viewpoints, be curious and create an inclusive environment that caters for all.

How do we create psychological safety at HubGem?

Every voice is heard: Despite role or experience, every viewpoint is encouraged and holds equal value. We avoid a hierarchical feel and promote collective decision making.
Empathy led: Leaders lead with empathy in everything that they do, both internally and externally.
Mistakes are embraced: We treat mistakes as a great learning opportunity and work collectively to find a solution, leaders foster and celebrate this growth mindset.
Problem solving circles: We encourage problems to be shared and for the team to collectively support one another to find solutions. We share our reflections and debrief from projects to encourage group reflections and shared learning.
Vulnerability in leadership: Leaders are not afraid to be vulnerable, they openly share when they have faced difficulty and how they overcame it.
Open SLT calls: Each month team members are encouraged to join to provide feedback or suggest new ideas and thoughts directly to SLT.
Start, Stop, Continue feedback: Team members are asked to provide this feedback for leaders during their professional reviews. Leaders commit to action points to foster accountability and trust.
Culture Surveys: A separate employee survey from our usual feedback, with the aim to understand the employee experience of our culture, inclusion and their sense of belonging. It’s important to note that the feedback approaches above can only truly work where team members feel psychologically safe to be vulnerable and honest.

The Glue: Trust and Respect

Trust and respect are the glue that holds a supportive work environment together, it’s the belief that colleagues and the organisation as a whole will act with integrity and fairness. Employees trust that their colleagues and leaders will follow through on commitments and act in their best interests.

Build Trust Through Transparency: Be open and honest in your communication and actions, ensuring that both are fully aligned. In other words, always follow through with what you say you are going to do!

Establish Clear Expectations: Ensure that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities to set individuals up for success. Any concerns are addressed directly in an open and supportive manner, leading with empathy to reach a solution.

Empower and Believe in Employees: Give individuals autonomy in their work and trust them to make decisions. Value every individual contribution and lead with dignity and understanding.

How do we foster trust and respect at HubGem?

Transparency at the heart: From SLT decisions to company finances, we believe that transparency and trust is key in all areas. Transparency allows us to welcome diverse ideas and work collectively as a team to achieve business success, whereby everybody can take ownership for their contribution.
Accountability: Every bit of verbal and written feedback is followed up or acted upon to foster trust and team-wide accountability. Feedback is presented on team days, demonstrating how we plan to action the feedback in the months/year ahead.
Objective led: Weekly/monthly 1-1’s and professional reviews encourage clear objective setting for the period ahead, fully supported in a way to set individuals up for success.
Remote and flexible working: As a fully remote team, we have full trust in our team to work from anywhere, make decisions and work autonomously. We encourage individuals to take ownership for projects, and where possible tailor projects to meet individual’s passions and interests.

The Conduit: Open and Effective Communication

Open and effective communication is more than just exchanging words; it's about ensuring that messages are conveyed, received, and understood in a way that builds strong relationships, achieves goals and resolves any conflicts. Open and effective communication is fundamental for a supportive workplace culture.

Two-way Communication: Create open channels for feedback and dialogue whereby both the sender and receiver can provide feedback to ensure that the message has been understood correctly.

Practice Active Listening: Pay close attention both verbally and nonverbally to individuals, asking clarifying questions and seeking to understand the other perspective.

Use Clear and Concise Language: Avoid jargon or ambiguous language, ensuring the message is clear, concise, and easy to understand, tailored to the specific individual. Ensure that any constructive feedback has clear improvement pointers that the individual can action.

How do we encourage open and effective communication at HubGem?

HubGem Leadership Programme: Our four-month programme supports HubGem leaders with leadership skills including sensitive communication and leading with empathy.
Continuous Communication: We use tools like Slack to keep the team informed and allow for fast, and open communication. Alongside work and team related channels, we have social channels and calls to build connection and working relationships (travel, book club, music, sports, wellbeing, food, art club, social events etc).
Celebrating Wins: We make sure to celebrate achievements, big or small. There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t have a win celebrated by team members!
Regular One-to-Ones: We conduct weekly and monthly one-on-one meetings between leaders and team members to discuss performance, goals, and any concerns. This provides a safe and regular space for open communication.
Team Feedback: We hold regular team feedback sessions and surveys to gather input and identify areas for improvement. This ensures that everyone has a voice and that we're continuously evolving our workplace culture.

By prioritising a supportive environment through psychological safety, trust and communication, you can build a culture where your team and business can thrive.

If you would like to learn more about building a supportive culture, check out our Culture blog and head over to our culture page!