The Workplace Psychological Safety Act (WPSA) is a legislative framework for Sates that provides a cause of action for employees who suffer from workplace psychological abuse.
It serves as a protection against the detrimental impacts of issues such as bullying, harassment, and discrimination, which can significantly compromise the psychological health of employees. It's important to note that there are no current laws that protects workers from workplace psychological abuse, unless you’re a member of a protected class (sex, race, age, disability, etc.) under the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — and can prove the abuse is from your protected class membership.
The Act underscores the critical need to cultivate an environment that prioritizes emotional and mental well-being within organizational settings.
Currently, the bill has passed the Rhode Island State Senate (2023) and in Massachusetts, the bill is with the Senate Ways & Means Committee.
Main Benefits of the Workplace Psychological Safety Act (WPSA)
Protects all people from mistreatment - The WPSA will make all forms of toxic behavior in the workplace unlawful.
Requires employers to resolve harassment issues - The WPSA provides a full and complete remedy, recognizing the creation of a toxic work environment with a reasonable person standard. It also includes a remedy for low-wage workers, who are often left out of our pay-to-play legal system yet suffer from higher rates of mistreatment.
Eliminates the hurdle of intent - The WPSA requires a baseline of proof of damage to the work environment. Intent involves additional damages but is not required for a legal claim.
Incentivizes employers to change - The WPSA provides a strong incentive for employers to make the work environment psychologically safe, prioritizing human rights.
You can find the full details of the bill here.
What Workplace Psychological Abuse Can Look Like
Verbal abuse
Discounting and minimizing; Name-calling, put-downs, yelling, or intimidating gestures; Silent treatment, ignoring, or walking away from you; Excessively harsh criticism or reprimands; Unwillingness to engage in a dialogue; Rumors, gossip, behind-the-back defamation, or false accusations; Offensive language, jokes, or sarcasm
Comments about your protected status (age, gender, religion, race, color, beliefs, for example); Threats; Blaming or guilt; Placating; Making a joke out of your feelings; Jumping to conclusions about what you think; Changing the subject, not allowing you to speak, deflecting, or blaming you when you confront them.
Sabotage
Exclusion from:
Meetings, social events, and conversations you should be involved with
Timely access to resources and information you need to do your job;
Support, empathy, and attention (when others receive it)
Assignment of work (followed by reprimands for not completing work)
Unfairness (can include gaslighting or crazy-making) designed to make you believe you’re the problem. The abuser twists, lies about, or selectively omits information to favor them to make you doubt your own memory, perception, and sanity.
Inaccurate, negative performance reviews — a paper trail to justify the abuse as a business decision
A demotion or other discipline, including threatening job loss, without cause
Micromanaging
Inconsistently complying with rules
Discounting and denying accomplishments or taking credit for your work
Blocking requests for training, leave, or promotion
Increasing responsibilities without giving you authority to complete the responsibilities
Removing responsibilities with no explanation
Unreasonably heavy workloads, even non-related work
Underwork resulting in you feeling useless
Unrealistic deadlines
Favoritism involving you having a separate set of rules or benefits or frequently changing rules
Vague unsatisfactory work performance reviews or accusations without factual backup
Pestering, spying, stalking, or tampering with personal belongings and equipment
Lack of clarity or vague directions and responses to take away your power, leaving you confused. It’s deception that can set you up for failure regarding:
Work expectations (changing them without notice, explanation, or buy-in)
Deadlines (with reprimands for missing deadlines not communicated)
Reprimands without providing ways to improve
Mobbing
In toxic work environments, bullying escalates to mobbing when you report abusive behavior to the proper workplace authorities only to discover higher-ups prioritize avoiding liability over your well-being:
The employer’s representative employees typically mislead you to believe the employer has a legitimate complaint process in place to remedy the problem but then ignore your valid complaint by using a bogus complaint process to avoid employer liability.
The employer/its representative employees also don’t remove the stressor (the bully) or change your work environment. The bully continues to harass and abuse you without consequence or deterrent. The representative employees string you along by prolonging the complaint process.
You voluntarily leave, die, or are fired after succumbing to the silent killer stress and its subsequent physical and mental injury. Game over. The employer wins. The threat of liability is gone.
Further trauma occurs when you realize the institutional complicity of tampering with your overall well-being, forcing you off the payroll to avoid liability and the absence of any viable legal recourse to address any of it.
Read more on the patterns and characteristics of workplace abuse and more at the End Workplace Abuse website.
What Psychological Safety at Work Can Look Like
The Center for Creative Leadership outlines the 4 stages of psychological safety at work according to Dr. Timothy Clark and provides 8 tips for leaders to support psychological safety in the workplace.
The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety
According to Dr. Timothy Clark, author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, employees progress through 4 stages before they feel free to make valuable contributions and challenge the status quo.
Inclusion Safety
Inclusion safety satisfies the basic human need to connect and belong. In this stage, you feel safe to be yourself and are accepted for who you are, including your unique attributes and defining characteristics.
Learner Safety
Learner safety satisfies the need to learn and grow. In this stage, you feel safe to exchange in the learning process by asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, experimenting, and making mistakes.
Contributor Safety
Contributor safety satisfies the need to make a difference. You feel safe to use your skills and abilities to make a meaningful contribution.
Challenger Safety
Challenger safety satisfies the need to make things better. You feel safe to speak up and challenge the status quo when you think there’s an opportunity to change or improve.
To help employees move through the 4 stages and ultimately land in a place where they feel comfortable with interpersonal risk-taking and speaking up, leaders should nurture and promote their team’s sense of psychological safety in the workplace.
8 Steps Toward Creating More Psychological Safety at Work
Tips for Leaders from the Center for Creative Leadership.
Make psychological safety an explicit priority.
Talk with your team about the importance of creating psychological safety at work. Connect it to a higher purpose of greater organizational innovation, team engagement, and inclusion. Ask for help when you need it, and freely give help when asked. Model the behaviors you want to see, and set the stage by using inclusive leadership practices.
Facilitate everyone speaking up.
Show genuine curiosity, and honor frankness and truth-telling. Be an open-minded, compassionate leader, and willing to listen when someone is brave enough to say something challenging the status quo. Organizations with a coaching culture will more likely have team members with the courage to speak the truth.
Establish norms for how failure is handled.
Don’t punish experimentation and (reasonable) risk-taking. Show recognition that mistakes are an opportunity for growth. Encourage learning from failure and disappointment, and openly share your hard-won lessons learned from mistakes. This will help encourage innovation, instead of sabotaging it. Use candor when expressing disappointment (and appreciation).
Create space for new ideas (even wild ones).
Provide any challenge within the larger context of support. Consider whether you only want ideas that have been thoroughly tested, or whether you’re willing to accept highly creative, out-of-the-box ideas that are not yet well-formulated. It’s fine to ask the tough questions; but do so while always being supportive at the same time. Learn more about how to foster more innovative mindsets on your team.
Embrace productive conflict.
Promote sincere dialogue and constructive debate, and work to resolve conflicts productively. Set the stage for incremental change by establishing team expectations for factors that contribute to psychological safety. With your team, discuss the following questions:
How will team members communicate their concerns about a process that isn’t working?
How can reservations be shared with colleagues in a respectful manner?
What are our norms for managing conflicting perspectives?
Pay close attention and look for patterns.
Focus on team members’ perceived patterns of psychological safety, not just the overall level. Do some members experience significantly more or less psychological safety than others, or is the level fairly even across the team?
Advocate for consistent psychological safety for everyone, and not just as a “nice to have” — it matters for the bottom line.
Consider the team’s current beliefs when developing strategies to enhance team psychological safety, because one size does not fit all.
Make an intentional effort to promote dialogue.
Promote skill at giving and receiving feedback, and create space for people to raise concerns. Ask colleagues powerful, open-ended questions, and then listen actively and intently to understand their feelings and values, as well as facts. Provide opportunities to learn how to share constructive feedback to one another and what respectful responses look like.
You may want to consider investments in strengthening the quality of conversations across the organization, because quite literally, better conversations will lead to a better culture. Improved skill at feedback conversations, combined with a psychologically safe work environment, will yield colleagues who are more willing to share unspoken reservations with one another and propose solutions that are more rigorously stress-tested before implementation.
Celebrate wins.
Notice and acknowledge what’s going well. Positive interactions and conversations between individuals are built on trust and mutual respect. So share credit and embrace expertise among many, and the success of the collective, versus a single “hero” mentality.
Celebrate what’s going well, however small, and appreciate people’s efforts. Encouraging and expressing gratitude reinforces your team members’ sense of self. Give your team members the benefit of the doubt when they take a risk, ask for help, or admit a mistake. In turn, trust that they will do the same for you.
Support The Workplace Psychological Safety Act (WPSA)
Sign the Petition through End Workplace Abuse's website.
In the spirit of, 'ADA is the floor, not the ceiling', it's also important to note that legal compliance is the minimum effort - below are some additional actionable steps to support psychological safety at work.
Employers can take the Workplace Psychological Safety Pledge here.
Review our Well-Being In Social Work Library for resources.
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