The Connection Between DEI and Psychological Safety

26
Jul 2022
125
A silhouette of a man 's head in a blue circle on a black background.

Author : Lewis Glassey

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological safety is the degree to which an individual feels safe to contribute without fear of being punished, embarrassed or criticized. It’s fundamental to team collaboration, our sense of belonging, our wellbeing and organizational performance.

As leaders increasingly look to create more diverse, respectful and inclusive workplaces, we’re finding many are becoming less confident. Leaders are feeling unsure how to support and strengthen individuals and team dynamics while simultaneously holding staff accountable and achieving strategic goals.

Open communication with your teammates does not result in a lack of accountability, it’s actually quite the opposite. A psychologically-safe workplace is where all members can give and receive feedback, contribute ideas, raise concerns and it is the key to building diverse, high-performing organizations.

Traditional leadership practices are not great at creating psychologically safe work environments. Leaders should instead  set the direction for a team and introduce accountability to ensure goals are being met. When leaders take their team’s needs into account and are able to sustainably perform at a high level, it is referred to as the accountability loop. There is an expectation that leaders simply know and understand how to strengthen and support teams without being taught.

We believe in a four-step, repeatable approach to leadership development:

  • Confirm direction - Ensure clarity, certainty, and alignment
  • Support Individuals - Promote fairness, recognition, and trust
  • Strengthen Team Dynamics - Build a team safety, comfort with risk, and acceptance of all team members; and
  • Build Accountability - The team can now focus on learning, catching, and coaching

Our Circular Leadership program gives leaders and teams a shared language and deliberate approach to sustainably build and support human-centric, high-performing workplaces.

Challenges Facing Successful DEI Initiatives

As companies increasingly recognize the performance benefits of more diverse and inclusive workplaces, it’s important that they track and respond as these concepts evolve over time.

For example, diversity was initially thought of as simply integrating people of different genders, faiths, ethnicities, and physical abilities into the workplace. As our understanding evolved, we learned to consider others’ experiences, identities and opinions. The most current iteration takes the previous ideas into account but recognizes that it’s also about tolerance, flexibility, choice and career purpose/progression. The expansion from a focus on just diversity to including, equity, inclusion and more recently belonging highlights these evolutions.

The challenge is that, without any way of understanding the needs of your workforce, it is difficult to drive meaningful action to achieve and maintain diversity targets.

When organizations are unable to see how their DEI initiatives impact their workforce, it is impossible to understand why these initiatives undermine collaboration, performance, innovation, customer satisfaction and staff retention. Decision-makers are hamstrung to make good decisions that positively improve the workplace experience and organizational performance.

As a result, strategies to increase diversity see short-term results with the very staff they are trying to attract leaving due to feeling excluded, unheard or under-valued.

Psychological Safety: The Key to an Effective DEI Strategy

Over the past six months, we have been doing a lot of work with clients measuring the relationship between psychological safety, DEI and its impact on organizational performance.

In every case, our results have revealed strong relationships (correlations) between psych safety and DEI. These results show that teams with elevated levels of psychological safety always or regularly:

  • Feel comfortable discussing women’s career development.
  • Discuss gender and ethnicity issues amongst their team and with their managers;
  • Experience better interactions between staff of diverse backgrounds; and
  • Feel more satisfied with how their organization handles diversity issues.

Teams that reported low levels of psychological safety, on the other hand, reported rarely or never to each of the above.

For one client, who had committed to increasing diversity in their workforce, they discovered staff with low levels of psychological safety were 43% more likely to leave the organization, with women being 71% more likely to leave than their male counterparts. In a tight labour market, servicing the revolving door of staff leaving was dramatically impacting staff morale, business growth and product development.

Implementing a DEI strategy that does not incorporate psych safety is lose-lose-lose for the people in your workforce, your organization’s performance, and greater society.

The Takeaway:

Where psychological safety is low, staff feel unwilling or unable to discuss DEI issues with fellow staff members or management.

Employers who focus on DEI topics but ignore the psychological safety of their teams put their organization at risk of higher turnover, reduced performance, low innovation and have a lower likelihood of change initiatives succeeding.

The good news is that employers who recognize psych safety as a foundation piece to achieving DEI targets can intentionally and sustainably build high-performing, human-centric workplaces.

 

About the Author: 

Written by Lewis Glassey, Business Development Manager at  Conductor Software

Performance, innovation and retention depend on the ability of leaders - at all levels - to cultivate and sustain psychological safety in the workplace. 

 

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post belong solely to the original author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of CPHR Alberta.

 

 

 

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post belong solely to the original author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of CPHR Alberta.



Before the Title: HR's Role in Growing Leadership Capacity

By Jessica Jaithoo • August 19, 2026
Author: Kanwaljit Chaudhry We often begin developing leaders after we have given them something to lead. Someone is promoted into their first supervisory role. They join a leadership development program, receive coaching, attend workshops, or are paired with a mentor. All of these can be valuable. But by then, leadership development has already been happening. Long before the title arrives, people are learning how to exercise judgment, influence others, navigate disagreement, take responsibility and make decisions when the answer is not obvious. The question for HR is: Do we have to wait for the title to help those capabilities grow? Create opportunities, not just programs Some of the most valuable leadership development happens through work itself. A stretch assignment. Leading a small project. Presenting an idea to senior colleagues. Coordinating people who do not report to you. Navigating competing priorities. Being trusted to make a decision rather than simply carrying one out. None requires a management title. HR can help organizations look at development as not only as courses people attend, but as experiences people need. That may mean encouraging managers to distribute meaningful opportunities rather than repeatedly turning to the person who is already proven. It may mean designing project work so different employees have opportunities to lead. It may mean making mentoring, coaching or job-shadowing available before someone enters a formal leadership pipeline. The objective is not to make everyone a manager. It is to give more people opportunities to build capabilities that will serve them whether or not formal leadership is their eventual destination. Make room to learn from experience Experience alone does not necessarily create development. Two people can go through similar experiences and take very different things from them. What often makes the difference is the opportunity to reflect: What worked? What didn't? What did I notice about myself? What would I do differently next time? HR can help make those conversations part of development rather than leaving them to chance. A manager checking in after a difficult project can ask more than, “Did we deliver?” A mentor can help someone examine why a conversation went differently than expected. A performance discussion can explore not only what someone accomplished, but how they influenced others, exercised judgment or responded when things became uncertain. These are relatively small interventions. But they help turn experience into learning. Notice leadership before it becomes obvious There is another role for HR: helping organizations broaden what they notice. Potential does not always announce itself loudly. The person who volunteers to coordinate a complicated piece of work may be demonstrating leadership capacity. So might the employee who brings people together when a team is stuck, asks the question no one else is asking, helps a colleague succeed without needing credit, or remains thoughtful when everyone else is rushing toward an answer. If we look for leadership potential only among those who already resemble our current leaders, we may keep finding the same kinds of people.  Creating broader opportunities allows capability to become visible before we decide who has it. Pay attention to what the organization teaches Organizations are also developing future leaders when they are not deliberately trying to. Employees notice who gets promoted. They notice what behaviour gets rewarded, whose ideas receive attention and what happens when someone makes a mistake. They notice whether managers share information or protect it, whether difficult conversations are avoided or handled respectfully, and whether asking for help is treated as good judgment or weakness. These observations become lessons about what leadership looks like here. HR influences many of the systems through which those lessons are reinforced e.g., performance management, recognition, development, succession planning and promotion among them. That makes an important question worth asking: What are our people learning about leadership from the way our organization actually works? The answer may tell us as much about our leadership pipeline as any competency framework. Before the title Leadership development does not have to begin with a leadership program. It can begin when someone is trusted with something slightly beyond what they have done before and supported while they figure it out. It can happen when a manager shares the reasoning behind a difficult decision rather than only communicating the outcome. It can happen when someone gets to lead a project before they have people reporting to them. And it can happen when an employee has someone who helps them make sense of an experience rather than simply move on to the next task. HR cannot manufacture leaders. But HR can help create workplaces where people have opportunities to practise judgment, responsibility, influence and reflection long before a title makes those things part of their job description. Perhaps the question is not only “Who are our future leaders?” It is also: “What are we doing today that gives future leadership capacity a chance to emerge?”

What HR Leaders Are Telling Us Their Organizations Need Right Now

By Marina Perkovic • July 22, 2026
At the CPHR Alberta Conference, we asked HR leaders one question: What leadership capability matters most for the future of your organization? Leaders picked up a star and placed it beside their answer. By the end of the conference, HR leaders cast 131 votes across 16 capabilities. Three stood out, with two tied for first place. Here is what they told us. What the Data Showed The capabilities on the board came from Bright Wire's PLUS Leadership Framework, a proprietary model built to define what effective leadership looks like across every level of an organization and is organized across four dimensions: Courageous Coach-Like Disciplined for Results and Relational The results below reflect the capabilities HR professionals believe matter most. 

The Business Case for Sleep: What HR Professionals Need to Know

By Jessica Jaithoo • July 9, 2026
Author: Robin Daultani Mental health support. Fitness benefits. Stress management resources. Workplace wellness programs have evolved significantly over the past decade. Yet one foundational pillar of employee health and performance remains conspicuously absent from most wellness strategies: sleep. The cost of this gap is staggering. A landmark RAND Corporation study¹ found that insufficient sleep costs the Canadian economy up to $21.4 billion annually, through a combination of absenteeism and reduced productivity. A Gallup study² reinforced this finding, showing that poor sleepers report more than double the rate of unplanned absences compared to other workers. And a 2026 Wellhub study³ found that 83% of employees identify poor sleep as a contributing factor to burnout, a figure that demands attention when nearly nine in ten employees report burnout symptoms annually. Consider what this looks like in practice. A team member who slept poorly scrolls through emails at 7am already feeling behind. By mid-morning, a decision that should take minutes stretches into a 45-minute deliberation. After lunch, focus drops sharply, not because of the workload, but because the brain is running on insufficient rest. By 3pm, a second coffee masks the fatigue but does nothing for the impaired judgment underneath. Research shows that after 17 hours of continuous wakefulness, the equivalent of a normal waking day ending at 11pm, cognitive impairment matches that of someone who is legally intoxicated⁴. This is not an unusual day. For many employees, this is every day. Sleep rarely appears on the wellness agenda, leaving a significant and measurable performance gap unaddressed. The reason is partly cultural. Sleep is still widely perceived as a personal responsibility. But the research suggests otherwise: sleep is not a personal indulgence. It is a performance lever that affects every metric HR professionals are already tracking: productivity, absenteeism, burnout, and retention. The same RAND study¹ that quantified the cost of insufficient sleep also found the flipside: if Canadians who sleep under six hours started sleeping just one hour more per night, it could add $12 billion to the national economy. The returns are not theoretical. They are measurable, achievable, and waiting to be captured. The good news is that addressing sleep does not require a major overhaul of existing wellness programs. Organizations can start by simply putting sleep on the wellness agenda. Most workplace wellness surveys ask about stress, mental health, and physical activity. Adding questions about sleep quality or duration to existing wellness assessments can provide baseline data to identify and measure the scope of the issue within their workforce. Leaders and managers who openly prioritize rest and recovery give permission for the rest of the organization to do the same. Small cultural shifts like discouraging late-night emails or respecting boundaries around after-hours communication can quietly improve sleep conditions across an entire team. None of these require a budget. They require intentional inclusion. Now consider what becomes possible. A team member, after two weeks of consistent, quality sleep, arrives at work already focused. The mid-morning decision is made in minutes. The afternoon dip is manageable, not debilitating. The second coffee becomes optional, not essential. Nothing else about their workload or responsibilities has changed. They show up more empathetic and more present for their customers, peers, and family. The only difference is how well they slept. The performance gap between these two versions of the same employee is not marginal. It is the difference between surviving and thriving. The question for HR professionals is no longer whether sleep affects organizational performance. The research has answered that definitively. The question is whether sleep has earned a place in their wellness strategy. And if not, what that gap is quietly costing their organization.
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