Improving psychological safety at work with only 36 questions

Do you ever feel like team building exercises are more about bonding with your best work buddies than actually building a team? You are not alone.

According to University of Sydney Associate Professor Julien Pollack, shared stories and experiences through team building exercises can help to build group cohesion.

Still, if you think about the last team building event you went to, you were more likely to spend the time with the colleagues you already liked.

“These are the people with whom you already share experiences,” he said.

“This kind of exercise tends to reinforce existing bonds, instead of creating new ones.  

“The people you really need to build relationships with are the people you don’t yet know well in the organisation, but most team building doesn’t directly facilitate this.” 

Psychological safety at work 

Associate Professor Pollack said psychological safety relied on being comfortable expressing your ideas without fear of censure – and this usually stemmed from familiarity with coworkers. 

“Here, leaders have a responsibility to create an environment where ideas are welcome,” he said. 

“That doesn’t mean you need to implement every idea, but it does mean you need to be very careful in how you respond to creative input. 

“Psychological safety is supported or undermined every time we react to others’ ideas, whether they come from our peers or subordinates. 

“Being comfortable with your colleagues and knowing them as people, not just by their organisational role, can support this.” 

Try getting personal 

So, if the commonly used team building exercises like trivia nights, raft building or scavenger hunts do not get us anywhere with colleagues, what actually works? 

Associate Professor Pollack and University of Sydney School of Project Management Associate Head of Research and Associate Professor Petr Matous embarked on a social network analysis, firstly identifying pairs of colleagues whose relationships were critical for the cohesion of the network and would benefit the group by being stronger. 

They then paired people across the group divide and let the pairs work through 36 questions – commonly known as the ‘36 questions to fall in love’. 

Questions such as: ‘Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?’ were asked first. 

Near the end of the session, they become more personal, such as: ‘When did you last cry in front of another person?’

“We needed a method that would help us strengthen the most critical links we found in social networks underpinning teams, and by that, prevent the whole network from falling apart,” Associate Professor Matous said. 

“Facilitated mutual self-disclosure is an old and tested way to improve relationships but it is more often applied in other settings. 

“Importantly, these questions have been used on independent pairs of individuals, such as married couples in different families, but not as a part of holistic network repair.” 

After the analysis, Associate Professor Pollack and Associate Professor Matous observed that the targeted relationships strengthened as expected.

“This created bridges across gaps in the network that were preventing it from functioning as one cohesive team,” Associate Professor Matous said. 

“The most direct impact was seen in terms of people starting to casually talk to each other, which trickled into an exchange of information instrumental to getting the job done – something that was lacking before.”

Three months after the team building exercise, Associate Professor Pollack said the social networks were remeasured. 

“We found the structure of the networks had substantially changed, significantly eroding the separation between the cliques,” he said. 

“We compared the relationships between the pairs of people who had gone through the exercise together and found their relationships – measured in terms of the quality and frequency of their communication – had improved significantly more than the relationships between people who hadn’t gone through the exercise together. 

“This means that a lot of the change in the network can be attributed to the team building exercise.” 

Are the 36 questions beneficial in every workplace? 

Before you reach for your desk partner and ask about their relationship with their mother, Associate Professor Matous said whenever the 36 questions were implemented, it was essential that no one felt pressured into sharing sensitive personal aspects of their lives, which they would prefer to keep separate from work.

“What is needed is a completely voluntary approach facilitated by independent organisers who have no power relationships over the participants and no conflicts of interest,” he said. 

Echoing this sentiment, Associate Professor Pollack said the method wasn’t suitable for all workplace situations. 

“This approach is best suited to a situation where the team members have worked together but have not had much of a chance to get to know each other,” he said. 

“This could involve divisions of an organisation that need to work together but don’t get much opportunity to interact. 

“This approach would also work effectively with distributed workforces such as on large virtual project teams or across portfolios of projects distributed across multiple sites.”