Retrofitting Meetings for Psychological Safety

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of psychological safety in meetings, proposing an interdisciplinary approach to design tools that enhance participants' feeling of being listened to and motivated, thereby improving organizational productivity.

Contribution

It highlights the need for new meeting tools focused on psychological safety and discusses research opportunities and challenges in designing such tools.

Findings

Psychological safety is crucial for effective meetings.

Interdisciplinary approaches can improve meeting tools for safety.

Designing for safety involves sensing, modeling, and UI challenges.

Abstract

Meetings are the fuel of organizations' productivity. At times, however, they are perceived as wasteful vaccums that deplete employee morale and productivity. Current meeting tools, to a great extent, have simplified and augmented the ways meetings are conducted by enabling participants to ``get things done'' and experience a comfortable physical environment. However, an important yet less explored element of these tools' design space is that of psychological safety -- the extent to which participants feel listened to, or motivated to be part of a meeting. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach would benefit the creation of new tools designed for retrofitting meetings for psychological safety. This approach comes with not only research opportunities -- ranging from sensing to modeling to user interface design -- but also challenges -- ranging from privacy to workplace surveillance.