Prioritizing Psychological Safety

Rosemarie Radke, Director of Registries Administration & Accountability at Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction

First and foremost, we have to provide a safe and healthy workplace, which means supporting both physical and psychological well-being. We always like to identify and control risks through general hazard assessments, ensuring clear escalation pathways. If a situation arises, we want people to know there’s an easy way to remove themselves from it. This includes training employees for real-world situations and emphasizing incident reporting and response.

There’s not enough said about the emotional labor of dealing with difficult customer interactions, like when you have to interact with someone who may be frustrated with the process or doesn’t understand the policies. When leaders acknowledge that these moments happen and allow employees to step away and take a moment, it’s important.

I think one way to create a psychologically safe environment, which might seem a little strange, is through humor, which is very important in the workplace.

I’m quite passionate about psychological safety, which means that, within a team, people believe it’s OK to speak up, take interpersonal risks and be vulnerable without fearing negative consequences. (I say this because it doesn’t mean we will always feel comfortable 100% of the time.)

When leaders create a framework for psychologically safe environments, it allows employees to come forward and feel safe if they’ve made a mistake or if they see something happening that’s not appropriate. A psychologically safe environment provides an avenue to ensure accountability
and continuous improvement.

I’ve been in government for over 20 years, and this wasn’t discussed when I started. But I’m glad to see that businesses and government have evolved for the better and are now ensuring employees have safe environments.

I think one way to create a psychologically safe environment, which might seem a little strange, is through humor, which is very important in the workplace. Humor shows you can be vulnerable, and it creates levity, which can shift your whole environment. Adding and encouraging levity can be as simple as respectfully sending a fun email or making light of yourself. I think all of that creates a lot of psychological safety.

The Pike Place Market is a famous fish market in Seattle. They started throwing fish around one day, which eventually drew national attention. Now, people come from all over the world to watch them have fun at work. I like that concept because it adds levity—and not just for the people working there. The customers who watch this feel good afterward, too. Adding levity has this ripple effect.

Over the years, especially since COVID, we have experienced a lot of fear, which generates uncertainty and anger. All of this gets exacerbated with social media. But I like to think of us as a pendulum. As we acknowledge and address what’s happening, I hope the pendulum will swing the other way.

Team Effort

Ryan Ridout, Director of the Bureau of Enforcement, Auditing and Training within the Motor Vehicle Division at the Iowa Department of Transportation

Effective policies start with having a threat assessment team. In 2024, we had seven threat assessment instances. In 2025, we had 19. Before the end of January, we already had five. These situations are not slowing down, and we need to make sure we’re providing our employees with the tools they need to handle them.

We launched our threat assessment team a few years ago in Iowa because we were all over the board on how we were responding. Darcy Doty [vice president of MVA Operations & Customer Experience at AAMVA] was in Iowa at the time, and we worked together to put the team together, featuring a diverse skill set from leaders, including our director of HR, director of law enforcement and director of all our driver’s license service centers.

We’ve had employees reach out to the threat assessment team because a customer came in, the team identified some weird behaviors or agitation and they just weren’t sure how to respond. The threat assessment team can document the incident and provide guidance and a plan if that person should return. When a person who was previously aggressive returned a few days later, we were better prepared to deal with that situation.

We’ve put together a wide-ranging working group in Iowa to talk through these issues, and I believe our employees appreciate knowing we take their concerns seriously.

We’ve really seen success with that team: We’re responding more consistently and appropriately, and we’re giving our employees resources to better prepare for those situations.

Effective policies also include training in de-escalation and crisis management. We train our employees on what we call “CARE” principles: consistent, accountable, responsive and engaging. Unfortunately, we’re continuing to experience some difficult situations at our service centers, including altercations, and our folks are dealing with them. Having a dedicated safe space for our employees is important.

We recently reached out to the United States Department of Homeland Security to do a facilities assessment of our 18 service center locations, and they have been wonderful and more than willing to help.

We’re also trying to do a better job of incident reporting and sharing information across all teams to ensure incidents at any of our service centers are communicated to other locations. I think there’s an opportunity for us to continue building on that to make sure we’re documenting these situations.

The last piece is partnering with law enforcement. Invite local police departments into your space and have them conduct a walk-through so they understand the layout. We’ve even provided blueprints of a DMV space. Having that relationship and encouraging staff to engage with law enforcement outside of critical situations helps build trust and improve response time.

But I don’t want our employees to go directly to law enforcement without relying on their own training. We want them to build a skill set to handle these situations: When is the right time to de-escalate? When is the right time to remove yourself?

We’re continuing to think about the actions that make employees safer. We currently have one or two panic buttons in our service centers. Going forward, we’re going to provide panic buttons that are mobile and can be worn on an employee’s belt loop, or something of that nature, so it can be accessed by each individual employee.

Some of our employees have also expressed that a particular design isn’t the best from a security or safety perspective, such as the physical layout or the height of the counters. For instance, we’ve made a change to the retesting area for customers. Previously, there wasn’t a clear exit. Now we’ve set up that area so employees do have a direct exit if a situation arises.

We’ve put together a wide-ranging working group in Iowa to talk through these issues, and I believe our employees appreciate knowing we take their concerns seriously. The changes that are coming will make them—and the facility—safer moving forward.

Quick Relaxation Technique

Radke: I have been a yoga instructor for over a decade, and one of my passions is mindful breathing. There are many, many studies on the topic, and some people may even be familiar with James Nestor’s book, “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art,” which was on The New York Times bestseller list.

Breathing better reduces stress by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. For example, slow, nasal and rhythmic breathing can lower your heart rate, reduce cortisol levels and calm the mind, making it a powerful, natural tool for managing anxiety and chronic stress—preparing you for meetings or dealing with stressful work situations.

There are many mindful breathing techniques for nearly every need, which are as varied as recipes in a cookbook. But one breathing exercise to quickly reduce stress is to breathe in through your nose for four counts and then exhale through your nose for eight counts. Do that 10 times, and notice how you feel after.