For professionals working in CACs to be in a position to help families feel safe and to recover from trauma, these professionals must feel safe themselves —both physically and psychologically. An organizational culture that promotes physical and psychological safety also enhances staff’s ability to absorb information and skills related to secondary traumatic stress (STS) and creates an environment that promotes staff well-being and resilience. Strong leadership support and well-trained supervisors who are able to enforce the norms of the safe and supportive culture are critical, as are the development and implementation of policies that create a safe and supportive environment for the organization. This domain will cover how to assess and to develop norms and policies within your organizational culture that are secondary trauma-informed.
Creating a safe and supportive culture includes:
- promoting physical safety for staff by ensuring that there are policies and protocols in place to protect staff from work-related primary trauma and dangerous situations by
- having strategies in place to ensure that the work environment is safe (e.g., proper lighting in and around the office, locks on exterior doors, working alarm systems) and work policies (e.g., requiring that multiple staff be in the office at any one time, conducting field work/home visits in pairs) and that there are other protective and preventative measures in place.
- creating a sense of individual psychological safety for staff by
- finding ways to decrease the frequency of trauma exposure and dosage when possible. Less trauma exposure has been shown to have some protective effects on staff, but there are also studies showing that having the chance to work through trauma exposure with clients is also protective and may decrease the impact of trauma dosage.1-3 Thus, staff who are working on the front end (forensic interviewers and investigators) may be impacted by the amount of trauma exposure in different ways than those providing longer-term support or therapeutic interventions.
- normalizing the impacts of working in a trauma-exposed environment on all individuals within the organization.4 Individual differences based on roles within the organization, current levels of trauma exposure, personal and cultural factors, etc. should be taken into account when acknowledging how STS manifests among staff.
- providing support to staff to mitigate the impact of trauma exposure. This includes promoting peer support, as mutual support practices have been shown to have a positive impact on staff in trauma-exposed workplaces.4-6
- focusing on decreasing any stigma related to acknowledging STS and normalizing that it is okay to ask for and receive help and support. Research has found that stigmatizing attitudes held by senior leaders prevent line staff from contacting supervisors to seek support.7
Differentiating between Individual and Organizational Psychological Safety
Throughout this domain, there will be references to two types of psychological safety: individual and organizational. The following provides additional explanation as to how they are differentiated and what they mean in the context of creating a safe and supportive culture.
- In the context of trauma-exposed organizations, psychological safety is about the degree to which an individual feels that the work itself is a threat to them. Trauma exposure, either direct or indirect, can threaten one’s sense of safety. If doing the work is activating their fight, flight, or freeze response, then this would be considered a lack of psychological safety. It is the work itself, not the organization, that creates this lack of psychological safety. However, there is still a role that the organization plays to support the individual (e.g., providing a caseload mix, opportunities to process, etc.). This will be referred to as individual psychological safety.
- In the context of the overall organization and MDT, psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception that they will not face humiliation for voicing their concerns or be punished for a mistake at work.8 It also means that an individual feels safe to express how they are being impacted by the work and to ask for help. To differentiate from individual psychological safety, this will be referred to as organizational psychological safety.