‘If you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it’

The Loop’s editor Ab Banerjee outlines how ViewsHub’s platform will empower teams in organizations to measure and improve their psychological safety, cognitive diversity, and growth mindset…

Our mission at ViewsHub is to empower every team in every organization to become high-performing, and as a consequence, boost productivity and profitability, enhance client service levels, break down organizational silos, improve cooperation, and dramatically enhance employee engagement.

In recent years, there has been much research into the enabling criteria for high performance, and three factors in particular have come to the fore:

• psychological safety
• cognitive diversity
• a growth mindset

At ViewsHub, we passionately believe that if you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it. So we have developed tools to enable every team and organization to measure and improve these three enabling factors and to determine, in real time, whether overall team performance has indeed improved.

It is our contention that, whilst these three factors are not sufficient for top team performance (we measure many other contributory factors), all three are necessary conditions in combination, and form the bedrock of high performance. Cognitively diverse teams will be sub-optimal if there isn’t the psychological safety to enable all team members to express their diverse approaches.

Psychological safety is, in and of itself, not sufficient to help teams to be open to new solutions to ever-changing problems or to be learning through effort and regular and comprehensive feedback on how to improve continually – demonstrating a growth mindset at a team-level.

Measuring each of these enabling conditions is essential to continuously improving overall team performance. It is not a one-off calculation – it needs to be monitored in real-time throughout the year. Measure, improve, repeat.

Measuring Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is the belief that it’s OK for team members to take risks, to express ideas and concerns and to admit mistakes, without fear of negative consequences. 

Teams with high psychological safety result in members feeling more engaged and motivated, leading to better decision-making and a more diverse range of perspectives being heard and considered. 

The ViewsHub Psychological Safety score is based on the aggregate perception of ‘trust’ levels within the team based on ratings from all team members, measured in real-time.

Measuring Cognitive Diversity

Cognitive diversity is the variety of ways people work, think, and interact with others. 

Teams work better when they are more cognitively diverse. Non-cognitively diverse teams can result in groupthink, with the loss of independent thinking and individual creativeness. 

The ViewsHub Cognitive Diversity score measures the spread of employees’ workplace traits within the team, based on the crowd-sourced views of how they are perceived by those they work with. The average across all companies is 0 – anything above that represents cognitive diversity above average.

Measuring a Growth Mindset

Growth mindset is the belief that continuous feedback is an opportunity to grow and improve. 

Teams with a growth mindset encourage feedback, embrace challenges, and ensure that every decision they make actively helps them to become better. 

The ViewsHub Growth Mindset proxy score is based on the team’s combined reaction to the feedback they have received, signalling their openness to change and improve.

Measuring Overall Team Performance

TeamScore is ViewsHub’s overall measure of a team’s effectiveness (scored out of five), combining ratings from team members, other teams internally and clients/suppliers externally. It encompasses a range of criteria tailored for each stakeholder group and captures in real-time the overall performance of any team.