People enjoy working at City Digital – something we know from the employee wellbeing surveys we have conducted regularly over the years. But a positive workplace culture doesn’t happen automatically, nor should it ever be taken for granted. That’s why, in early summer 2024, we decided to take part in Remote Team Builder’s six-month psychological safety training programme.
Psychological safety means being able to be yourself at work, voice your opinions, make mistakes and learn without fear.
Commitment from the Very Beginning
From the outset, our approach was simple: we would either commit to the programme properly or not do it at all. The aim of the kick-off lecture and workshop held in June was to inspire teams across the group to participate in the training every week for six months.
After the session, Remote Team Builder coach Juho Nenonen conducted an anonymous survey to find out whether participants were genuinely ready to commit to the programme. If fewer than 90% were willing to participate, the training would not go ahead. At City Digital, however, more than 95% wanted to take part.
Learning Moments, Discussions and Insights
The training resumed after the summer holiday season in August and continued for six months, until March 2025. Following the opening lecture and the ground rules we established together, the most important part of the programme was the weekly learning modules. These themed sessions took around 10 minutes to complete and were designed to be easily accessible on a phone – even over a cup of coffee.
The topics covered included how to give and ask for feedback, how to embrace differences, and what makes a good apology. At City Digital, we developed our own ways of working through the themes: first, participants discussed the content with a partner, and then we continued the conversation together in our weekly meetings. Partners rotated both within individual teams and across team boundaries.
What Did We Take Away from the Training?
At the beginning and end of the programme, participants completed a survey measuring different aspects of psychological safety. City Digital’s starting point was already strong compared with Remote Team Builder’s benchmarks, but the results improved even further. In some areas, we even achieved some of the best results in Remote Team Builder’s measurement history.
What mattered especially was how much discussion the programme sparked in our everyday work: small moments of realisation, new insights and, at times, deeper reflection on both our own behaviour and the dynamics within our teams.
The programme concluded in spring 2025, with each participant setting a personal development goal. While psychological safety is something that is built collectively within a group, an essential part of it is each individual’s commitment to personal growth and taking responsibility for their own role in the work community.
Finally
Psychological safety isn’t something you achieve once and then consider finished. That’s why regularly taking the time to reflect on these themes is something we can wholeheartedly recommend to other workplaces as well – even when (and perhaps especially when) there is no crisis to solve.
If you’d like to learn more about what City Digital is like as a workplace, take a look at our culture and careers pages. We always publish our open positions on LinkedIn – follow us to stay up to date!