By: Morgane Tanguy, UX Designer and Joe Triccas, Product Manager at This is Milk ​

The Larder is a charity that helps people who are neurodiverse and/or come from a disadvantaged background to learn skills required to get a job in the hospitality sector – from preparation for an interview to making coffee. 

Students learn through practice and are exposed to real-life experiences through placements. Their courses are personalised and tailored to fit the students' needs. The Larder fights to address poverty and hunger issues – for example feeding students. 

The Larder partners with 80 businesses across the UK and aims to have 50 businesses in Midlothian alone. We spent 2 hours with them to understand their training experiences and approaches with neurodivergent and disadvantaged people to improve the trainers' experiences on our product ‘Neve’.  

By: Morgane Tanguy, UX Designer at This is Milk

Once a year, BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) organises the ‘Digital Day’. A day where professionals working in digital and technology go back to school, to spend a day with pupils in a school they’ve been matched with. 
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This year, one of my colleagues and I went to a school. It was the first time I was going back to school, since I left. 

We started the day by talking about the digital industry, presented how to respond to a brief and put the pupils in the shoes of people working in a creative agency. The problem they had to solve was the following: “How can digital play a part in improving these experiences, tools, and services to educate customers on sustainability, and make fashion kinder to our planet for you, and for future generations?” for the company Primark.

One of the key elements of building success in your team is for every single member to feel psychologically safe. 

Results from an ambitious internal research project undertaken by Google in 2012 showed that the most important dynamic of effective teams was the existence of psychological safety.

First let’s remind ourselves that psychological safety refers to the belief that you can speak up and express yourself without having to fear negative consequences.

In a business team context this has been best defined by Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. 

Google’s ambitious research project to determine what made the perfect team was called ‘Project Aristotle’, paying tribute to philosopher Aristotle’s famous quote stating that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

The researchers found that the main characteristic of successful teams was, you guessed it, psychological safety. 

If you want your team members to thrive, they must feel safe and secure to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. 

Here are nine reasons why you should create a psychologically safe working environment:

1. Increases positive employee engagement
2. Unlocks the benefits of inclusion and diversity in teams
3. Supports mental health
4. Facilitates a strong feedback culture
5. Improves how team members learn from feedback and mistakes
6. Fosters creativity and innovation
7. Improves employee retention
8. Boosts employer branding and talent attraction
9. Attracts brand awareness