Psychological Safety 101

Mar 1

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety refers to the shared belief that a team or workgroup is conducive to interpersonal risk taking. This means that you won’t be penalized by your boss or colleagues for:

Admitting mistakes
Asking tough questions
Raising concerns and challenging the status quo
Offering new ideas and perspectives
Expressing vulnerability
Asking for support and friendship

If you are looking for a deep-dive into the concept of psychological safety and the research behind it, I recommend the book “The Fearless Organization” by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson. I had the privilege of studying under Dr. Edmondson during my doctoral program. You can see us discussing our mutual interest in psychological safety in this video.

Why does it matter?

Psychological safety is a critical driver of innovation and team effectiveness. For example, a four-year data analytics project at Google identified psychological safety as the single most important determinant of team success. In addition, companies seeking to embrace DEI initiatives have begun to recognize the tight connection between psychological safety and inclusion. A recent study by Bresman and Edmondson found that pharmaceutical teams at multiple companies were more successful if they had both diverse membership and psychological safety.

I have been studying psychological safety for decades in my own research, particularly examining the role it plays in building social support and relationships at work. Reaching out to a coworker to build a friendship or to seek support involves vulnerability. We’re afraid of being rejected or exploited. If the culture includes psychological safety, those risks will be reduced and we will be more likely to make that first move or to respond openly to someone who approaches us.

How do we know if we have it?

To measure psychological safety, there are a variety of short survey tools available. The original scale was published in this article. In my research, I ask people to rate their agreement with statements such as:

Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues
If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you (reverse-score)
It is easy to ask other members of this team for help
People on this team sometimes reject others for being different (reverse-score)
My team environment is not a safe space to speak up (reverse-score)

I recommend asking 5-7 questions like this to get a fuller sense of people’s level of psychological safety. After reverse-scoring any questions written in the opposite direction, simply take the average rating to get a baseline of where your team stands.

Moreover, it is important to collect qualitative data to understand not just the level of psychological safety that exists, but why. You want to capture the specific behaviors and conditions that increase or decrease your employees’ sense of safety. Those insights will tell you what is going on — and what needs to change.

I recommend adding open-ended questions to surveys as well as conducting interviews and focus groups to gather that data. For example, you might ask questions like, “Can you tell me about a time when you didn’t speak up at work and wish you had? Why?”, “What types of team meetings or interactions make you feel more/less psychologically safe?” and “What does your manager do to encourage and reward you for speaking up?”. In my experience, the answers to questions like these generate new ways of understanding behavior and the environment at work.

How do we encourage psychological safety?

Psychological safety takes intentional effort. It doesn’t happen naturally because we humans are naturally risk-averse. We want to protect our careers and our reputations. So, the first thing to know is that if you have not been actively cultivating psychological safety, your team probably doesn’t have too much of it. This is a case where no news is not good news — if people are not speaking up on your team, that doesn’t mean they don’t have something to say. They just may not feel safe saying it. Essentially, a lack of safety is silent.

Moreover, some practices that sound good on paper may actually have a negative effect when enacted in the workplace. For example, if you ask for feedback on anonymous surveys, you are implicitly telling employees it is not safe to “go on the record” with how they feel. Similarly, if you have Town Halls or listening tours where you collect input but nothing changes afterward, then you are telling people their problems don’t matter or their ideas don’t have merit. As Detert and Burris note, the two main reasons people don’t speak up are (1) fear and (2) futility. You want to address both concerns up front.

Creating psychological safety isn’t easy. It requires behaving in a way that may feel quite unnatural at first. It also requires a significant investment of time, energy, and resources to set up the conditions for success. As you contemplate how to get started, make sure to address these three core questions:

What’s the rationale? It is critical to establish a compelling rationale for people to speak up. If employees are not clear on the benefits, they won’t be willing to take on the potential costs. Clarify why you need people to contribute their ideas, admit their mistakes, and so on. What is the business case for doing so? Explain how the organization/team/customers will benefit from their input. Give case examples and testimonials to help sell them. Make sure to also explain what’s in it for employees themselves (e.g., new skills, career growth). Often, the gains are presented at the team and organizational level but the pains are experienced at the individual level. Look for individualized rewards and incentives to motivate employees to speak up.
What’s the process? It is equally important to establish how people can best provide their input. Don’t make them guess at whether to email, direct message, call a meeting, stop by the office, fill out a survey, draft a white paper, ask for a 1-on-1, etc. Remember, people are busy. Set up communication channels and routines that make it easy to provide the input you seek. Once you establish the channels, reinforce their availability repeatedly. It may take time for people to try out the new structures and get used to providing their input that way.
What’s the consequence? Don’t make their efforts go to waste. Before asking for employees to speak up, make sure there are clear processes in place to receive, learn from, and use that input. Make it a closed-loop system so people can see what happens next before they even offer up something to you. This does not mean every piece of input will need to be activated. Yet people do need to feel their input mattered, that it was heard and valued. So make sure to follow up with acknowledgement and appreciation. Provide those positive consequences, even just a sincere thank you. In addition, be vigilant to root out any negative consequences (e.g., career penalties, snarky comments) as much as possible. Even one person’s eye roll in a meeting can have a chilling effect on the psychological safety of the group.

For best results, what else is needed?

Organizations need to cultivate psychological safety and personal accountability to achieve ideal outcomes. This means every member of the team should feel obligated to deliver the best work possible and to communicate in a respectful and constructive manner. Otherwise, people end up in the “comfort zone,” which is safe but anemic in a work context. Feeling comfortable is not going to drive innovation, inclusion, and other aspects of high performance.

If people feel both safety and accountability, the “learning zone” emerges. That’s where employees and organizations achieve their full potential. In the learning zone, there is electricity in the air. People are so committed to their goals — and to each other — that they seek every opportunity to improve. They share all their inputs, mistakes, and ideas so that the team can learn and grow in real time.

Psychological safety isn’t an excuse to sit back, it is the chance to step forward. When everyone contributes fully to collaborative work, the experience is exhilarating.

Resource list:

Bresman, H., & Edmondson, A. (2022), “Research: To Excel, Diverse Teams Need Psychological Safety,” Harvard Business Review

Chugh, D. (2020), “Making Meetings More Inclusive.” Dear Good People

Coutifaris, C. G. V., & Grant, A. M. (2022), “Taking Your Team Behind the Curtain: The Effects of Leader Feedback-Sharing and Feedback-Seeking on Team Psychological Safety,” Organization Science

Detert, J., & Burris, E. (2016), “Can Your Employees Really Speak Freely?” Harvard Business Review

Duhigg, C. (2016), "What Google Learned From Its Quest To Build the Perfect Team," New York Times

Edmondson, A. (2019), “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth,” John Wiley & Sons

Edmondson, A. (2008), “The Competitive Imperative of Learning,” Harvard Business Review

Edmonson, A. (1999), “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly

Grant, A. (2021), “Is it Safe to Speak Up at Work?”WorkLife podcast

Hadley, C. N. (2021), “Employees Are Lonelier Than Ever. Here’s How Employers Can Help” Harvard Business Review

Hadley, C., & Edmondson, A. (2021), The Real Value of Psychological Safety: Connie Hadley and Amy Edmondson. YouTube