What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety at work is a climate that makes all team members feel secure to take risks. Your employees feel like they can speak up and share their ideas and concerns without being mocked or humiliated. They can ask questions or admit their mistakes and not be punished or experience retaliation. Dr. Amy Edmondson identified and defined the concept while conducting studies with clinical teams, but it can apply in any workplace situation.

Reasons to create a psychologically safe workplace

Why is psychological safety important? When your employees feel safe to take risks and try new things, you get more out of them. This can help your company grow and improve in many areas. Some benefits of a psychologically safe workplace include:

• Improved innovation: When employees know they can safely share what they’re thinking, they’re more likely to bring up their out-of-the-box ideas. Without psychological safety, those employees might hold their ideas in, and your company would never hear them.
• Better collaboration: This type of environment is often more inclusive and can encourage greater collaboration between employees since everyone feels equally able to share. This can make your team more efficient, and they can build off and enhance each other’s ideas.
• Greater employee happiness: How safe an employee feels overall in the workplace can have a major impact on their mental health. Focusing on helping employees feel safe taking risks can improve their job satisfaction and their overall well-being.
• Increased productivity: Your employees can get more done when they’re in a safe environment and don’t have to worry about negative consequences when they try something new.
• Support for DEI initiatives: Many companies have diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives they’re working on. A psychologically safe environment also helps those important qualities grow in your organization.
• Attracting new employees: When you make your employees feel safe in all ways, they’ll likely talk about it with other people, which might encourage these individuals to apply for open positions. Having larger numbers of applicants can help you find better employees.

What can interfere with psychological safety?

Anything that makes the environment feel too risky or not accepting can disrupt the psychological safety of your employees. Here are some examples:

• Unconscious biases
• Discrimination
• Lack of empathy
• Bullying or intimidation
• Failing to follow through on commitments
• Micromanaging
• Managers who don’t like to be challenged or aren’t open to feedback
• No clear communication channels or opportunities
• Little concern for employees beyond their productivity

How to tell if your employees feel psychologically safe

Observing your team can give you clues about how psychologically safe they feel. When a workplace is safe psychologically, you can see these signs:

• The open sharing of feedback and ideas
• No fear of asking questions or raising concerns
• Regular contributions from all team members, not just the loudest or most confident
• Willingness to admit mistakes
• Active solicitation of opinions from quiet team members
• Encouragement of teammates when sharing ideas

On the other hand, you might notice the following signs when people don’t feel safe:

• Blaming others or refusing to take responsibility for mistakes
• Gossiping or talking negatively about teammates
• No feedback or questions, even when you ask for them
• Little to no creativity
• Only a few contributors to conversations
• Eye rolling, laughing or other signs of mocking
• Low morale and high turnover
• Few challengers to the status quo

Psychological safety stages

Psychological safety falls into four stages. Each stage describes how safe and comfortable someone feels in an environment. With increasing comfort, they’re willing to take greater risks. Aiming to move all of your employees to stage four can give you the greatest results.

Stage 1: Inclusion

Starting with stage one, you’re helping your employees realize that they’re in a safe, accepting workplace. They feel like they belong and can show who they are—even what makes them unique. For true inclusion safety, employees shouldn’t feel like they have to hide things about themselves to fit in. The group has to accept them completely, quirks and all.

Stage 2: Learner

Stage two pushes the employee to ask questions, seek feedback and start experimenting. This allows them to grow as a learner and become more active in their participation instead of just being a bystander or a passive member of the team. This is also the stage where they realize it’s okay to make mistakes.

Stage 3: Contributor

When an employee reaches stage three, they know the workplace is safe enough to contribute the skills they have. They’re ready to make meaningful contributions to the team, which they know can make a difference for the company. This is the stage in which employees feel like contributing team members with fewer insecurities.

Stage 4: Challenger

At this stage, the person will challenge the status quo. They feel so safe in the environment that they’re willing to push for change and improvement, knowing that they won’t face negative consequences. This is when you get the greatest amount of innovation and creativity.

Strategies for psychological safety

All employees play a role in creating a psychologically safe environment at the office, and one employee who constantly mocks teammates can make everyone else feel unsafe. However, the leadership team sets the tone and heavily influences the company culture, which affects how safe employees feel. These strategies can help your team improve psychological safety within your organization.

Evaluate the environment

Look critically at the current culture, especially how it relates to working as teams, sharing ideas and running meetings. Consider what opportunities your employees have to share their ideas safely. Evaluate the ways you encourage employees to share and take risks as well as what usually happens when they do. This helps you determine how well you’re doing with psychological safety and how you can improve.

Ensure managers lead by example

Your managers should work on creating a more inclusive, safe environment with their teams. Ensure they’re handling ideas, suggestions, questions and criticism professionally without punishing, ridiculing or retaliating. If your managers laugh at unique ideas or give an employee an undesirable job duty after they raise concerns, you’re showing everyone else that those behaviors are acceptable and it fosters an unsafe environment. Managers who admit their mistakes show that messing up is allowed in your organization and it can be a learning opportunity.

Encourage questions and ideas

When leading meetings or working with teams, intentionally leave time for questions, concerns and ideas. It’s easy to get caught up in what you’re saying or expecting employees to jump in if they have something to say. However, some employees might need encouragement to speak up in this way. Ask if anyone has something to share and pause to give them time to work up their courage. Always inject those opportunities into interactions, even if some employees don’t talk initially. It might take them some time to feel comfortable.

Offer alternatives

Not everyone feels comfortable sharing an idea in front of a group or even aloud in front of another person. Everyone has preferences in their interactions, so offer several ways for employees to share their thoughts. When asking for feedback or questions, you might mention that employees can email you later, ask for a one-on-one conversation or use other communication methods available in the office, such as chat or collaboration tools.

Suspend judgment

When you’re brainstorming ideas or working through solutions to a problem, you want employees to throw out lots of ideas to see what sticks. Even if an idea sounds ridiculous or impossible, avoid dismissing it immediately. Let employees talk through their ideas without shutting them down before they’re finished. The thought could evolve as they say it out loud, or other employees might get new ideas from what they say. If you automatically shoot something down, other people are less likely to join the conversation for fear of being rejected, too.

Express gratitude

You won’t use all the ideas your employees give. However, you can show appreciation every time an individual takes the risk to share their ideas. A simple thank you when someone shares can help employees feel appreciated. This also shows them you noticed their risk-taking, which can encourage them to continue in the future.

Build trust

Employees need to have trust in their managers and coworkers to feel psychologically safe. Without trust, they don’t know what to expect from others. Ways to build trust in the workplace include:

• Avoiding blame when something goes wrong
• Providing the support your team needs
• Being transparent with open communication about things that happen at work
• Establishing clear expectations
• Getting to know your team and letting them get to know you
• Follow through on what you say you’ll do
• Be consistent with your actions and decisions
• Allow them to take ownership over projects
• Avoid micromanaging your employees

End harmful behaviors

The workplace can be a breeding ground for negativity, gossip and exclusion. Express a zero-tolerance policy for these and other behaviors that can disrupt the cohesion of your team. Such behaviors create division and may make some employees feel unsafe. For example, if a few employees form a clique, those outside that circle might feel excluded and be afraid to share.

Special considerations for remote work teams

You have less control over the work environment when your employees are remote. Team members often have less frequent communication, and there’s more room for miscommunication when you’re not in the same room. It can also be more difficult to see coworker interactions or notice when an employee isn’t feeling safe.

Here are some ways to help promote psychological safety when you have a remote team:

• Check in. Make it a point to regularly have one-on-one conference calls or video chats with your team members to get a better read on how they’re feeling.
• Make time for fun. You likely have video calls with your team, but don’t restrict those calls to work only. Having a little fun, using icebreakers or saving some time to chat can help build trust and camaraderie within the team.
• Include everyone on hybrid teams. If some of your employees work in the office and others work remotely, find ways to make everyone feel included. Your home-based employees might feel less connected than your office-based team members. Make an effort to do things as a team and keep your remote employees updated.
• Get to know your team personally. By learning more about your staff, you can build trust and understand how to get the most out of each person.
• Incorporate more technology. Having multiple ways to interact and stay in touch can improve psychological safety on remote teams.

Measuring psychological safety at work

After you implement strategies to improve psychological safety at work, measuring the changes helps you track your progress. You can do this in two ways: observing changes in your team members and asking them for feedback.

Make notes about how your employees act and the signs you see indicating whether or not they feel safe. Regularly observe them to see if you notice improvements. For example, perhaps more people are asking questions or sharing ideas at meetings than previously, or you might notice that your employees are actively seeking feedback instead of avoiding it.

To get feedback directly from your staff, create a survey relating to the different aspects of psychological safety. If you noticed particular areas of concern initially, include several related questions. Give employees a ranking system as well as a place to provide written feedback. By conducting these surveys regularly, you can see if things are improving and identify new concerns.