Psychological safety is becoming widely known as a large benefit to companies. But the question comes as to whether your company has psychological safety - If it does, what level of psychological safety exists within the organisation and how effectively is it working for the company? To discover the answers to those questions, it is important to understand the means of measuring psychological safety This way, if you were looking to continue building or improving the level of psychological safety within your company you’ll know where to invest your time and effort.

What is psychological safety?

As defined by the Center for Creative Leadership, psychological safety at work is when employees have the belief that they won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up about their ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. As Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School explains,

“It’s a shared belief that the environment is conducive to interpersonal risks like asking for help or admitting a mistake or criticising a project and that can be challenging to so this sort of the sense that this is a special place where that kind of activity is okay.”

Some examples of psychological safety might be: 

• An employee feels a policy is discriminative and brings it up to their manager.

• An associate believes that adding a new tech will speed up a process and suggests it in the next department meeting.

• A team member makes a mistake, and they are not ridiculed for it.

This isn’t to say that people will be nice or soft or applause for what others have to say. Psychological safety is a description of the climate or the environment of the organisation where it is energised and productive.

Make no mistake, what it is not:

• Is an excuse to whine

• A reason to slack off

To create highly effective teams, organisations have to enable two things:

• High performance standards: through training, coaching, clarity about goals etc.

• Psychological safety: so that people don’t hold back and instead drive innovation 

These two elements are connected, and their relationship can be better understood using the following model created by Amy:

Let’s talk through the four zones:

1. Apathy Zone. People show up to work but aren’t particularly bothered. They might be prone to procrastination, they’re typically disengaged, and they don’t exert unnecessary effort collaborating with colleagues.

2. Comfort Zone. People generally enjoy working with each other, but they’re not challenged by the work they do. They don’t seek stretch assignments, harder tasks or innovate particularly.

3. Anxiety Zone. An unfortunately common zone, employees feel unable to speak up and simultaneously are buried under a mountain of work that feels insurmountable.

4. Learning Zone. The work is challenging, complex and satisfying. People collaborate and learn from each other, and the organisation is able to excel in an uncertain environment.

How can you measure psychological safety at work?

People in HR roles or people analytics teams should be sure they have the proper training and skills to be able to take a data driven, business focus and experience led approach when measuring the psychological safety of the organisation.

The first key is to keep your finger on the psychological safety of your workplace. Do check-ins before meetings. Psychological safety can be lost quickly if a new dynamic happens such as a promotion of an inadequate leader, shift in teams or a toxic new hire. Delivering pulse surveys with important questions will keep you in the know.

Ask the hard questions from employees and team members. Use surveys to collect and analyse the data. Depending on the answers of your employees will determine the level of psychological safety at your organisation. Some questions to ask might be:

• Do they feel that their mistakes are held against them – if they state that they are punished for errors, big or small, there is a likelihood of poor psychological safety. Here, also evaluating performance reviews can give you a clear indication on how mistakes are handled.

• Are there occurrences of team members undermining or sabotaging other team members. If you find there are more than one speaking out about poor teamwork, there is a likelihood of psychological safety in jeopardy.

• When they need help, do they feel comfortable to ask – because if they feel they may be ridiculed for reaching out for assistance, they won’t, and productivity can suffer. Look into project failures and see if it was due to lack of support.

Also note, they may be in fear of retaliation if they speak up even in psychological safety surveys. Here, leaders again need to be the example and communicate the safety of giving needed information to make company improvements.

What you may also want to consider, is looking at the variances within the organisation. This is deeply meaningful and can give better insight than surveys alone. Looking into why some sales teams are more productive than another sales teams. Could it be because they have stronger psychological safety? If so, it might be wise to adapt their ways of doing things

One thing to remember, you can’t measure the success you never had. When thinking about psychological safety in your organisation, if it is something you did not put full energy into creating, it will be difficult in the beginning to gauge it.

Why is psychological safety important?

If employees fear being ridiculed or belittled or just punished for saying something or doing something wrong, employees are less likely to speak up when they have an idea, see a potential improvement, or have made an error. Because of this employers are at a loss.

When employers put in the energy and promote psychological safety, they become more competitive in the marketplace and see substantial growth. Companies with high psychological safety find:

• More innovation – when employees can’t speak up, new opportunities for real change are missed. Innovation happens when ideas that were not thought of before are explored and makes processes faster or procedures more efficient 

• Quicker response time – when problems are caught sooner by employees free to point out concerns so that action can be taken sooner before the problem become bigger. From healthy psychological safety, companies see lower safety issues, lower litigation issues, lower customer dissatisfaction and higher profits.

• Better team effectiveness – when there is true psychological safety within teams, most importantly there is a high sense of belonging and inclusion among members. Teams are freer to brainstorm and work together knowing that what they say will not have negative repercussions. Lastly, there is less conflict because teams can speak freely of any issues they may have and feel the issues will be taken seriously and handle promptly.

Steps you can take to build greater psychological safety

First steps to building greater psychological safety is for leadership to communicate clearly with everyone in the organisation and within teams the benefit that psychological safety provides for everyone and why it is important. 

Once employees know that not only can they speak up, but should speak up, leaders need to be the example, asking for and encouraging their associates to let them know when there is a concern. They should also challenge their employees and ask the hard questions. Encourage a learning environment. Make the culture where failures are not just anticipated but mistake can be evaluated and learned from.

And even though some suggestions or problems that come their way by associates and teams may be troublesome, leaders need to stay receptive and listen carefully before making any harmful comments. A negative reaction can take psychological safety progress back several steps.

Keep in mind too, that if there are occurrences of someone disrupting the psychological safety within the organisation, there needs to be admittance of the issue and tough repercussions for the bad behaviour.

What does psychological safety look like in a hybrid work environment

Performing the steps listed above do help with hybrid work environment as well, but it is important to note hybrid work environments comes with some unique challenges because of its very nature and must be approached differently.

Due to how hybrid work environments are set up, during meetings there can be just a few people involved or a large gathering. Because there are several screens for people to contend with and lag time, people feel less able or inclined to pipe in with ideas as they would if they were across each other at a conference table. Here, utilizing tools such as polls or cold calls encourages people to put in their honest opinions.

Also, employees in a remote work location are striving with a work/life balance that at time collides with each other. Hybrid employees will at time need to reveal details of their lives that they normally would not bring to the office. Here, employers should be aware of the situation employees are in and not have them feel excluded from the team due to confessions they are forced to make, such as their parent is ill or their kids are in the next room.

Key Takeaway

When employees feel they are not free to speak up, they won’t. Psychological safety helps guarantee that when staff members see an improvement opportunity or have a company concern, they are confident that even if they are wrong, they can safety discuss it with managers and co-workers without having to worry that down the road there will be unwanted consequences.

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