What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological Safety is considered a team characteristic because the extent to which employees feel psychologically safe is primarily determined by the team environment. Thus, it is possible that the same employee will feel safe on one team, but unsafe on another team. The part of the team environment that affects feelings of Psychological Safety is the behavior and attitudes of team members, including both leader and non-leader members. More accurately, it is the employee’s expectations about how other members of their team will react to them engaging in certain kinds of behaviors that determines how safe they feel.

These behaviors include things like knowledge and idea sharing, reporting one’s own and others’ mistakes, giving critical feedback when it is needed, and expressing the authentic and diverse aspects of one’s self. These are behaviors that companies want their employees to engage in because research has shown that they result in valuable benefits. Specifically, they result in enhanced team performance, for example greater innovation and problem-solving. Company benefits include reduced turnover and greater revenue and sales growth. And employees enjoy enhanced well-being, such as less stress and greater job satisfaction.

Despite all these benefits, employees often feel anxious or fearful to engage in these behaviors because they perceive them to be ‘risky’. Specifically, they view engagement in these behaviors as putting them at risk of having their teammates react in a negative way. Negative reactions can include those that are scary, hurtful, or humiliating; for example, expressing anger, yelling, teasing and sarcasm, or being dismissive and ignoring. Employees also fear being exposed to negative consequences that can arise because these behaviors lead their teammates’ to form an unjustified negative opinion about the employee’s capabilities or qualities, or to feel spiteful and want to get revenge. Such negative consequences can include being given a bad evaluation, denied promotion or desirable roles, having bonuses or pay docked, and even fired.

The anxiety and fear caused by this perceived risk is detrimental to performance because it causes employees to avoid engaging in these beneficial behaviors. In cases where these behaviors cannot be avoided, employees will dedicate their limited time and energy to planning and preparing for how to execute the behavior without triggering their teammates’ negative reactions. Furthermore, there is ample evidence demonstrating how prolonged states of anxiety and stress interfere with the level of cognitive functioning that is required for optimal performance. Finally, when employees feel fearful and disrespected whenever they go to work, it is inevitable that they will end up feeling unmotivated, unengaged, and uncommitted to their job.

Psychological Safety works by removing this sense of risk and feelings of fear. When a team is psychologically safe, employees do not expect their engagement in these behaviors will lead to negative consequences. In fact, on a team with high Psychological Safety, employees will expect their teammates to have positive reactions, such as by thanking and rewarding them for sharing ideas or pointing out problems with others’ work. Thus, Psychological Safety leads to enhanced performance by unlocking employees’ willingness to engage in beneficial behaviors, allowing employees to allocate valuable time and energy to productive tasks instead of strategizing how to minimize risks, thereby reducing emotions that degrade cognitive performance and making employees feel valued and energized while at work.

As mentioned, the primary influences on Psychological Safety come from the team environment. Thus, changes within the team should be the beginning and emphasis of any Psychological Safety intervention. This is compared with organization-level efforts (such as HR-led events that the whole company is invited to) or dyadic-level efforts (such as making changes to individual manager-supervisee relationships). However, this does not mean that organization and dyadic interventions are not valuable or should be ignored—in fact, research has shown the best outcomes happen when there are changes made at every level of the organization.

A team-level intervention also means that all team members need to be actively participating. Thus, all members of the team should feel that their participation in the intervention process is invited and valued. There should be collaborative decision making, transparency, and open sharing of information and assessment results, and a non-defensive willingness to reflect upon the behavior and attitudes of all team members. This is compared to efforts in which only the team leader makes changes and decisions. Though research has shown that, typically, the team leader has a bigger effect on Psychological Safety than other members of the team, it is also well demonstrated that all members of the team have significant influence and thus need to be involved. Furthermore, it is not always the team leader who is the primary cause of low Psychological Safety; in research performed by Attuned, 19% of employee participants reported that a non-leader team member was the person with whom they felt the least safe.

The focus of a Psychological Safety intervention is on establishing new team norms regarding team members’ attitudes and behaviors. The reason norms are the focus of intervention efforts is because they are the mechanism by which employees will form new, positive expectations about how their teammates will react to them engaging in the beneficial behaviors previously described, thus resulting in them feeling psychologically safe. For example, when employees see their team leader expressing thanks, instead of anger, in response to mistakes, they will begin to expect such positive responses and thus start to feel safe to report their mistakes. This does not mean that, for example, every idea that an employee shares is celebrated and implemented. Instead, it means that if an employee shares a bad idea, they will be thanked for their willingness to share the idea and not teased or judged. In fact, the most effective norms will increase the likelihood that team members will reject bad ideas—because they will not expect the sharer to have an angry or spiteful reaction to their rejection; instead they may expect their rejection to become a springboard into a constructive conversation about how to alter the idea to make it viable.

A review of the scientific literature on Psychological Safety identified five classes of intervention efforts that can be used to produce new expectation-altering norms. These include:

(1) Awareness and Encouragement of New Attitudes

These types of interventions are usually recommended as a starting point for teams and companies. First, it is recommended that all levels of the organization are vocal and explicit about the new commitment to Psychological Safety; for example, by sending out letters and factsheets, and hosting discussions or presentations. There should be enthusiastic encouragement, consistent modeling, and rewarding of employees who engage in behaviors like being flexible and offering peer-to-peer support. There should be new framing of values, for example, by characterizing employees of all statuses as equals, and diversity and differences as strengths. There should be positive attitudes adopted towards behaviors typically framed as negative, like speaking up and expressing disagreement, and mistakes should be normalized as inevitable parts of learning. It is especially important for employees to see these new attitudes consistently demonstrated by those in higher status positions.

(2) Education and Training

Education and training efforts begin by teaching team members about Psychological Safety and its value. There should also be training in the skills required for a psychologically safe team, such as: assertive communication, giving feedback, providing emotional support, identifying and reporting mistakes, and awareness of personal biases. This can also include job role training to increase employee’s confidence in their knowledge, enhance clarity of job roles, and reduce the occurrence of serious errors that require punitive action.

(3) New Approaches to Communication and Interaction

New types of interactions can be encouraged, especially communicating the importance and value of collaboration and teamwork, and promoting the establishment of personal relationships and friendly interaction styles. Meetings should be characterized by active listening, and all team members should be encouraged to contribute and be given equal speaking time. Communication should be open, honest, and transparent. It should also be respectful and calm with an emphasis on using positive language. Being calm and respectful is especially important when team members report mistakes, in which case the member should be thanked for their report, and the focus is on solutions rather than blame. Similarly, a calm and gracious response should be given when members share concerns or challenge each other.

(4) Team-based Activities

Some examples of team-based activities include: collective, team-based decision making about team norms; creating opportunities for members to give each other feedback; open discussion of mistakes and failures with a focus on learning from them; the development of peer-support systems, such as formal and informal mentoring relationships; and the scheduling of unstructured, non-work-focused interaction time to facilitate the formation of personal relationships.

(5) Policy-based Changes

Finally, policy-based methods are those that will be carried out primarily at the organization level or by team leaders. These efforts can include creating a code of conduct that clarifies rules, expressly protects against discrimination, and enforces professional ethics. Employee benefits could be expanded to signal a valuing of employees’ wellbeing, such as by offering more lenient policies towards taking time off for self-care. Evaluation approaches should be frequent, transparent, accurate, proportional, and correctable. Leadership practices should be broad; specifically, encouraging the participation of all team members, having multiple leaders instead of one, practicing collective decision making of things like team goals and schedules, and making it okay for members to question or challenge higher-status members. The mistake-reporting process should be made clearer, emphasize collective responses to mistakes, and when well-intentioned mistakes occur, they should not be punished or allowed to affect the employee’s evaluation—in fact, it is frequently suggested that employees who promptly report mistakes should be rewarded for their reporting.