The psychological safety of your organization has a huge impact on how your employees will engage and contribute to the team's success. However, strengthening psychological safety requires a concerted effort from all team members.
In this article, we've gathered the knowledge you need to understand the concept, the history, the dynamics and the actions that can strengthen your psychological safety.
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety describes an environment where people feel comfortable talking openly about concerns, sharing ideas, asking questions and giving honest feedback. The level of psychological safety in a group indicates how willing participants are to contribute without the risk of being punished, exposed or sanctioned. Psychological safety is an important parameter for future success in your team.
Unlike trust, for example, psychological safety is defined in a room or a group of people gathered together to complete a task. This means, among other things, that safety changes depending on which people are in the room at any given time.
It also means that when we have high psychological safety, we have good access to the input that enables us to do the best job possible.
With respect for the task at hand, team members can have access to ask questions, share their doubts, give critical feedback, disagree and bring in new perspectives - when psychological safety is high.
The concept of psychological safety itself is relatively young, emerging from Amy C. Edmondson's research on trust in teams during the 1990s. Edmondson's research on trust in teams during the 1990s. Her research was based in the healthcare sector, where she wanted to investigate how trust between team members affected their performance, error rates and treatment success.
During the studies, researchers made a surprising discovery when they investigated which treatment teams reported the most errors in their treatments in hospitals.
Take a guess: Which teams do you expect will have the most reported bugs?
- Teams with high trust
- Teams with low trust
The surprising answer was A) High-trust teams.
At first, the team was confused. Had there been errors in the data processing? Had the results been switched around? However, it turned out that the key was to be found in the word 'reported'. Teams with low confidence were not as likely or comfortable reporting processing errors as teams with high confidence.
The study could not conclude who actually made the most mistakes. However, there was some evidence to suggest that a high level of trust resulted in a greater willingness to talk openly about and learn from mistakes.
On the other hand, if there is low psychological safety in a space, employees are more likely to refrain from sharing their thoughts for fear of appearing negative or offending other people.
The four steps of psychological safety
When talking about psychological safety, it's almost impossible not to mention the book 'The Four Stages Of Psychological Safety' by Dr. Timothy R Clarke. The book describes a conceptual model of four "stages" of psychological safety that teams can move through, from stage 1 to stage 4.
The four steps are:
- Inclusion safety
We all want to feel included and we all long to belong. As humans, we need to be accepted into a team before we can be heard. So essentially, the first step is simply about being comfortable being present. This step means that all members should be included and welcomed - without discrimination based on gender, age, social background, sexual orientation, or anything else.
- Learning safety
The second step is learning safety - and this means being able to ask questions, give and receive feedback, experiment and make mistakes. Team members at this stage will give feedback to each other and ask for feedback themselves. Openly sharing with the team that you are in a learning process and that your skills or performance have room for improvement is a hallmark of this stage.
- Contribution Safety
This step is about team members' ability to contribute their own ideas in an atmosphere where they feel safe and protected from potential embarrassment or ridicule. It's a complex stage because coming up with your own suggestions and ideas can expose you to increased vulnerability. Sharing your thoughts exposes you to criticism, which can be scary. However, in an environment where contribution safety prevails, team members will feel encouraged to share because they know their input is valued and won't be met with negativity.
- Challenge Confidence
At this stage, members feel able to challenge existing ideas, even ideas from those in leadership positions. They may suggest significant changes to existing plans, ideas or ways of working. This level of confidence is essential for innovation as it encourages critical thinking and constructive feedback. It's not just about questioning what exists, but also suggesting improvements and new approaches. In a challenge-safe environment, team members will feel empowered to think outside the box and challenge the status quo, which can lead to breakthrough ideas and solutions.
No model is perfect, and although this model approaches a non-linear phenomenon like psychological safety in a linear fashion, it is a very useful model.
It can be useful to describe and explore these steps to help people understand that psychological safety is dynamic and changes throughout the team's journey. Individuals and teams will move back and forth through these, skipping steps and moving into and across different "steps" in different contexts, times of day and different teams.
It's also relevant to consider how we can create these environments with increased psychological safety and how it manifests in different groups, cultures, and people with different backgrounds, languages, genders, sexualities and socio-economic backgrounds.
In this context, it's also incredibly important to pay attention to finding the right balance between flexibility, productivity and connection. Expectations and norms in relation to the workplace are changing rapidly, which means that many people are mixing between working from the office and working remotely. Therefore, it's crucial to establish new habits, rhythms and processes for communication. If you need help finding the right balance, we're happy to help you get to grips with hybrid collaboration.
Psychological safety leads to better learning, engagement and performance
What makes a team effective?
Google asked themselves this question back in 2012. This wondering formed the basis for their major internal research project 'Project Aristotle'.
After years of research in more than 180 teams, taking into account over 250 different factors, they found that psychological safety is the most important factor in predicting team effectiveness.
The study suggests that organizations can benefit greatly from an environment with high psychological safety. But efficiency is not the only benefit you can look forward to if you as a leader promote and support psychological safety.
Below you will find examples of some of the benefits:
Better learning environment
In a study of nurses in Belgian hospitals, a research team found that teams with higher psychological safety actually made fewer errors in their care and were more willing to report errors in order to learn from them than teams with lower psychological safety. This was despite the fact that all groups recognized the importance of reporting errors in order to improve care. This study is just one example - more support similar findings.
Another way in which the learning environment benefits is by reducing the amount of workarounds. A workaround is the solution you choose when faced with a challenge that only just gets you through the challenge today, but doesn't address how to prevent others from facing the same challenge tomorrow.
In healthy learning cultures, it is a characteristic that members try to make everyday life easier for everyone by pursuing problems until they are solved at the root, instead of all members having to make the same patchwork solutions time after time. Workarounds typically become an obvious solution when people are afraid to question processes or criticise the work of others.
So when there is high psychological safety in an organization, members are more likely to articulate the real problems and challenges instead of opting for yet another workaround..
Higher performance
In several different studies, conducted with different measurement methods in different types of organizations and in different parts of the world, there is a consistent answer: Teams with high psychological safety perform better than similar teams with low psychological safety.
One example is the Google study mentioned earlier. Other examples are Edmondson (1999) and Bear & Frese (2003).
For these studies in particular, there has been an interest in teams working with process development in one way or another.
It turns out that psychological safety is the most important thing when teams rely on developing ideas, methods or researching things - because here, members need to interact. In the opposite trench, psychological safety is less relevant for people doing routine work that is the same thing over and over again..
Greater commitment
When we talk about engaged employees, we're talking about employees who are more than just satisfied with their jobs. Employee engagement is defined as the degree to which employees feel passionate about their work and the level of commitment they feel towards the organization.
Among other things, engagement has a significant impact on whether the employee wants to go the extra mile in working for the organization. Again, several studies show that psychological safety can be used to predict engagement in employee groups, partly made possible by strong relationships in the employee group.
If you feel that you would like a helping hand to get started in a safe space, we are happy to help you get started. We can do this in different ways. For example, you can read how we've helped Novozymes' 6,500 employees strengthen psychological safety through digital team courses.
You can also access the same course below.cf_200D↩.
You can find the digital team course on psychological safety here
How to assess the psychological safety of your team
We recommend two basic methods to estimate the level of psychological safety in your team. Either you can start noticing the behavior of team members when it comes to meeting culture, knowledge sharing, presentations and the like - or you can take a quantitative approach and estimate the level of psychological safety in your team.
Use your eyes and ears
Below we have listed a number of questions that can help you investigate if people are holding back in the team.
If you experience these things, it could be a sign of low psychological safety:
- Do you find yourself hearing important messages through the back door?
- Do your employees often ask questions and provide input after your meetings instead of during the meeting?
- Do you experience "loud silence" in meetings?
- When was the last time you experienced disagreement? (If people don't disagree, it may be because they are not comfortable being critical)
- Do managers and team leaders have the most speaking time in meetings?
- Do your employees seem nervous when presenting at meetings?
Of course, the answers to these questions can't be the final assessment of your psychological safety, but they can help raise curiosity and awareness of the topic.
In this video, Morten here from Feedwork explains what low psychological safety can look like in reality when the team is collaborating.
You can also choose to take a more quantitative approach.
Make a measurement
In her book on psychological safety, Amy C. Edmondson provides a series of questions that she has used in her research to estimate the level of psychological safety across teams.
The questions are in English and you can find them in the image below.
However, there is one thing we think you should be aware of if you choose this approach. A survey on its own will not be able to contribute much knowledge about your psychological safety. The measurements can of course become interesting over time to show a development, but we always recommend that you use the measurement as a starting point to initiate a dialog about psychological safety in the team.
In this way, the measurement results can be used to initiate a dialogue about the different perspectives and experiences that team members have of working together in everyday life.
The manager plays a special role in psychological safety
The leader in a group of people has a special significance for the development of psychological safety. Firstly, the leader's own example leaves a clear imprint on the behavior of the team. What the leader does is copied by the other team members, and in this way, as with all other behavior, you could say that the leader makes a clear impression by being a role model.
Therefore, it is of course particularly important for the psychological safety of a group that the leader is aware of and demonstrates behavior that strengthens psychological safety. You can read about appreciative leadership. There is no getting around the fact that managers have a special power in their relationship with their employees. Secondly, the manager has a role in enforcing the rules of the game in the team and thus protecting psychological safety from any breaches.
Do you need help with concrete tools to drive change as a leader? We help develop leaders - for example, by building learning competencies and influencing the mindset of leaders so they can translate new methods into everyday scenarios.
However, in addition to being responsible for promoting and supporting psychological safety, the leader should also have a natural interest in psychological safety as it will help them succeed.
Just like any other employee in an organization, managers are interested in doing their job well in order to be rewarded, to advance or to be well regarded in the organization. To do this, managers rely on their team to deliver certain results and, as mentioned earlier, employees are more likely to perform and succeed if they work in an environment of high psychological safety.
8 tips to increase the psychological safety of your team
Fortunately, there are a number of very concrete things you can focus on to create an environment that will enhance psychological safety. Below we have listed a number of actions with detailed descriptions.
1. Set the framework for the work
Make an effort to clearly align expectations of roles, contributions and terms for all team members. This will make it easier for each employee to understand their role in the context of the work as a whole. This will remove implicit doubt and contribute to members' certainty about the upcoming collaboration.
2. Emphasise the purpose
Every collaboration has a purpose, whether it's a single meeting or a year-long project. By dwelling a little on this purpose, and each member's role in achieving it, a social obligation to contribute productively to achieving the goals of the collaboration can be more easily formed.
3. Show situational humility
All humans possess knowledge that is limited. No one has all the answers. Nevertheless, it can sometimes seem like a crime to acknowledge this fact. The words "I don't know" are incredibly powerful and can create a habit and acceptance that no one knows everything. By spreading the use of the 4 words, we can reduce members' fear of being "trapped in ignorance". When discussing difficult problems and exploring new solutions, questions will often arise that cannot be answered immediately.
4. Train the ability to investigate
When it comes to interpersonal risk, there's a big difference between spontaneously breaking in with your ideas in a plenary session and sharing them when asked - in response to a question. That's why questions are a great way to open up a dialog.
So your psychological safety can benefit from getting good at using questions and exploring the different perspectives in the room.
5. Use structures and processes
In line with the above advice, you can create more engaging conversations and dialogues by using conversation structures and processes that ensure involvement and reflection. If you need inspiration for these, we recommend that you take a look at Liberating Structures, which offers a large catalog of different conversation structures.
Read about stress at work here.
6. Sincere appreciation of inputs from the team
It's important to appreciate and recognize when team members actually participate in the dialogue. You can reinforce the motivation to participate by building a habit of clearly valuing input. This can take several forms. Either by saying thank you, but also by asking probing questions about the solutions that are brought to the table instead of dismissing them out of hand.
7. Normalize errors
Mistakes and the reactions that come from mistakes can tell you a lot about the level of psychological safety in a team. If members feel punished for making mistakes, they will naturally refrain from risking too much. Everyone wants to play within the safe confines of the collective comfort zone - where mistakes can be eliminated. However, this approach to work doesn't require innovation and disruption to your collaboration if everyone is constantly doing what they've always done.
One of the best approaches to this normalization is talking openly about mistakes and owning up to the mistakes that occur in your work, rather than hiding them or sweeping them under the rug.
8. Beat down on bride
Once you've defined the ground rules for good behavior that will strengthen your psychological safety, it's important to enforce them and ensure that members live up to the promise you've made to each other. Because as we mentioned earlier, one person in the team can destroy the psychological safety of the entire team.
As you can probably read between the lines, it's difficult to strengthen your psychological safety without the leader in the group getting involved. But on the other hand, the leader can't strengthen psychological safety alone - you need to work together to succeed.
How to use feedback to boost psychological safety
You could say that psychological safety is a foundation for the team's ability to get the full value out of your feedback, because it takes a certain level of psychological safety before members start using feedback spontaneously.
On the other hand, the way you use feedback can also be a great cultivator to take your psychological safety to the next level.
- Ask for feedback from your colleagues
By asking for feedback from your colleagues, you acknowledge their expertise while making yourself willing to accept their feedback. This way, you can build a habit of sharing feedback, thoughts and perspectives with each other. If you need inspiration on how to ask for feedback, we've created a resource with 40 great questions to ask for feedback. - Share positive feedback stories
When you have successfully shared feedback that has created learning or made a positive difference, it can be a great idea to share these stories with others in the group. This way, you can increase the overall motivation to share feedback with each other. - Give appreciative feedback
Focus on appreciative feedback as it creates a sense of "belonging" and being "good enough", and from here it is much more likely to dare to try something new, while increasing the overall engagement of your colleagues. All of which will make working with psychological safety easier. - Be good at accepting feedback
When feedback is offered, it's important, especially if you're a manager, that you respond in a productive way. Being able to show gratitude and curiosity has a big impact on whether your colleagues will be willing to give you feedback again. In fact, it's very similar to tip #6 above about valuing input from your team. - Choose the right space when sharing your feedback
Many people are relatively shy when it comes to feedback, as they feel that receiving feedback is a vulnerable situation. Therefore, it's super important that you get good at choosing the right spaces (especially the right audience) when sharing feedback with each other. Should this feedback be shared in plenary, or is it best to take it one-on-one?
Feedback and psychological safety are closely linked, and in this article you can learn more about what good feedback looks like.
Workshops and leadership training on psychological safety
In the past, we have successfully helped other organizations in their work with psychological safety in the form of conventional workshops and development courses.
When working to increase safety in your organization, there are many relevant things to consider: How do you behave towards each other? How do you communicate with each other? How do you structure your work? Do you give each other space to contribute?
We can help you with all these things, and you can read more about what a workshop on psychological safety for your team could look like here.
Thank you for reading this article on psychological safety. We hope you've found useful inspiration and motivation to continue working on psychological safety - your team will thank you. We're sure they will.
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