How to create psychological safety at work

Psychological safety is “The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson, 1999) Also stated as “A belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.“

And in 2013, Google’s Project Aristotle, led by Julia Rozovsky, showed psychological safety to be the foundation for high performing teams at Google. Since then, a great deal of research has shown how important psychological safety is for team performance, employee wellbeing, innovation, risk reduction, and organisational success.

You want to build and foster psychological safety, but how can you encourage others in your workplace to do the same?

Here are five ways to promote psychological safety at work

1. Run open events and workshops
2. Create a community of practice
3. Book an external speaker to deliver an engaging talk or seminar
4. Survey, measure, take action and (most importantly) communicate what you’re doing
5. Build a high performing, psychological safe team and lead by example
6. BONUS point: Speak to your senior leadership about their fears and aspirations.

1 – Run open internal events and workshops.

There are a number of workshop ideas and templates in the psychological safety action pack. You can use these to run events and sessions that anyone in your organisation can attend. Keep them short, punchy, accessible and inclusive. If you’re not sure about facilitating it yourself, find someone else in the organisation who can, or ask us to help.

2 – Create a Community of Practice (CoP).

There will be people all over your organisation who want to be involved in efforts to build psychological safety. And there will be people with great knowledge and skill in this area. Likewise, there will be many people who are keen to find out more, and by creating a psychological safety Community of Practice you’re creating a space where these people from all over the business can come together and share ideas, best practices, plan events and evangelise for psychologically safe workplaces. One of the strengths of this approach is that it brings together folks in the organisation (boundary spanning) who may rarely otherwise have opportunities to work together.

3 – Get an external speaker to deliver talks and workshops.

This is something we do a lot of at psych safety. Bringing in the experts on psychological safety not only means the workshops and seminars are as engaging and impactful as possible, but it takes some of the workload and interpersonal risk away from people in the organisation. Not only that, but external facilitators and experts can bring valuable insights from other industries and sectors that you might not have easy access to. Contact us for more information.

4 – Survey and measure psychological safety.

Measuring psychological safety is powerful for a number of reasons. You’re surfacing any issues that are impacting psychological safety, educating people about what psychological safety is, making psychological safety safe to talk about, and most importantly of all, encouraging the very behaviours that foster psychological safety. However, it’s really important to do this well. Measuring psychological safety is difficult to do well and dangerous to get wrong. It’s absolutely crucial to act on the information that you gather – make sure that people know that their candour results in positive impact to the organisation. We provide services to organisations to help design, deliver, analyse and act on psychological safety.

5 – Build your high performing, psychologically safe team.

If this is your only option, it’s still worth doing! By building a high performing, psychologically safe team, you’re demonstrating the power of safe teams who are motivated and empowered to deliver real results. Even if you can only lead by example, you’re still leading. Create your own psychological safety playbook. Other people in the organisation will see what you’re doing, and begin to emulate your practices, improving the reach of psychologically safe leadership and management in the workplace.

Download our psychological safety practice playbook for people and teams, which includes templates for personal user manuals, team charters, manager readmes and more.

If you’re interested in finding out more, download the psychological safety action pack or contact us to find out how we can help you.