Measure psychological safety in your team

We often get asked how to measure psychological safety. And it’s a fair question. Teams and organisations want to know where they stand, and leaders are usually being asked for a number by someone above them.

The trouble is that most of the tools available answer a slightly different question than the one that matters. They tell you how much — a score out of five, a percentile, a place in a benchmark. What they rarely tell you is why, or what to do differently in your next teem meeting, which is in half an hour.

So we built our own. It has been in development for years, it is free to use during this preview, and you can try measuring psychological safety now.

A psychological safety survey is an intervention

Even a thermometer changes what it measures. A survey about psychological safety changes far more.

The moment we ask a team whether they can speak up, we’ve already told them something about the subject – maybe that it’s safe to discuss it, or maybe that we think there’s a problem. We’ve introduced some vocabulary and have signalled that we consider psychological safety important enough to measure. Done badly, we’ve also taught them that their answers disappear into a spreadsheet and nothing happens as a result – survey theatre.

Rather than try to pretend we’re taking a neutral reading, we’ve designed the survey around the observer effect – the act of measurement changes the thing we’re measuring, so we should make that effect positive rather than negative.

What a team gets from the survey

A plan, not a score. The report ends with a short, prioritised set of experiments chosen against what your team actually reported, ranked by fit and effort. Things you can try now, drawn from the practices we use with clients.

It tells you why people hold back. There are many reasons people stay quiet, and each needs a different response. Someone who cannot predict how a comment will land needs something different from someone who predicts it perfectly well and expects it to cost them dearly. Different again from the sense of futility felt by the person who has raised things before and watched nothing happen.

It shows you what is already working. Most surveys only ask what is broken. When people tell us that speaking up here tends to go well, we ask what makes that possible, so the team knows what to protect and do more of.

You hear what people would not say to your face. Anonymity is built into the architecture rather than promised in a policy. No names, no accounts, no timestamps, and results stay sealed until the survey closes.

It draws on over ten years of practice. We’ve worked globally with teams in technology, healthcare, aviation, heavy industry, financial services and more. What works in one of those places usually has something to say to the others, and the suggested actions come from that experience rather than from a textbook.

What the survey does not do

There is no overall score, because a single number invites exactly the behaviour that destroys the thing being measured.

There is no benchmark against other teams or other organisations. Comparison breeds gaming, complacency and anxiety in roughly equal measure. The only meaningful comparison for a team is with its own past.

And there’s no incentive mechanism, no punishment for the manager who’s struggling against the system, and no reward for a high “score”. A psychological safety score used to punish or reward a manager isn’t measuring psychological safety at all, because everyone knows what the number is for and answers accordingly.

We also show distributions rather than averages – a team is only as safe as the least safe person. A team where everyone sits at three and a team split between ones and fives produce the same mean and need completely different conversations. The report shows you which one you have, one square per person, so the disagreement is visible rather than averaged away.

How the survey works

Pick the statements you want to ask, in your team’s language: adapt the wording, or add your own. Send the link. People answer twelve or so statements in about five minutes on any device, with no account and no app.

When you close the survey, the report opens to you first, then you share the identical report with the whole team. That order matters. It means no surprises for you and no cherry-picking for them.

The question bank is adapted from Amy Edmondson’s work, extended with our own items about voice, power and the reasons people stay silent. If you are doing research, or you need scores comparable across teams and studies, use her original validated seven-item scale unmodified: validation is precisely the property that adaptation destroys. Ours is built for a different job, which is starting a useful conversation in your team.

There is also a free three-minute self-check if you would rather look at your own experience first. It stores nothing at all.

Measure your team’s psychological safety

You can read a full sample report before you ask anyone anything. It is built from synthetic data for a team that does not exist, by the identical pipeline a real team’s report goes through.

Team surveys are free during the preview period while we learn from how people use it. If you try it, we would like to hear what worked and what did not. There is a feedback link on every page, and we read all of it.

Try the psychological safety survey here.