Practices that Foster Psychological Safety

There are many behaviours that (depending on the context) can help to foster psychological safety, over 170 of which are listed in our big list of psychological safety behaviours. However, there are also many practices that help to foster and create the conditions for psychological safety to emerge. The broad difference between practices and behaviours is that in general, practices have a specific name and we can more precisely define what they mean as a particular activity, as opposed to the more general and widely applicable behaviours. 

These practices may assist in establishing shared norms and rules of engagement within a group, they may provide scaffolds and mechanisms to enable speaking up, they may be ways of mitigating power gradients, or consist of mechanisms that help to learn from daily work – failures or successes. 

In this Psychological Safety Research Pulse, we wanted to surface the most popular practices used to enable psychological safety in groups and teams. We asked:

“There are lots of different practices we can use to help foster greater psychological safety. Which do you find to be most effective?”

With 12 options to choose from, including Social Contracts, The Andon Cord, 15/5 Reports and Empathy Mapping, we asked participants to select their top 3.

The results are below:

What are the most popular psychological safety practices?

What really stands out is that over 50% of respondents selected “social contracts or team charters” as part of their top three practices. This makes absolute sense: psychological safety is grounded in the predictability of group norms and expectations. Practices that make these norms explicit are therefore essential to fostering psychological safety, whether in short-term or long-term teams.

Top Three Psychological Safety Practices

Retrospectives are a practice focused on learning from past work (often, but not exclusively, failures). Conducting regular retrospectives normalises the discussion of failure, and reinforces a shared belief that we can admit mistakes, raise concerns and suggest improvements without any negative consequences; so it’s good to see this ranked as number two in the survey. 

The Circle of Safety is another group-norm defining exercise that helps discover, surface and address factors that damage psychological safety as well as positively contributing behaviours. In this sense, it’s thematically similar to social contracts, and unsurprisingly in the top three as well, with 43.6% of respondents choosing it. 

The final top-tier practice is Lean Coffee, which is actually somewhat surprising given that it’s relatively unknown in most organisations. But it’s important to acknowledge that our survey sample likely consists of folks already more familiar with these practices, and actively working to foster psychological safety. So its popularity may not reflect what’s happening most in wider organisational contexts. That said, Lean Coffee is an incredibly democratising, power-distributing and inclusive meeting practice. 

What else helps foster psychological safety?

While mid-tier favourites such as the Andon Cord, Futurespectives, 15/5 Reports, and Personal User Manuals, clearly resonated as “top-three” choices (the median being 17.9%), the lower rankings of practices such as Empathy Mapping, the Pac-Man Principle and PACE don’t necessarily suggest they aren’t widely used. Rather, because participants were asked to select only their three most-valued practices, some approaches simply didn’t make as many personal top-three cutoffs – even though they may still be regularly used as part of team routines and communication protocols. Of course it’s also possible that these practices are simply less well known!

If respondents could have ranked all their practices (not just their top-3), we may have seen a longer tail and less of a pronounced skew toward the few most-chosen methods. However, that’s a more difficult question to answer, and we want to make sure these short pulse surveys are easy and quick to respond to.

What Practices Pair Well Together?

We also looked at co-occurrence (how often two practices both appear in the same top 3 response set). Using a normalised “Jaccard index” (0–1 scale of overlap):

• Social contracts ⇄ Circle of Safety: J ≈ 0.43
• Retrospectives ⇄ Circle of Safety: J ≈ 0.40
• Futurespectives ⇄ 15/5 Reports: J ≈ 0.38
• Lean Coffee ⇄ Andon Cord: J ≈ 0.34

What does this mean? These pairs appear to form natural “bundles” of thematically-connected complementary habits (e.g., norm-setting rituals, reflection + forward-planning, communication protocols).

What do we take away from this?

Psychological safety is grounded in group norms and interpersonal predictability, and practices such as Social Contracts, Team Charters and The Circle of Safety help to surface, establish, and reinforce these norms. If we’re working with a group or team, these are some of the essential practices to establish a secure foundation for psychological safety.

This week’s Research Pulse explores the barriers to speaking up in the workplace – which do you feel are the biggest barriers?

Respond here and be in with a chance of winning stickers and an Action Pack bundle worth £50.