Seven principles for measuring people without mistaking them for data. In theory at least, we measure psychological safety because we want more of it. That, in fact, is often part of the problem. The act of measuring changes the thing
Qualitative Measurement of Psychological Safety What the survey can’t tell you A few months back, I was preparing for a workshop with a client, and they shared, anonymised, their staff engagement survey data. We both sat on our respective screens,
The Futility of Utility If we want to make the argument for psychological safety in most organisations, we often need to speak the language of value. There is genuinely strong evidence that psychological safety is associated with better team performance,
The Streetlight Effect Measuring the really important stuff is hard. How do we measure inclusion, or safety, or happiness? We can probably all agree that these things matter, but when it comes to measuring them, where do we start? In
Part 2: Different people, different safety Continuing our reflections on the last five years. In part one, we explored the name psychological safety itself, and here in part two, we get into diversity, myths, the proliferation of bad advice, and
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative, and happy teams. It shapes whether we feel safe speaking up, sharing ideas,
Executive Summary In this Research Pulse, 121 respondents were asked how familiar people in their workplace are with the concept of psychological safety. The results show a broadly “middle-ground” distribution: most people have heard of it, but few would call
Exploring The Psychological Safety Index (PSI) (Trademark: The Fearless Organisation) Psychological safety is one of those concepts that’s easy to grasp intuitively, but much harder to measure. We can usually sense when a team feels open, trusting, and collaborative –
A team is only as safe as the least safe person When measuring the psychological safety in a team, we often are asked which measurement should be considered the “group measurement,” given that different individuals will likely experience rather different
Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law, and the Cobra Effect. We’ve mentioned Goodhart’s Law a few times in previous newsletters about measuring psychological safety, alongside its siblings, Campbell’s Law and The Cobra Effect. I thought it would be useful to do a
How psychological safety emerges and changes over time in the workplace. Given that psychological safety itself is a relatively young field, there’s not a huge amount of published research that addresses the longitudinal dynamics of psychological safety in the workplace:
We love to measure stuff, don’t we? Maybe it’s human nature, but we seem to have a strong desire to make the intangible tangible, and we tend (or at least many of us do) to believe in the robustness of
Team performance isn’t the only reason that we foster psychological safety. We also do it because we want people to feel fulfilled in their jobs, we don’t want people to leave a team because they don’t feel included, we want people to experience less unnecessary stress and have greater mental wellbeing, we want to foster greater diversity and inclusion. Ultimately, we foster psychological safety because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do.
Psychological Safety in 2023 Thanks so much for all your support, feedback, encouragement, ideas, insights and collaboration over 2023! It’s genuinely a privilege to be able to do this work, and I appreciate every single one of you. I recently
Executive Summary This pilot study explored the relationship between employment protections—in law and organisational policy—and psychological safety at work. Drawing on 84 responses from participants across multiple countries, the research sought to understand whether stronger employment rights correlate with greater
Measuring psychological safety? Here are some tips on choosing the right tool for the job. As awareness of the importance of psychological safety in the workplace increases, there is a corresponding increase in the number of psychometric tools, applications and
Statistical Process Control and Understanding Variation In a chat with a great client this week, we got talking about different approaches to measurement and metrics. I introduced the concept of Statistical Process Control (SPC), so that’s what this week’s newsletter
Data Visualisation In the psychsafety.com measurement workshop we cover a lot: research ethics, quantitative/qualitative approaches, longitudinal vs cross-sectional studies, formulating research questions, survey design, and communicating our findings. As part of that, we look at data visualisation, including this classic example: The Broad Street
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2023 – the annual survey of The Psychological Safety Newsletter. This is your chance to join thousands of voices, share your experiences, and inform the content of the next year of articles, resources,
Read more about Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law and The Cobra Effect here.
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses some things to think about before measuring psychological safety. Measuring Psychological Safety I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about measuring psychological safety, and thought it’d be good to
It might be sometimes hard to tell whether people in a team feel psychologically safe, or how safe they feel. The more you hear these phrases, more psychologically safe they’re likely to be. Indicators of Psychological Safety in a Team
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
Westrum’s Cultural Typologies Dr Ron Westrum wrote in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal in 2004 about The Three Typologies of Organisational Culture. He was looking at how information flows through an organisation, and he considered that because information flow is influential and indicative of other aspects
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You rock. This week includes Neurodivergence, Google, Grout, Tigers and Elephants, Pre-Mortems, Equity, Accountability, Gendered Social Biases, and Cognitive Load.If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks
