We know psychological safety is essential for high performance teams: it enables sharing of ideas, admitting and learning from mistakes, highlighting risks, and challenging (and improving) the way we do things. Psychological safety is the primary foundation for team performance as well as organisational agility and change. Innovation is critical for creating products that delight customers and serve business needs, and psychological safety is a fundamental enabler of innovation. 

All of this means it’s understandable that you would want to measure psychological safety, and this can be a powerful thing to do. If you’re starting to explore ideas around measuring psychological safety in your organisation, this article should help you on your way.

If you have further questions, contact us for help. 

Download our psychological safety action packs and playbooks to help you foster and measure psychological safety in your teams and organisations.

Before you measure psychological safety:

Have conversations with people in your organisation and teams. Ask how people feel about the level of psychological safety in their teams and in the broader organisation. Attempt to find out how much people understand of the term psychological safety – or if they’ve heard of it at all. These conversations will help you craft the survey language better, and help you decide on the best approach to take.

Most importantly though, before measuring psychological safety, ask yourself these important questions. Make sure you are well prepared, understand what you’re doing, and can follow through with actions as a result.

Join one of our upcoming Measuring Psychological Safety online workshops, which will build your confidence and skill in effectively measuring psychological safety in your teams and organisations. In the workshop, we cover:

• An brief review of the theory of psychological safety.
• The rationale for measuring it in long and short-lived teams.
• The costs, risks and dangers of measuring psychological safety.
• Formulating your own Research Question.
• Longitudinal vs Cross-sectional research.
• Sociological Research Methods: Quantitative, Qualitative and Mixed-Methods approaches.
• Design your own psychological safety survey or interview
• Research Ethics
• Further reading and resources.

Measuring psychological safety is powerful, but it’s also dangerous.

If you’re embarking on an improvement journey, measurement can be a powerful exercise, but it also has its dangers. We must be conscious of sampling bias (where only people who feel safe to complete the survey do so, skewing the results), and of “Campbell’s Law“, by which if decisions are made as a result of the survey, it may incentivise people to alter the ratings accordingly – again, skewing the results. Even measuring itself, particularly if no action is taken as a result, can harm psychological safety. Don’t do this lightly, and ensure that change is catalysed as a result. Imagine how team members would feel if asked to complete this survey, which requires them to be vulnerable, and then perceive that the information is discarded afterwards, no attention is paid to the results, and no changes are made as a result.

Campbell’s Law, image by Sketchplanations.com

It’s essential to only do this as part of a broader programme of psychological safety practice improvement and as part of an open dialogue with your people. This practice also only really works for long-lived teams that have had the opportunity to build habits and practices – it won’t make as much sense for short-lived or brand new teams who don’t yet have embedded practices and behaviours. 

For short lived teams, use the “team performance exercise” instead (which is also a great qualitative practice for long-lived teams too!).

Asking the right questions

Below are ten questions that you can ask yourself or your teams to determine the level of psychological safety in your team. Be aware of cultural and language differences that may impact the way statements are interpreted, especially if your team includes non-native English speakers. Change any questions that might not make sense to your team, and modify language as necessary. We’re not trying to repeat this across different organisations (so we don’t need to worry about replicability in different contexts) – we’re trying to have the greatest relevance and impact for our own context.

You may also want to reduce the number of questions, especially for a first attempt, as it will help increase your response rate, so pick the questions that matter most to you.

Our experts at Psych Safety provide survey design, delivery, analysis and recommendations for organisations of any size. Contact us to enquire how we can help you measure, build and maintain psychological safety in your organisation.

When carrying this exercise out with your team, (ideally) perform the survey anonymously – if it’s possible that your team are psychologically unsafe, they will be more likely to be honest if the survey is anonymous. If the team are very psychologically safe, then it won’t matter if the survey is anonymous or not.

Note: this is a great exercise for a long-lived team – don’t carry out this exercise with a short-lived team (such as a temporary project team). Instead, use the psychological safety matrix workshop to more qualitatively address and create psychological safety.

Simple but powerful dialogue

You may decide to use these statements not as a survey, but primarily as a talking point, and have some really valuable discussions with your team about them. If you’re familiar with the Action Research approach, this is a good example.

 Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

William Bruce Cameron

Where possible, add a “comment” option for each question so people can provide some extra detail if they wish. It’s important to obtain qualitative feedback for each statement as it will facilitate and clarify some of the actions that you may need to take in order to build psychological safety in the team.

Measurement

Ask your team to score agreement with the statements below (using a 1-5 or similar scale, 1 being low and 5 being high: this is called a “likert” scale).

1. On this team, I understand what is expected of me.
2. I feel my ideas are valued, and I feel safe in suggesting them.
3. If I make a mistake on this team, it is never held against me.
4. When something goes wrong, we work together to find the systemic causes.
5. I feel able to bring up problems and concerns.
6. Members of this team never reject others for being different and nobody is left out.
7. It is safe for me to take an intelligent risk on this team.
8. It is easy for me to ask other members of this team for help.
9. Nobody on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
10. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilised.

This survey, adapted from Dr Amy Edmondson’s “The Fearless Organisation”, alongside many other tools, is included in the psychological safety action pack which you can download now and use with your teams. 

Four powerful impacts of measuring psychological safety

By surveying agreement with these statements, you’re actually doing four powerful things –

1. Surfacing any issues that are impacting psychological safety,
2. Educating people about what psychological safety is,
3. Making psychological safety safe to talk about, and
4. Most importantly of all, making explicit and encouraging the very behaviours that increase psychological safety!

(This is the rationale for modifying them from Dr Edmondson’s original 7 statements.)

These statements are from Dr Edmondson’s original research. The key point is to ensure that you use the language, statements, and practices that have most meaning for your teams and context. Here’s a free psychological safety survey template containing 17 questions to choose from and refine.

Repeat the survey after a period of time (the timescale is up to you) to evaluate any change in the different areas psychological safety and to demonstrate to your team that you’re committed to continuous improvement.

Metrics

A perfect “score” for every team member would represent the most psychologically safe team in the world. This is somewhat unlikely. In reality, a perfect score may highlight an issue where people feel unable to answer truthfully, so investigate further if that is the case.

The lower the aggregate score for the team, the lower the general psychological safety. However, the power of this survey is really in the detail.

Identify the statements with the lowest scores and the widest range of responses. These are your areas that require action, and are where you can make the largest difference whether you’re in charge of the team or not. It may be, for example, that there are new team members who don’t feel as safe as the team members with a longer tenure. Remember, a team is only as safe as the least safe member.

Read the rationale for each statement below and consider what actions you can take or behaviours you can encourage to raise the scores.

In Practice:

Use a survey tool such as Typeform, Surveymonkey, or the free Google forms service to build your own survey.

See an example here in Google Forms: https://forms.gle/cpYafs4224nkqiaB7 – and feel free to have a go, and make a copy for yourself.

What do I do now that I’ve measured psychological safety?

After you’ve used the survey, you must take some actions to address any issues that have arisen. If you ignore the results, you could inadvertently damage psychological safety and make it more difficult to address in the future. Where your teams score low for any of the questions, take a look below and see what actions you could take as a result.

1 – On this team, I understand what is expected of me.

It is essential that team members understand what is expected of them in terms of delivery (speed, quality, cost, and other factors) and behaviour (everything from dress code and punctuality to coding standards) to foster psychological safety. Ensure tasks are clear and well defined, behaviour expectations are explicit, and negative behaviours are dealt with.

2 – I feel my ideas are valued, and I feel safe in suggesting them.

It can be daunting to suggest an idea to other people, particularly if it’s not fully formed yet. But some of the best outcomes result from suggesting ideas that aren’t quite ready. And the more ideas we can play with, the better the outcomes for the team. A more diverse team will generate more diverse ideas – but will require psychological safety in order to suggest them in the first place.

3 – If I make a mistake on this team, it is never held against me.

A psychologically safe team will never blame a member of the team for a genuine mistake if their intentions were good. Indeed, by enabling mistakes to be made without a fear of blame, you enable innovation and risk taking that can drive your organisation ahead of the competition. Utilise systems thinking and DevOps approaches to prevent mistakes before they happen or mitigate the impact of mistakes when they do.

4 – When something goes wrong, we work together to find the systemic causes.

Related to the previous point but important enough to warrant its own question, a system of discovering the root causes of mistakes and failures means that not only do team members feel able to take risks without being blamed, but every single “failure” is an opportunity for learning and improvement. By building psychological safety through these retrospective exercises, everyone on the team gets to learn from mistakes, meaning mistakes are a gift, not a threat. Look for all the causes of an incident or failure, not just the “root cause”. And don’t forget to look for the causes of success too!

5 – I feel able to bring up problems and concerns.

In a psychologically safe team, all members of the team are able to bring up problems and tough issues, ranging from personal struggles to concerns about other (even senior) members of the team. This psychological safety is crucial for allowing both vulnerability to show when you’re struggling and need help, and courage to raise difficult topics.

6 – Members of this team never reject others for being different and nobody is left out.

Evidence shows that diversity in a team results in higher quality products and happier team members, but diversity in itself is not enough: it is crucial that team members are all included in decision making and delivering results. To facilitate psychological safety (and high performance) every member of the team needs to be invested in the decisions made and the outcomes generated. This is particularly crucial for remote and distributed teams, where it is more difficult to see if a team member is becoming disengaged.

7 – It is safe for me to take a risk on this team.

Mistakes happen unintentionally, but risks are about taking actions that might not work, or may have unintended consequences. Psychological safety provides the framework for positive risk-taking, enabling innovation and ultimately, competitive advantage.

8 – It is easy for me to ask other members of this team for help.

In psychologically unsafe teams, team members try to hide their perceived weaknesses or vulnerabilities, which prevents them from asking for help. In a psychologically safe team, members prioritise the team goals over individual goals. Helping others helps achieve the team goal, and because team members feel safe to ask for that help, psychologically safe teams achieve more of their goals than unsafe teams.

9 – Nobody on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts. 

In an unsafe team, members compete with each other to achieve their individual goals, and may even undermine other team members if it could benefit them or it is perceived that doing so may elevate their “rank” within the team or organisation. In a psychologically safe team, that counter-productive competition doesn’t exist, and the success of the team is more important looking good in the eyes of others.

10 – Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilised.

We all bring our own unique experience, skills and knowledge to the teams that we’re in, but we also bring our own prejudices and biases. In a psychologically safe team where members are valued for being their true selves, biases are less likely to manifest. Indeed, team members may feel safe enough to identify, raise, and discuss their own biases or those of other team members. By doing so, we provide space for each individual to maximise their potential from utilising their own unique skills and talents.

Additionally, here is a list of 120 different behaviours that help to foster psychological safety, such as praising people for admitting mistakes and being firm with negative or harmful behaviours in the group. Take a look and share it amongst your teams to help people foster psychological safety.

Regularly Measuring Psychological Safety

Be sure to regularly survey your teams’ agreement with these responses to determine if your strategy is working and to identify trends and early warning signs of problems in the team. By regularly measuring the degree of psychological safety on your team, you can begin to build your own unique strategy for developing and maintaining it. For instance, this may involve running more regular retrospectives or by workshopping the team’s values and behaviours.

Measurement is only a small part of the process. Download a complete Psychological Safety Action Pack full of workshops, tools, resources, and posters to help you measure, build, and maintain Psychological Safety in your teams.

Remember to be patient: this is a journey, not a destination, and work on your own psychological safety too. You can’t effectively help others if you don’t look after yourself.

When you’ve completed the survey, you can work on creating and maintaining psychological safety in your workplace with these ten key behaviours and actions.

Or, if you’re ready to take the plunge, download the entire psychological safety action pack to measure, build, maintain and improve psychological safety in your teams and organisation.

Try taking this psychological safety survey for yourself.