Is Your Team Psychologically Safe? Take This Quiz.

You already know that psychological safety is the key ingredient for high performing, effective, and happy teams. And you’re a great leader and team member, so you’re doing all the right things, but how do you know whether your team is actually feeling psychologically safe?

Start with these ten statements below to measure the psychological safety in your team or organisation – though you should consider adapting them to best fit with the language and practices that your teams use.

Reflect by yourself at first, and consider each one and rate agreement on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) when thinking about your team. If you “score” 50, congratulations! You’re on possibly the best team in the world right now.

In reality, the chances are that there were some statements that you didn’t agree with so much, and these are the areas that you can work on, either as a leader or contributor.

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.

When you’re happy to do so, share these with your team and ask them to rate their agreement too. You can do this anonymously, and gather the scores in aggregate. A great tool for this is Typeform, where you can really quickly and easily paste the above statements into ten statements and add a 1-5 scale. Typeform will give you a link to share with your team, and will even export the data into Excel or Google sheets for analysis. You can also use a survey tool such as Surveymonkey, or the free Google forms service to build your own survey.

Our resource page on Measuring Psychological Safety goes into a lot more detail about what each statement can tell you about your team.

In the Psychological Safety Action Pack, we expand on this measurement with more detailed statements and an action guide to follow for each statement. Also included are workshop exercises, checklists, posters and templates: so if your team score low on one or more of these statements, you can know exactly what to do in order to build psychological safety and team performance.

When running this survey, consider the environment you’re asking people to do it in, and ensure that people don’t feel under pressure to answer in certain ways, rush it, or worry that they might get in trouble for giving the “wrong” answer! Ensure that you discuss with your team what this data will be used for, why you’re asking for it, and assure them that it will be treated confidentially.

After this survey, you may also want to look at some of the other great exercises you can do to build psychological safety, such as a “Fear Conversation”, working with values and behaviours, or using a team performance quadrant to workshop how to improve performance in a psychologically safe manner. All of these exercises are in the toolkits provided by the psychological safety action pack.

If you’re working with a remote or distributed team, ensure you check out this great guide about building and maintaining psychological safety in remote teams.