Psychological Safety and Safeguarding

Article by Jade Garratt

Imagine suspecting, or even knowing, that something is terribly wrong, but feeling unable to speak up about your concerns. This feeling can be all too real in environments where safeguarding is essential, but there is a lack of psychological safety.

When we talk about safeguarding we’re referring to the essential task of protecting people’s health, wellbeing, and human rights, ensuring they can live free from harm, abuse, and neglect. Safeguarding is important for everyone to be aware of, but it’s especially crucial for those working with children, young people, or vulnerable adults.

Effective safeguarding requires robust policies, processes and sufficient resources. But that’s not enough. The culture within an organisation is vital for safeguarding mechanisms to work. Sadly, we’ve seen many safeguarding failures where in hindsight, there were warning signs, and sometimes lots of them – red flags that were ignored or unreported because people didn’t feel safe enough to speak up.

Systemic Failures

In our Psychological Safety workshops, we sometimes ask people to reflect on disasters that they know of where an absence of psychological safety was a contributing factor. Failures of safeguarding often come up. For instance in the UK context, many people are aware of the tragic examples of Victoria Climbie and Peter Connelly or “Baby P”, cases where the signs of horrific child abuse were repeatedly missed or unreported and where ultimately the children were murdered by those entrusted with their care. There were clear examples in both cases where a lack of psychological safety suppressed people’s actions, although these catastrophic safeguarding failures can’t be attributed solely to a lack of psychological safety. The investigations into their deaths found they were the result of myriad factors, including inadequate training, inexperience, breakdowns in communication between organisations, and ambiguities around where responsibility sat. The signs were there, but they went unnoticed, unreported or unrecorded, and unconnected.

Amplifying Weak Signals

These are extreme examples, where actually the signs should have been clear and the failures are glaring. But in many safeguarding cases, the signs that something is wrong are much more subtle and can be difficult to detect. They might be things that people describe as “I’m sure it’s nothing”, or they’re isolated incidents whose significance only becomes apparent when you can see the whole picture or in hindsight. They’re weak signals, and they need amplifying. 

In an environment of psychological safety, people feel they can speak up without fear of negative consequences. This means they feel empowered to report something that seems just “a bit off”, without worrying that they’ll be seen as paranoid, dramatic, or overly sensitive. They won’t worry that they’ll be seen as less competent, or that they’ll suffer career consequences for raising a concern. They can speak up immediately, without asking for permission, or waiting for further details to emerge.

Safeguarding and psychological safety in practice

To create this culture, it’s not enough to just establish reporting mechanisms. We need to be intentional to amplify weak signals in a safeguarding context, by, for instance:

• Praising and encouraging reporting, and telling people explicitly that it’s ok to over-report; it’s ok if a concern turns out to be a “false alarm” (these are learning opportunities too!). More than that, it’s our duty to report even if we think it’s probably nothing. 
• Backing this up with rigorous training to help people recognise what weak signals might look like and ensuring they have absolute clarity about their responsibility to share and follow up on their observations.
• Enhancing feedback loops through creating not only real-time reporting mechanisms, but also regular cross-organisational meetings so that concerns can be discussed, shared and examined for patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed in our respective silos.
• Welcoming and acting on all concerns, taking them seriously and reinforcing the idea that every voice matters, regardless of its seniority, status, language or volume. All perspectives have value in enriching the sensemaking process. Dissenting and diverging opinions need to be explored and investigated, not shut down. The messenger should always be thanked, and definitely never shot. 
• Embracing complexity through recognising that “people work” is complex and messy, and the systems in which we work can be too. Understanding and ultimately improving these dynamics for better safeguarding requires continuous effort, communication, adaptation, and on occasion, learning from failure.

But won’t people always speak up when children are at risk?

There’s a common, but dangerous, assumption that when children are at risk, it’s serious enough that people will “just speak up” without worrying about their own fear of embarrassment or shame if they get it wrong. We can’t assume that. Psychological barriers can prevent individuals from voicing their concerns, even in dire situations, including when a child’s safety is at stake.

The Tenerife Airport disaster is a poignant example of this. On March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747 aircraft collided on the runway, resulting in 583 fatalities – the deadliest commercial aviation disaster in history. Despite hundreds of lives being at risk, including their own, miscommunications and a lack of psychological safety prevented crew members from challenging their captain’s decision to take off without clearance. The disaster occurred because the flight crew did not feel empowered to voice their concerns assertively enough, leading to a tragic and completely preventable accident. 

Without psychological safety, even the best safeguarding policies will fail, because as the Tenerife Disaster demonstrates, interpersonal fear can keep people silent despite lives being at stake. Reducing or removing that fear is the foundation of effective safeguarding. Therefore, the only way to ensure that safeguarding measures are not just in place but actively working to protect those who need it most, is through fostering ever greater psychological safety into our organisations.

Useful links and resources:

NSPCC Barriers for Professionals to Reporting Abuse and Neglect (March 2024)

The 6 Principles of Safeguarding

Psychsafety.com further reading:

Amplifying Weak Signals

Tenerife Airport Disaster

PACE Graded Assertiveness

Psychological Safety in Practice

3M Executives suppressing concerns

This is a fascinating article about how 3M executives suppressed chemist Kris Hansen’s concerns about PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid), a chemical with various uses, which Hansen discovered in samples of blood taken from the general population whilst testing 3M employees’ blood samples. This piece shows how an environment of fear about the consequences of speaking up against authority, and later, explicit marginalisation, prevented speaking up about health risks. Hansen’s experience highlights the importance of fostering a workplace culture where employees feel safe to voice concerns without fear of retribution, for the sake of public health.

Thanks to Lisa Riemers for the article tip.

The Psychological Safety Community

A very warm welcome to all the folks who joined our relaunched psychological safety community over the past week. We’re at about 140 members now, and there are already some great discussions and plans afoot for exciting events. One of the great features of the community is our #careers-and-jobs channel, where we’ve got a few folks advertising their availability, and some interesting jobs to check out too. 

Kudos especially to Al, who is recruiting for their own boss. This is one of the the smartest moves I’ve ever seen – recruiting your own boss from the psychological safety community! 

Leadership, Organizational Culture, and Hierarchy in relation to patient safety

This is a very useful paper for my dissertation! An excellent study on the influence of leadership, organisational culture, and hierarchy on raising and escalating concerns about patient safety. Leaders who demonstrate humility, provide consistent feedback, and are approachable, increase psychological safety in their teams, and thus increase the ability to speak up about concerns, which improves patient safety. Organisational culture, an amalgamation of our communication efficacy, behaviour, and practices, such as simulation training, all contribute to greater psychological safety too.

Thanks to Becky Thomas for the tip.

Psychological safety and restorative practice

Community member Lesley Parkinson wrote the excellent book “Restorative Practice at Work“, about communication and learning practice in healthcare contexts. This is a fab little graphic showing the components and effects of restorative practice in relation to psychological safety. 

Equality and Equity

We talk quite a lot about equality and equity. In fact, “equity” is a core part of our mission statement. It’s important to distinguish between equality and equity, because they’re not the same thing. Striving for equality is a good first step in highly imbalanced contexts, but equity is (or at least in my opinion, should be) the goal. Equality means every receives the same or fair treatment, the same amount of stuff, the same opportunities, etc. Equity means everyone receives what they need in order to achieve an equal, or fair, outcome. And I believe that it’s the outcome that matters. Here are two images that reflect the difference between equity and equality.

This week’s poem:

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”

James Baldwin – If Beale Street Could Talk