Ten Ways to Foster Psychological Safety in the Workplace

We’ve been reflecting on our last few years of experience delivering psychological safety workshops, training and consultancy in organisations around the world. Based on all those wonderful experiences, working with industries from healthcare to aviation, education and technology, we’ve surfaced over 150 ways to build psychological safety, but these are the top ten activities that we’ve found most effective in fostering psychological safety and enabling people to speak up.

In our experience, these strategies have proven to be effective in the vast majority of contexts and environments; they look slightly different in different situations, but they consistently work. Whatever the organisation and whatever the work, if these top ten activities are adopted across and between teams, we see a dramatic improvement in psychological safety and performance:

1. Levelling power gradients
2. Establishing shared norms
3. Effective listening and giving space
4. Intelligent and compassionate communication
5. Rewarding speaking up
6. Framing work as experiments
7. Practising retrospectives and futurespectives
8. Addressing persistent problematic behaviour
9. Embracing differences
10. Accepting human error as normal

Let’s dive into each one of these top ten ways to build psychological safety:

1. Levelling Power Gradients

In our experience, the single most effective practice for increasing psychological safety is to level the power gradient within a group. This means reducing the power held or exhibited by the most powerful individuals and increasing the power of the least powerful members. The power may be formal (e.g. through organisational hierarchy), informal (e.g. due to tenure in the organisation) or socially constructed (e.g. through gender representation). 

Disasters such as the Tenerife Los Rodeos airport disaster in 1977 show how inhibiting power gradients can be; they are so obstructive that people may not speak up even if many lives, including their own, are at risk.

The idea of levelling or flattening power gradients through redistributing power isn’t new. Mary Parker Follett spoke of enabling generative cultures through “power to” instead of “power over”, more than a century ago.

How we do this in practice will vary between context and situation: making this a reality in a software engineering team will be very different to a maternity department, but there are some common, helpful practices:

• Use people’s names, not rank or status, when talking with and about them
• Share and delegate responsibilities such as chairing meetings.
• Hold open forums for discussion with people at all levels of the organisation.
• Devolve decision making as much as possible to the sharp end: to the people doing the work.

2. Establishing Shared Norms

Being able to predict how the team will react to what you say and do is crucial for psychological safety. One thing that has a massive impact on this predictability is group members collectively agreeing their shared expectations and standards of behaviour. 

Every single high performing team we’ve ever worked with has established some kind of evolving social contract or team agreement. Even just the process of creating the agreement is a powerful exercise that bonds the group and increases psychological safety. Once it exists, it gives us greater confidence that how we behave in the group is acceptable or even praiseworthy. As the group gets to know each other and their ways of working better, they can add items (or remove something too). It’s very effective for onboarding new members, who can get up to speed much faster with the group’s norms and expectations.

It also means that if someone breaches the social agreement by, for example, repeatedly speaking over someone in a meeting, the team can collectively refer back to the agreement to help bring that behaviour back on track. See point 8 about addressing problematic behaviour. 

Practically, this involves the creation of a social contract, Team Charter, and similar shared agreements on standards. This will be different for every group, and it’s important it’s co-created by the group, not imposed on them. It must be owned by the people it’s about. Nothing about me without me.

3. Effective Listening and Giving Space

Psychological safety isn’t just about speaking up (verbally or otherwise): it’s about listening. We cannot expect people to speak up if they don’t have the space to do so, and people will quickly learn that speaking up is a waste of their time and effort if they’re not actually listened to. 

However, this is a lot easier said than done. Time and production pressure, neurotypical and westernised approaches to meetings, and speaking often being valued over listening, mean highly effective listening practices are all too rare. However, in groups that exhibit high psychological safety, we notice that people are very effective listeners, and tend to prioritise listening over speaking. This active listening creates the space for others to speak up, and a great deal of evidence shows that it leads to higher performance.

Listening practices can be improved through effective chairing and facilitation of meetings, “enforced” periods of silence in meetings to give time for quieter voices to find their words before speaking up, and having conversations in distraction-free environments (including laptops and phones) so that we may focus on those who are speaking.

4. Clear and Compassionate Communication

On the flip side of listening is speaking and communicating. In every case of high psychological safety in teams, we observe intentional practices of clear and compassionate communication. 

We can’t always control how someone receives or responds to our behaviour and communication, but we can do all we can to be clear, kind, empathetic and reasonable. Busy-ness and stress may mean we find ourselves communicating bluntly or tersely, even when we don’t mean to. 

Practices such as Non Violent Communication, Graded Assertiveness, use of emojis, gifs, and simply taking a little more time to communicate thoughtfully go a long way to fostering psychological safety. This also means not using acronyms without explaining them, avoiding obtuse or academic language where simple language will suffice, being conscious of language barriers in multilingual contexts, and providing information in ways that are accessible to all. 

5. Rewarding Speaking Up

As well as making it safe to speak up, we must value, praise and encourage speaking up. In teams that exhibit high levels of psychological safety, people are thanked for their contributions. Raising concerns is valued and those concerns are acted upon. When someone admits a mistake, the group takes time to explore and address the contextual factors that contributed to the mistake, rather than blaming. 

This works differently in different contexts, but the simple practice of praising and thanking people for their contributions is universally beneficial.

6. Framing Work as Experiments

Language matters. How we refer to our work changes how we think about it. The highest performing teams we work with have learnt to frame work as experiments. The purpose of the work is to learn how to do the work better next time, and the time after that, and so on. . Delivery still matters, of course, but learning is even more important.

If instead, we only talk about “objectives”, “targets”, “milestones” and “deliverables”, we only focus on whether something is done or not done, hit or missed. This inhibits our ability to take the true value, the learning, from each bit of work we do. 

Even in safety critical domains such as healthcare, framing work as learning is key. This doesn’t mean recklessly “experimenting” with someone on the operating table – it means executing to the best of our abilities and making sure that whatever happens, success or failure, we learn from it and get better each time. 

Some organisations use the term “bets” instead of experiments, for example, making a “bet” that a product will succeed in the market, which is a good way to acknowledge the influence of factors beyond our control. However we prefer the term “experiments” because bets typically either win or fail: there is no explicit mention of learning. In contrast, the primary outcome of an experiment is the learning itself: it may succeed, fail, or most likely fall in that grey area in between. But regardless of the outcome, we always learn from it.

7. Practising Retrospectives and Futurespectives

As we’ve established, the highest performing and most psychologically safe teams we work with all intentionally learn from work. They run retrospectives, “debriefs”, “lessons learned”, “washups” or “After Action Reviews” at the end of a projects or programmes, and often at regular intervals such as monthly or weekly. The highest performing teams, and the ones that exhibit highest levels of psychological safety, embed these practices into daily work (such as via an Andon Cord mechanism).

Those teams also tend to practise “futurespectives” – which involve looking ahead, imagining future states of failure or success, and learning lessons about how they may have occurred. This leads to effective risk mitigation, improved success, and a greater ability to talk about failure when it actually happens – because we’ve already practised discussing it in a safe environment.

The ability to discuss learning, whether from failure, success or simply daily work, relies on psychological safety. The more we do it, the better we get at it. And by demonstrating that we can have powerful conversations about the outcomes of work without destructive conflict, blame, or embarrassment we actually solidify and foster greater psychological safety in the group, making it easier to discuss next time – it’s a virtuous cycle. 

8. Addressing Persistent Problematic Behaviour

Where we find high psychological safety, we also find strong, well defined boundaries of behaviour. This doesn’t mean punishing people or shaming them for making interpersonal mistakes, but it does mean collectively holding each other accountable for high standards. To do this well in practice requires some form of social contract or team agreement: without this, those explicit boundaries and expectations either don’t exist, or aren’t shared by everyone in the group. The social contract allows team members to point out, with kindness and compassion, if someone breaches their shared agreement.

The really problematic behaviour is when it persists despite those nudges to course correct, which may require a firmer response. And, as we often say, psychological safety doesn’t mean never firing anyone. If someone’s behaviour is persistently problematic, discriminatory or otherwise harmful, despite very clear communication about how they can address it, maybe this team isn’t the place for them.

Being firm with these boundaries and expectations means that we can all be reassured that if behaviour such as bullying or exclusion does occur, it will be addressed, and we will be protected from it as far as possible.

9. Embracing Differences

Psychological safety does not look the same for everyone. Culture, experience, neurodiversity, and many other factors influence our needs and preferences for working together in groups. For example, some people will feel psychologically safer when they’re able to maintain eye contact with others in the group, whilst for other people, maintaining eye contact may be difficult or impossible. This doesn’t mean that some folks are psychologically safer than others – simply that it looks different from one person to the next. 

One of my main criticisms of the field of psychological safety is that it tends to be rather focused on Western, English-speaking, white collar, neurotypical contexts. If we believed everything we read on LinkedIn about psychological safety, we’d think that psychological safety meant everyone speaking up verbally, in English, without stuttering or hesitating, whilst maintaining eye contact, and shaking hands afterwards. 

This is far from reality. In truly psychologically safe groups, people behave in ways that work for them and their context. A software development team may feel safest sitting in silence, with headphones on, whilst maintaining 15 different conversations via 10 different platforms. Conversely, the sales team next door might be ringing bells to celebrate wins and clapping each other on the back. Neither are “good” or “bad” for psychological safety, and we should avoid assuming that there is a cookie-cutter version of what a psychologically safe team looks like.

10. Accepting Human Error as Normal

High performing, psychologically safe teams acknowledge that humans are always going to make mistakes, and none of us can do something perfectly every time, no matter how expert we are. By embracing Local Rationality and acknowledging that context drives behaviour, we’re better placed to improve the environment, tools and systems of work than by blaming individuals.

In practice, this means employing technical mechanisms, and applying human factors and ergonomics principles to prevent, detect, and mitigate human errors, allowing us humans to get on with our work as safely and effectively as possible, without worrying that our inability to be perfect is going to result in disaster. 

In our work, we observe that teams that actively employ these approaches also foster greater psychological safety. It requires psychological safety simply to have the discussions that enable these practices and close the gap between work as done and work as imagined. And it’s another virtuous cycle: the more reassured we feel that our errors will be caught before they result in disaster, the more able we feel to openly discuss the mistakes we make and what we can learn from them, because the real-world consequences are lower.

To summarise:

These are ten things that we’ve identified as some of the most powerful and effective ways to foster psychological safety and performance in teams and organisations. That doesn’t mean these are the only ways, nor will they all be effective in every case. Here’s a list of more than 150 behaviours that foster psychological safety, which grows all the time based on feedback and insights from the people we work with.

Try some of these top ten approaches out with your teams, experiment, play with them, and try different ways of doing them. Let us know what works best for you! 

All these practices, approaches, and behaviours are in our Psychological Safety Tool Kit, alongside much, much more!

Further reading: 

Power and Mary Parker Follett
Team Charter Canvas
The  Andon Cord
Local Rationality

Version 3 of the Psychological Safety Action Pack!

Our comprehensive Psychological Safety Tool Kit is designed to help you study, measure, build, and maintain psychological safety in your teams and organisation. It’s perfect for team leaders, managers, HR and People professionals, and facilitators and trainers. Version 3 has been updated an improved as a result of four years of experience using it in organisations around the world, and feedback from over 3,000 practitioners using it with their teams.

What’s new in Version 3?

• All the content has been refreshed and updated, with improved links to online resources and further reading.
• A clearer structure for you to work through with your team, structured around the Psych Safety framework of Study – Measure – Build – Maintain – Reflect
• A completely revised and updated section on Measuring Psychological Safety, including a comprehensive question bank of 30 questions to choose from, as well as ideas for alternative approaches to data collection and analysis. 
• Resources that were previously part of the Psychological Safety “Managing Teams and People” Playbook have now been been updated and integrated into the Action Pack, including:
  • Personal User Manuals
  • Manager Manual
  • Social Contract
  • Team Charter 
• There are also brand new resources and tools, including:
  • Psychologically Safer Meeting Practices
  • The Andon Cord 
  • TRIZ
  • Do / Discuss / Decide
• Improved and updated self-reflection and coaching exercise
• Refreshed poster images to reflect our values around diversity and inclusion

As thank you for being a newsletter subscriber and a member of the psychological safety community, here’s a voucher code for 20% off the new Action Pack so that you’ve got the most up to date version to support your work. This code will only work for the next 14 days. 

Use the code NEWSLETTER20 at the checkout to get 20% off when you purchase the Psychological Safety Action Pack or Bundle.

As a final treat, the first 10 people to use this code will also receive a free selection pack of psychological safety stickers! 

Psychological Safety in Practice

Giraffe adventures 

Thanks to Heather, Lidija and the team for a wonderful workshop this week at UCA, Jess and the team in Kensington, as well as all my other clients this week. Here’s Jill the NVC giraffe enjoying a break at UCA and making friends in Hyde Park.

Psychological Safety for Medical Students

This episode of “Sharp Scratch” features Amy Edmondson discussing psychological safety as applied to medical students. What environments have made people feel psychologically safe? How hard is it to learn when you don’t feel safe? How can we help to cultivate a psychologically safe environment at medical school?

Norm alignment

This is a great little post by Peps Mccrea about the importance of aligning norms across different groups within an organisation (in this context, a school). When individiual groups co-construct their rules and norms, it can be a powerful way to cohere and perform as a team, but if people move between teams or groups, as in a school or hospital for example, it can erode and dissipate those very norms. Alignment across groups is important. 

Toyota

I could easily believe that any organisation that we use as great exemplars in our psychological safety workshops are eventually doomed… This piece from BBC news describes how a government investigation has uncovered faulty testing data at five of Japan’s leading carmakers including Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Suzuki and Yamaha Motor in a widening scandal that has forced the suspension of some vehicle shipments. Thanks James Pomeroy for sharing.

Moving forward anyway!

I love this doodle by Sophia Joan Short on Instagram. Constantly failing forward is the only way 🙂 Thanks Jade Garratt for sharing.