9 Top Tips for Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace
Creating psychological safety in the workplace is all about forming a happy, high-performing environment. When employees feel psychologically safe at work, it improves employee engagement, employee well-being, and employee retention. The improved workplace culture leads to more innovation, higher productivity, and greater resilience.
Team psychological safety is so important that 89% of survey respondents told McKinsey it’s essential.
But what are the keys to creating psychological safety in the workplace? And why does it matter anyway?
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is the shared belief within a team that it’s OK to disagree, to speak up, to have opposing ideas, and try new things or take risks—even if you fail. There’s no fear of negative consequences or judgment.
This enables challenges and disagreements and allows individuals to be vulnerable at work.
Amy Edmonson, who coined the phrase in 1999, describes it as:
Psychological safety means an absence of interpersonal fear. When psychological safety is present, people are able to speak up with work-relevant content.
Why is psychological safety important in the workplace?
When a team has high psychological safety, they can freely contribute ideas and feel like those ideas will be heard. No one is afraid to ask “stupid” questions or worry about looking vulnerable. Problems therefore get solved faster through open dialogue, rather than people being afraid of looking dumb or not having all the answers.
As a result, team members feel valued and like they belong, so they’re more likely to help each other. Senior staff will also have a greater understanding of what their employees think and feel rather than only hearing the information from direct reports. This prompts a more open, responsive company.
Because of this, companies experience lower employee turnover, a positive company culture, and improved mental health for employees, lowering their risk of burnout.
Julia Rozovsky, people analytics manager at Google found that:
There are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google…Psychological safety was far and away the most important.
Despite this, McKinsey research found that just 26% of leaders created a psychologically safe work environment.
How does a lack of psychological safety affect employee performance?
When a company has low psychological safety, people are more likely to hide mistakes because they’re afraid of reprisals. This leads to a blame culture and problems that don’t get solved. Small issues that could lead to bigger problems get buried under the carpet, leading to much larger consequences. There have sadly been too many examples of this in the news in recent months.
Not only that, but employees are less innovative. They either don’t have as many ideas because they lack the energy and space to develop creative solutions, or they don’t voice what they’re thinking. If they do, they might be ignored, leading to frustrations. So they just don’t bother.
Burnout is also a possibility, as an employee may feel they don’t own their work or can’t influence company direction. This lack of autonomy has a huge impact on employee well-being, as we’ll explore below.
Silos or cliques can also form, reducing communication between teams. This can create an unhealthy competitiveness between teams that should work well together (like sales and marketing) or makes it harder for employees to get answers from members of other teams. I’ve experienced this myself and it meant that it took so much longer to get answers to simple questions. I often felt frustrated at the end of the day because of things outside my control.
Needless to say, all this has consequences for employees’ mental health, productivity, and the business’s bottom line.
Top tips for creating a psychologically safe work environment
Now that you know the benefits of creating psychological safety in the workplace, let’s explore how to do just that.
1. Have a clear purpose
It’s important that employees understand the purpose of their role. What are they there to achieve? How does what they do affect the business? What’s the business’s long-term goal?
For instance, my purpose at Sanctus is to improve the site’s SEO. So, I view everything I do through that lens. I can clearly see if, and how, my SEO efforts help the business bring in more website traffic and leads. I can measure how well I’m doing using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs.
Communicating the company purpose alongside the employee’s purpose keeps them focused on their goal. It also leads to higher-performing teams because they have their north star and know what to measure themselves against.
When employees don’t have a clear direction, they can feel detached from their colleagues and disengage from their roles and the company.
2. Create an open, honest culture
Honest, open communication helps form deeper connections. When employees are shut out of conversations or feel like secrets are being kept from them, it makes them uncomfortable and reduces employee engagement.
It’s also a lot harder for someone to come forward and challenge the status quo if there isn’t a culture of openness and honesty, especially if the person they’re challenging is above them.
If someone is experiencing bullying, or has witnessed it, they’re only going to feel comfortable telling someone with an open culture. If the workplace culture is to bury problems and pretend they don’t exist, employees will do the same thing.
Employees follow leaders’ examples, so when leaders are open and honest, and allow themselves to be vulnerable, employees feel more comfortable being this way too. That allows them to bring their whole selves to work, feeling more accepted and like they belong in the workplace.
Leaders need a clear understanding of mental health, and how to communicate clearly with colleagues, to achieve this.
Using Sanctus Listening powered by Rungway, employees can use constructive anonymity to express themselves. They can raise concerns they may not otherwise feel comfortable discussing, raising them directly with colleagues or leaders.
Leadership development initiatives like coaching and mentoring can help leaders learn how to actively listen, support employee mental health, and feel comfortable being vulnerable.
3. Communicate clearly
Most of us go to school, maybe university. But are we really taught how to communicate clearly? Or are we taught to communicate in a way that will get us the highest grades?
Communication is one of those skills that we often think we learn naturally or at school, but to communicate effectively in the workplace requires real work. It requires self-awareness, honesty, and clarity. These things don’t come easily to all of us, and that’s ok—so long as we’re aware of that and work to fix it.
Leaders also need to be comfortable giving and receiving feedback. Being good at this is surprisingly rare. Most people focus on the negatives and feel uncomfortable celebrating the positives. This is where coaching and mentoring can come in, helping leaders work through their internal challenges to better support employees.
This is one of the things that coaching can help with.
Connected Leadership is a personalized coaching program that supports leaders where they’re at, whether they’ve been a manager for five minutes or five years. It improves their ability to communicate with employees, work on competencies that are typically excluded from traditional leadership programs, and coaches work with managers to create their own personal objectives to track their progress. Get in touch today to find out more about how our manager training program could benefit your leaders.
There’s really no downside to clear communication. With clear communication, and a psychologically safe workspace, colleagues can disagree agreeably and have healthy conflict without anyone taking anything personally or getting offended by someone else’s opinions. Which leads nicely on to my next point…
4. Value everyone’s ideas and opinions
In some companies, there can be the attitude (or opinion by some) that some people’s opinions or ideas are worth more than others. This could be because of their seniority, their role, or another characteristic. This approach could mean you miss out on your next great idea, though.
Diverse perspectives are key to companies staying innovative. The opinion of a new starter, or someone from a different department, could be game changing to how you solve a problem or create a new product.
You never know where the next great idea will come from. It could be the quiet one who rarely speaks; the loud one whose voice drowns other people out; the one who doesn’t work in that department but still has thoughts on the matter. It doesn’t really matter.
It also doesn’t matter if an idea is bad. Until an idea has been written down and assessed, it’s impossible to judge it.
Employees need to feel comfortable sharing their ideas, even if they perceive it to be bad. Thinking of a bad idea and not voicing it can act like a plug, blocking the potential for other ideas to come through. That so-called bad idea could also lead to exactly what you were looking for. You won’t know unless you explore it.
5. Treat everyone fairly
Everyone wants to be treated with respect. There’s nothing worse than feeling like your colleagues or managers don’t respect what you contribute to the team or business.
Feeling underestimated or underappreciated isn’t just bad for a company’s psychological safety, it’s also bad for employee well-being. Over time, it can lead to detachment and reduced productivity.
Treating people fairly is really just about the things we’ve already covered: being open and honest, listening to their ideas, and communicating clearly.
Give employees credit for their ideas, too, regardless of where they came from. A shoutout on Slack or an employee listening platform like Sanctus Listening goes a long way to someone feeling valued at work.
6. Provide opportunities for people to speak up—without repercussions
Innovation and creativity only happen when we challenge the status quo.
However, employees can only think outside of the box if they’re encouraged to be themselves and question how things have already been done. For example, just because an “open door” policy has always been a thing, that doesn’t necessarily make it the best way to connect employees with leaders or HR.
Sometimes, employees feel more comfortable sharing anonymously, and the sad fact is that they still get more responses if they post anonymously.
Sanctus Insights, powered by Rungway, found that when women post on the platform anonymously, they receive 31% more responses.
Colleagues of color get 44% more replies when they post questions anonymously.
This shows we still have a long way to go before everyone feels heard, let alone before everyone can speak without fear of negative consequences.
7. Make leaders visible and accessible
Just because you have an open-door policy doesn’t mean everyone will feel comfortable discussing things in that way. Some people prefer to write things down, others prefer to ask in person, and some prefer to air their concerns anonymously for fear of embarrassment (whether it’s an embarrassing topic or not).
Sanctus Insights, powered by Rungway, found that 90% of people ask questions anonymously.
If they’re challenging the company’s behavior, this goes up to 98%. Junior staff are the most likely to post anonymously, with 93% of them doing so, while middle-grade staff post anonymously 86% of the time and senior staff 81% of the time. This shows a huge difference in what people are comfortable sharing and asking of their employer. And things only change if leaders change how they do things.
Leaders need to make the effort to allow people to feel comfortable expressing themselves. This could mean connecting via an employee listening platform, where employees can anonymously share what’s on their minds. Even if they can’t change anything, allowing employees to feel seen and heard relieves some of the stress that can come from workplace challenges.
8. Give employees workplace autonomy
When we feel like we lack control in our lives, it can lead to everything from stress to chronic pain. Data from Champion Health found that 76% of people feel moderate to high levels of stress at work. 35% of those people feel that stress negatively impacts them. Just 9% of people experience no stress at work.
Its Workplace Health Report 2023 expanded on these stats, finding that the second biggest cause of workplace stress was a lack of control. It was only beaten by excess workload. It was followed by lack of support at work (more on that in a minute).
Employees who have autonomy feel more able to make decisions and more confident taking risks. They’re also more likely to be proactive, have emotional stability, and be open to new experiences.
Providing learning opportunities enhances this, giving them the opportunity to expand their existing skill set and then use their new knowledge and skills to take what they do to the next level.
9. Offer support at work
Supporting your employees shows them that they’re a valued team member. It also helps them feel more comfortable sharing their opinions, ideas, and feelings with colleagues.
There are lots of ways companies can offer support.
One way is to have regular check-ins between employees and managers. This ensures that problems are solved before they become bigger and that employees have someone to discuss ideas with.
Coaching develops employees’ communication skills, making it easier for them to share what they’re thinking, ask for help, and give feedback to colleagues.
Democratized online coaching allows everyone to work on their self-development, even if they can’t think of anything they want to discuss. Sometimes, coachees arrive to an appointment with nothing to talk about, but just talking about their day or week can lead to self-discovery and a new way of doing things.
Mentoring helps employees form connections with people inside and outside of the business who can teach them new skills and/or expand their network. Internal mentoring can be vital to them developing a sense of belonging at work.
Sanctus Mentoring, powered by PushFar, can help mentees connect with mentors using its unique algorithm.
Listening platforms like Sanctus Listening allow employees to voice what they think in a safe space. With 90% of people asking questions on the platform anonymously and 98% posting anonymously if they’re challenging company behavior, it shows how uncomfortable challenging the status quo can be. If they don’t have the option to share how they feel safely, are they going to do it at all?
Does having a psychologically safe workplace really matter?
In short, yes. You can buy all the fancy tools in the world for employees to use, but if they don’t feel valued or seen in the workplace, they’re more likely to disengage and you won’t get the most out of them.
If you’d like help building a more psychologically safe environment, get in touch to discuss how Sanctus Coaching, Mentoring, and Listening could help your employees develop their communication skills, get support, and feel valued in the workplace.