How to measure psychological safety at work

Psychological safety means creating a work environment where everyone feels comfortable disagreeing or taking risks. They don’t fear consequences or judgment.

Or, to paraphrase Amy Edmonson who coined the phrase in 1999:

Psychological safety means an absence of interpersonal fear.

89% of employees feel it’s essential in the work environment, according to a McKinsey study. But how can businesses measure if they actually have a culture of high psychological safety or not?

Thinking you have that culture, and actually having it, can be two different things. Especially when just 41% of employees feel comfortable sharing concerns with leaders, based on Gartner research.

To make matters worse, PwC research found that 86% of executives claim to highly trust their employees, but just 60% of employees feel highly trusted. This shows there’s a disconnect going on in far too many businesses.

Without trust, you can’t have psychological safety. So how do you measure it in your organization?

Why do you need to measure psychological safety?

The simple answer is: unless you’re in regular contact with your employees, you don’t know what’s happening on the front line.

There could be huge issues or disconnects between employees and leaders (like the ones in the stats above), but if employees have nowhere to comment on these things or share their thoughts, not only will you never know, but they’re likely to feel unappreciated and disconnected. This can lead to quiet quitting and employee resignations, as well as the business underperforming: in a 2024 study, Gallup estimated that low engagement cost the global economy $8.9 trillion—9% of global GDP.

Psychological safety metrics you need to measure

Now that we know why measuring psychological safety is important, let’s explore what metrics can help you track it in your organization. And how to improve them.

Employee retention rate

Employee resignations can tell you a lot. If people from a particular team or demographic all seem to be leaving at once, it can reflect team dynamics and potentially low psychological safety.

More than half of people who leave a role leave their manager, so it’s a significant metric worth keeping in mind.

The top reason employees leave is a lack of development opportunities. In a world where everything is changing faster than we can blink, providing upskilling and reskilling opportunities is more important than ever to retain top-performing employees and stay ahead of the competition.

This is why it’s imperative to offer coaching and mentoring solutions for your employees. Sanctus Coaching and Mentoring can support your employees to learn new skills, navigate the changing world of work, and explore where they want to go next in their career. Helping you retain internal knowledge and save money on hiring.

Employee sentiment

Employee sentiment is a key metric that can tell you a lot about how employees think and feel about the workplace. It’s a key indicator of your workplace culture and how motivated employees are in their roles.

Lack of motivation can affect productivity and profits, so supporting employees with the challenges they face inside of and outside of work is vital to maintaining high performance without burning them out.

If you notice a decline in employee sentiment, it’s worth comparing it to what’s happening within the organization as well as what’s happening outside of it.

For example, our friends at Evoluted noticed that during the pandemic, its employees struggled with adjusting to remote work. The pandemic left them feeling isolated and lonely, and no amount of online quizzes or socials were cutting it. Its employee engagement and sentiment were declining and starting to affect colleague and client relationships. It had to do something to fix it before it affected their bottom line. But what?

Evoluted brought in Sanctus Coaching to support employees with workplace and mental health challenges. It now continuously has high employee sentiment in feedback surveys.

Team productivity

If a team’s output has declined, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong. It may be a sign of something other than psychological safety, but a decline in productivity is still a red flag.

Has there been a change in leadership that’s affected the culture? Has a key player left? Has something happened within the business that’s changed the team dynamics?

The more engaged employees are, the more productive they are, but to be fully engaged they must first feel safe.

Listening to employees’ concerns in the form of an employee listening platform like Sanctus Listening ensures their voices get heard by the right people.

And no business is immune. Based on our data, women get 30% more responses when they post anonymously.

Junior staff post anonymously 93% of the time, compared to senior staff who post anonymously 81% of the time.

With so many people posting anonymously, it makes you wonder how much is left unsaid in organizations that don’t have the opportunity for employees to share their feedback anonymously.

It also makes you wonder about their company culture. If so many employees post anonymously when they have the option, perhaps even in an organization where they do feel able to share their thoughts, how many things are they not sharing?

Workplace relationships and conflicts

Employees’ ability to manage their professional relationships is a vital part of success in any role. Not getting along with colleagues can be a huge source of workplace stress.

Workplace relationships are such an area of contention that it’s the fourth biggest area employees choose to work on with their Sanctus Coach, behind career progression, stress management, and mental well-being.

But of course, work relationships are related to these areas. If employees can’t manage their relationships, they can’t progress in their careers; if they can’t handle stress, they may take it out on their colleagues, and relationships of any kind play a huge role in our mental well-being.

So even if an employee doesn’t think they’re directly working on their relationships with coaching, there’s a high chance that probably are.

Innovation

How innovative is your business? If it has a reputation for being innovative, new or creative ideas drying up could be a sign something is wrong with your psychological safety in the workplace.

Sometimes, risks go wrong, and how a business responds to that risk says a lot about its culture.

Formula 1 team Mercedes was once the most dominant team in the sport. In the last few years, its cars have underperformed. Instead of scapegoating anyone, team principal Toto Wolff took the blame on his shoulders. To try to fix things, he reorganized the team. Some people left, but the camaraderie and team spirit is still strong.

How to measure psychological safety

So how do you collect this valuable data?

Send a pulse survey

Pulse surveys can be a data gold mine. When sent regularly, they give you data to compare against and track your improvement initiatives. You can also see what’s working and what isn’t.

If your company is going through a particularly challenging time, like an acquisition or merger, surveys can be useful to help you monitor how employees feel about the way it’s being handled.

Conduct stay interviews

A stay interview allows you to gather feedback from employees on what you can do to keep them happy and productive within your organization. This hands-on feedback allows you to get more detailed answers on the good, bad, and ugly of what’s happening within your organization.

Compare teams

Some teams may have better retention rates than others, which could be a sign that one team has higher psychological safety than another. This helps you understand what’s making your employees leave.

You can then speak to the managers of each team to understand how they function and what could be creating the discrepancies.

Use an employee listening tool

Our data found that 90% of people post anonymously on Sanctus Listening, powered by Rungway.

When people are challenging the business, this goes up to 98%.

So without somewhere like Sanctus Listening for employees to safely share their feelings, opinions, or grievances, there’s a risk of them bottling all of this up, becoming stressed and frustrated, disengaging, and ultimately leaving due to dissatisfaction at work.

Beware of data biases

Tracking metrics is great, but it’s worth keeping in mind that in some cases, data biases can crop up.

For instance, if only a certain group, or certain groups, of employees come forward, it can skew results.

This is why it’s important to offer employees the opportunities to share feedback anonymously, collect from as many sources as possible, and look at more than one metric. You’ll get a more well-rounded picture.

Make the changes

Once you’ve collected your data, it’s time to take action based on the results. This is really the key to employee experience, especially with 46% of employees wishing their organization did more to address employee feedback. Failing to do so makes the collection of this data a waste of everyone’s time, and can be even more disheartening for employees who are already feeling disconnected.

One of the best ways to support your employees is with Sanctus. Our coaching, mentoring, and listening offerings are part service, part software.

Use our mentor matching algorithm to connect employees with the right mentor so that they can progress in their career; connect them with a coach who fits their needs so that they can problem solve and grow their skills, and collect their thoughts and feedback so that you can track employee sentiment in real time—with the help of our expert moderators. Get in touch to book your free consultation.