What is: A Psychologically Safe Workplace

The belief that my work environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, where I will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

What is Psychological Safety

A psychologically safe workplace is

A place where people feel:

1. included,
2. safe to learn,
3. safe to contribute, and
4. safe to challenge the status quo

…without fear of being embarrassed, marginalised, or punished in some way.

Workplaces function best when people can communicate freely and respectfully. It takes effort to create an environment that allows this to happen. Psychological safety replaces anxiety and fear with respect and permission, allowing team members to feel accepted and respected. Psychological safety is built on a foundation of trust, a shared belief that the team is safe to speak and behave openly but respectfully.

Where employees and managers feel psychologically safe, they can contribute, develop, and take reasonable risks without fear of an unfair impact on their self-image, status, or career. In this way, Psychological safety plays an important role in enabling high performance within teams and organisations.

The Psychologically Unsafe Workplace

A Psychologically unsafe work environment (sometimes referred to as a Toxic Workplace) can be devastating to self-esteem and mental health. In a toxic work environment employee’s will be forced to self-protect from behaviours such as blaming and shaming. It is unhealthy to go to work constantly fearing that we are:

questioned, mocked, or ignored
attacked or disregarded
having our ideas used against us or stolen
shut down entirely.

A toxic workplace makes people too afraid to contribute their thoughts in meetings, participate in discussions, or take reasonable risks in their workplace.

Myth: Psychological safety is just about being nice

Psychological safety at work does not mean that everybody is nice all the time or that people always agree with one another. It also does not mean that people offer praise or support for everything you have to say. Psychological safety is about honesty and a willingness to engage in productive conflict to learn from different points of view. It is having the courage to have the difficult conversations, to set clear expectations and speak up, knowing that your team has your back, and you have their backs.

Conflict inevitably arises in any workplace. Productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas are vital to learning and innovation. Psychological safety enables people to speak candidly about what’s bothering them.

Psychological safety and work performance

Psychological safety is not an “anything goes” environment. Psychologically safe work units can be high performing or low performing.

Apathy culture occurs when both psychological safety and performance expectations are low. People show up at work, but their hearts and minds are elsewhere. They choose self-protection over exertion every time protecting and defending themselves either passively (not contributing at all), or aggressively (by attacking others). When staff feel undervalued, they protest quietly with reduced effort, or displaying negative or disruptive behaviour.

Comfort culture is where workplaces have high psychological safety but low performance expectations. People enjoy working with one another. They are open and collegial but not challenged by the work. When employees are comfortable being themselves but don’t see a reason to seek challenge, there won’t be learning, or innovation nor will there be engagement or fulfillment.

Anxiety culture develops when a lack of psychological safety is coupled with high performance expectations. Don’t confuse setting high performance expectations with good management. To build a high performing team, managers need to build a culture of trust where employees feel safe to contribute

Learning culture occurs when performance expectations and psychological safety are both high. Team members collaborate, learn from each other, and get complex, innovative work done. High performance occurs when people are actively learning as they go.

	High Performance	Low Performance
High Psychological Safety	Learning	Comfort
Low Psychological Safety	Anxiety	Apathy

Why is Psychological Safety important and what’s my role in this?

A psychological safe workplace is one where you can be vulnerable amongst your peers without fear of retribution because you feel safe to:

make a mistake
ask a question
admit when you don’t know something, or
share a new idea

The benefits of psychological safety include:

A willingness of individuals to take accountability and learn from their mistakes
Improved team innovation
Improved team resilience
Concerns raised are resolved informally without escalating into formal issues (complaints, grievances, disputes)
Often reducing difficult conversations to important, crucial, or uncomfortable conversations
Ability to raise, establish and hold people to expectations in a respectful way
Ability to raise issues without fear
Improved employee Wellbeing
Reduced injuries and illness and improved recovery after an injury or illness
- Reduced risks of psychological injury
- Reduced unnecessary stress and anxiety
Positive and healthy cultures
Higher employee engagement, motivation and moral
- Higher levels of staff satisfaction and engagement
- Increased attraction of talent and reduced turnover

What do I need to do?

Your team is psychologically safe if employees answer “yes” to the following:

I understand what is expected of me.
We value outcomes more than outputs or inputs, and nobody needs to “look busy”.
If I make a mistake in this team, it will not be held against me.
When something goes wrong, we work as a team to find the systemic cause.
All members of this team feel able to bring up problems and tough issues.
Members of this team never reject others for being different and nobody is left out.
It is safe for me to take a risk on this team.
It is easy for me to ask other members of this team for help.
Nobody on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
My unique skills and talents are valued and utilised.

You can take practical steps to start making sure your work unit is psychologically safe. Please consider:

Reviewing your Have Your Say results and Action Plan
Liaising with:
- The “Values In Action” (VIA) team
- Staff Psychology
- Your local Human Resource Business Partner