Have you ever found yourself in a situation as a leader where your team members only wait for your lead and never question your judgments or challenge your ideas? While this may be reassuring, this is a red flag that indicates that your team members do not feel safe in the workplace to speak up without feeling embarrassed or getting punished.
When a speak-up culture is lacking in a work environment, employees are less likely to express their ideas, admit mistakes, and take risks, which can lead to negative consequences for both the individual and the organization.
This fear of speaking up stunts progress, stifles creativity, and prevents teams from reaching their full potential. Psychological safety is the answer to this problem and is now recognized as a critical driver of innovation, collaboration, employee engagement, and overall team performance, leading to more creativity .
This article provides a guide to creating psychological safety at work, where team members feel psychologically safe to take risks and express their opinions. It will also explore the link between the organization's success and psychological safety at work.
Key takeaways
<div id ="one">
Psychological safety at work refers to an environment in which employees feel comfortable speaking up, sharing thoughts, and raising concerns without fear of being humiliated, embarrassed, criticized, or punished. Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, developed this concept through research that emphasized the importance of trust, respect, and open communication in the workplace.
👉Related: How to Build Psychological Safety in the Workplace
<div id ="two">
<div id ="three">
According to Harvard Business School professor Timothy R. Clark, there are four stages of psychological safety at work. These stages help organizations determine where their teams are and where to increase psychological safety as well as advance toward a transparent and trusting work environment.
The following are the four stages:
The first stage of inclusion involves allowing individuals to be their authentic selves and be accepted into part of a group despite their differences or diverse backgrounds without fear of rejection.
Organizational leaders at this stage demonstrate their inclusivity by showing respect to all employees and supporting diversity programs, improving equity, and enhancing inclusion initiatives.
In the learner safety stage, individuals satisfy the basic needs of inclusion and have gained confidence to begin the learning process. Individuals are encouraged to be curious, ask questions, and view failure as an opportunity to grow.
In this stage, employees feel empowered to share ideas, demonstrate their ability, and share their perspectives on the organization's goals. They trust that their input will be valued and that they can take calculated risks without facing negative consequences.
Leaders can encourage contributor safety by recognizing contributions and giving employees the autonomy to act on their ideas.
The challenger safety stage is where the employees feel comfortable enough to challenge the status quo, challenge decisions, propose changes, and offer constructive feedback.
This stage drives innovation and prevents stagnation. Leaders can encourage constructive dissent and respond positively to alternative viewpoints.
<div id ="four">
From leadership style to organizational culture and systems, various factors interconnect to determine whether psychological safety at work thrives or suffers. Some of the factors that influence the level of psychological safety include the following:
The leadership style typically sets the tone of operations within organizations. Leaders can either impede or promote psychological safety in the workplace. Practicing active listening, showing empathy, and allowing diverse viewpoints creates safety in the workplace while dismissiveness and authoritarian tendencies erode trust and openness.
👉Related: What are the Different Styles of Leadership?
Communication is a cornerstone of any organization, and how it is handled has a significant impact on employee engagement and cross-functional relationships. Leadership that encourages clear, transparent, and respectful interactions builds psychological safety and enhances trust.
Leaders and team members who share information, give constructive feedback, and acknowledge both successes and setbacks signal to other members of the organization that it is safe to speak up. When poor information flow is allowed, there can be misunderstandings, fear, and disengagement.
Related: How to Create an Effective Stakeholder Communication Plan
Organizational culture takes time to establish, and it touches every aspect of the workplace. When the culture values innovation, continuous improvement, and employee respect supports psychological safety. A terrible organizational culture, on the other hand, that has blame-oriented upper management discouraged risk-taking, stifling employee progress.
👉Read more: How to Build Strong Leadership Culture: Keys to Organizational Success
Modern corporations have recognized the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. These programs create psychologically safe workplaces where everyone's voice matters. Embracing diversity and implementing equitable practices ensures that team members feel safe and belong.
Ensuring fair treatment and equitable resource access creates opportunities for personal and organizational growth.
👉Related: What Is Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace?
While it is normal for high-performing teams to work under intense schedules, a healthy work-life balance has to be maintained to avoid burnout. Leaders who fail to understand the need for a healthy work-life balance do not create psychologically safe environments. A balanced workload, paired with support systems, is important for employee physical and mental well-being.
An excess workload coupled with consistently high-stress environments undermines psychological safety at work. When employees are under too much pressure, they make more mistakes but rarely own mistakes or share concerns.
The relationship between colleagues at the workplace is important for building psychological safety. Cultivating a culture is mutual respect, trust, and support creates environments where members feel confident to speak up and share ideas.
<div id ="five">
With the many benefits of psychological safety in the workplace, investing in it long-term requires deliberate and consistent action from leadership and the workforce to ensure a change in attitudes and model the right behavior.
The following is a way to build a successful psychological safety environment:
Lead by Example.
Leaders set the tone of operations in a workplace to create psychological safety in the workplace. Showing openness, humility, acknowledging own mistakes, being transparent, welcoming unique perspectives, and being empathetic encourages employees to follow in the leader's steps.
Encourage open communication.
Leaders should facilitate an open and transparent flow of ideas and information. Allowing input from all team members and utilizing inclusive meeting practices will ensure that everyone's voice is heard and
Respond Constructively to Mistakes.
Errors and mistakes are inevitable in any organization. Paying attention to and accounting for them when creating psychological safety in the workplace will create an environment that feels safe and productive. How leaders handle errors helps employees to be comfortable speaking up and focus on providing solutions while implementing the lessons learned.
Show appreciation for contributions.
Leaders should recognize persons who contribute fully to workplace psychological safety. Individuals who speak up, share ideas, and raise concerns should be appreciated to reinforce the behavior and encourage continued participation and implementation.
Foster Mutual Respect.
In the absence of fear in the workplace, respect for leaders and vice versa should be cultivated. By setting clear expectations for information flow, encouraging active listening, acknowledging other members' points of view, and avoiding dismissive responses, trust and respect are built across the team.
Invest in training and development.
Leadership training programs within organizations should include psychological safety in their curricula. Leadership coaches should provide workshops on emotional intelligence and conflict resolution to equip team members with the ability to navigate challenging situations among colleagues and maintain a harmonious work environment.
👉Related: Leadership Training for Managers: 10 Skills to Learn
Make Psychological Safety a Core Value
With the increasing benefits of psychologically safe work environments, leaders should initiate an intentional effort to integrate psychological safety into every aspect of the organization. From onboarding to performance reviews, psychological safety has to be embedded into the organization's culture rather than becoming a separate initiative.
<div id ="six">
Promoting workplace psychological safety is not always an easy task. Organizations face cultural and operational challenges that undermine efforts to maintain psychological safety. Taking targeted actions can allow leaders to overcome these challenges.
Organizations can build strong teams with a trustworthy culture where members feel free to exchange ideas, take risks, and fully contribute to the success of the team by proactively tackling these challenges.
Some of the challenges include the following:
Hierarchical Power Dynamics
Conventional leadership styles with strict hierarchies as the status quo lower employee morale and deter individuals from speaking up due to the possibility of retaliation or criticism.
This problem can be addressed by encouraging open forums, increasing information channels, and actively allowing input from all levels of the organization.
Fear of Making Mistakes
Workplaces with almost zero tolerance for mistakes build a climate of dread in their workforce. Errors are actively punished, and mistakes remain hidden, causing limited and bad feedback in some cases.
Organizations can overcome this challenge by redefining the concept of making mistakes as learning opportunities and rewarding risk-taking and experimentation, especially when it aligns with the business goals.
Resistance to Change
Organizational culture tends to have inertia that causes resistance to a new mindset. Openness and collaboration may be viewed with suspicion, and there may be hesitance to speak up.
To overcome the resistance to change, members have to be educated on the benefits of psychological safety and training workshops provided to improve awareness.
Lack of Leadership Commitment
Leadership sets the tone for the entire organization. If the leaders fail to foster psychological safety, efforts and motivation to implement will stall.
Offering training on inclusivity and encouraging leaders to immerse their whole selves in implementing psychologically safe behaviour can solve commitment problems.
Poor Team Dynamics
Poor team cohesion and a lack of robust conflict resolution mechanisms prevent open dialogue, creating information silos and mistrust.
Utilizing team building exercises and improving conflict resolution training to bring harmony among members strengthens relationships and can overcome this challenge.
Remote and Hybrid Work Challenges
Working remotely can result in the separation of employees, making it harder to build relationships and potentially leading to misunderstandings. Trust gradually erodes when one cannot read the emotions and tone of a member.
To overcome this problem, leaders should encourage video meetings and remove information barriers, as well as promote informal opportunities for virtual connection.
<div id ="seven">
A psychologically safe work environment, where employees feel comfortable speaking up, sharing ideas, and admitting mistakes without fear of judgment, is not just a “nice-to-have” but a proven driver of business success. Measuring its impact is essential for leaders who want to link workplace culture directly to performance.
For example, Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the number one factor in high-performing teams. In such environments, employees are more likely to share creative solutions, flag potential risks early, and collaborate effectively. These behaviors directly translate to faster problem-solving and greater innovation.
The impact can be measured using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. Metrics such as employee engagement scores, turnover rates, and productivity levels provide tangible indicators. For instance, if turnover drops by 20% after implementing open feedback channels, that is a clear return on investment. Surveys and pulse checks can reveal whether employees feel safe to disagree with leadership or admit mistakes without repercussions.
Qualitative insights from focus groups and one-on-one interviews can uncover real stories of how psychological safety improved team outcomes. A software development team, for example, might report that openly discussing coding errors led to a 30% reduction in bugs, saving the company time and resources.
When leaders measure these results and act on them, they not only foster happier and more engaged employees but also strengthen the organization’s resilience and long-term competitiveness.
<div id ="eight">
If you are struggling to create a psychologically safe workplace, Highrise can guide you every step of the way. As a comprehensive leadership development program for growth-minded professionals, we equip you with the tools, strategies, and mindset needed to foster trust, openness, and collaboration within your team. Contact us today to learn more and start building a work environment where people thrive and performance excels.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
