Identifying Psychological Safety
Since psychological safety is the unconscious belief that a situation is safe enough for risk-taking, it can’t be measured directly. It is however, possible to measure the conscious correlates of psychological safety.
Psychological safety is subjective, so the metrics have to be subjective.
Tracking objective behaviours won’t give you useful data and has substantial negative side effects. If an employer tracks success based on objective behaviours, employees are incentivized to behave as if there is psychological safety even when there isn’t. In personal decision-making situations, we would describe this as reckless behaviour. In an employment situation, it is a survival tactic, But the cost is great.
Functioning in an unsafe environment damages people’s mental health and results in poor decision-making and burnout. The cost of creating psychological safety for the employee is externalized to the mental health system and hidden in reduced productivity and employee retention issues.
The metrics used to assess psychological safety at scale need to be subjective, anonymous, and segmented according to the categories of historical exclusion and cultural training that create systemic impediments to psychological safety.1
Being included and welcome as you are is the foundation of psychological safety. Without that foundation, learning is impaired, contributing one’s own ideas is scary, and challenging the status quo is impossible. To oversimplify things greatly, social status conveys safety. Any actual impediment to high status or assumption that impediments to high status exist decreases an individuals’s sense of safety. You want to be able to tell when some subsets of people feel safe to challenge the status quo and others feel like they have to hide who they are to stay out of trouble. 2 Segmenting by population allows you to assess the Inclusion element of your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda.
A Sample Survey
To quantify your data and measure change, a simple survey with a 5-point Likert-type scale is sufficient.3
Ask employees to rate the following statements on a scale of 1-5.
I feel welcome here.
My unique skills and talents are valued and utilized here.
My opinions are welcome here.
I feel comfortable offering constructive criticism of other people’s ideas.
If I make a mistake at this organization, it won’t be held against me.
I feel comfortable asking for help.
No one at this organization would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
I believe I have fair and equal opportunities here.
In small groups, anonymity is hard to maintain and care must be made to avoid false promises of anonymity.
For now, I am going to ignore the fact that without sufficient representational diversity, you cannot anonymize diversity data. Creating psychological safety for people from historically excluded populations during the process of increasing diversity is a particularly knotty problem.
Strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree.