Part 1: The Power and Peril of Naming Over the past five years of our work in psychological safety, it has transformed from a little-known term, understood and explicitly practised by only a small group of researchers and practitioners, to […] The post Reflections on Psychological Safety: Five Years of Learning appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity and culture. In this piece, we’re going to dive […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Isn’t Enough We hear this sometimes, and well… Obviously. It’s rather like saying that having a fully functioning car isn’t enough to make a road trip – and of course it isn’t. We need lots more things to […] The post Psychological Safety Isn’t Enough appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Every year we hold Psych Safety Days and other events for our wonderful community to come together, share insights, learn new practices and examine emergent research and evidence. We’re currently putting together ideas for Psych Safety Day 2026, so if […] The post Psych Safety Day 2026 appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
There isn’t a “one-size-fits-all”, cookie-cutter, road map approach to psychological safety. There are some foundational practices and principles, but the experience of psychological safety, and how it manifests, is different for everyone. Our background, culture, neurodiversities, abilities, needs and preferences […] The post Psychological safety isn’t the same for everyone appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative, and happy teams. It shapes whether we feel safe speaking up, sharing ideas, […] The post The State of Psychological Safety Survey: 2025 appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt It will probably come as no great surprise to those of us who work with the concept of psychological safety that one of the earliest references to the term in academic and psychological literature comes from Carl […] The post Psychological Safety and Creativity appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Barriers to Psychological Safety There are many team-level, organisation-level and broader barriers to speaking up, including (most significantly) steep power gradients, cultural norms (organisational or otherwise), and others. But in this research we wanted to examine the experiential barriers to […] The post Barriers to Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
We’re currently planning Psych Safety Day 2025! Likely location is Malaga, Spain, in September or October. Contact us for more information and to be on the “find out first” list!| Psych Safety
Effectively manage interactions with a condescending boss. This guide provides a clear path to respond with composure and set professional boundaries.| CLIMB
How you respond matters. “Everything you do is important to your organization. People are watching you. The people in your organization determine how to move forward after both successful work and how to recover after failure by watching how you […] The post How you respond matters. appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Practices that Foster Psychological Safety There are many behaviours that (depending on the context) can help to foster psychological safety, over 170 of which are listed in our big list of psychological safety behaviours. However, there are also many practices […] The post Practices that Foster Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Feedback in the workplace In our “Delivering Effective Feedback” workshops, we explore participants’ experiences of feedback, and we find, of all the feedback they’ve received so far in their career, roughly: So this seemed like an excellent avenue to explore […]| Psych Safety
Job Security and Psychological Safety In a lot of “What Psychological Safety Is Not” articles, we often come across statements like “psychological safety is not job security”. And that’s true, to a degree. Psychological safety is not the same as […] The post Job Security and Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Research Pulse Last week, we asked “Typically, how familiar are people in your workplace with the concept of psychological safety?”. 121 people responded, and the distribution across the whole sample looked like this. The most common responses were […] The post Research: how familiar are people with the concept of psychological safety? appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Why do We Foster Psychological Safety? By Tom Geraghty and Jade Garratt It’s easy, when considering why we should work on psychological safety, to go straight to the organisational benefits: improved learning, greater innovation, higher quality products or services and […] The post Why do We Foster Psychological Safety? appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Why Just Culture Isn’t Sticking by Tom Geraghty What Do We Mean by “Just” Culture? The concept of a “Just Culture” was first developed in James Reason’s 1997 book Managing the Risks of Organisational Accidents. When we say “Just Culture”, […] The post Just Culture appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt Have you ever found yourself reacting to something a colleague said as if you were a child being told off by their parents, even though you’re both adults and peers? Or ever said something to a teammate […] The post Transactional Analysis appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Comfort vs Need by Tom Geraghty What do we do when the things that help some people in the team feel psychologically safer don’t work for everyone? Perhaps one person says they need time away from the main meeting group […]| Psych Safety
The Organisational Fabric of Psychological Safety (AKA psychological safety is more than just a team phenomenon) By Tom Geraghty When we talk about psychological safety, the definition we usually use is something along the lines of “a shared belief that […]| Psych Safety
All Feedback Is Subjective By Jade Garratt … And Why That Matters for Psychological Safety “No person in the world is so privileged as to have access to a ‘ground truth’ against which all other people’s understanding can be proven […]| Psych Safety
Déformation professionnelle By Tom Geraghty “Every specialist, owing to a well-known professional bias, believes that he understands the entire human being, while in reality he only grasps a tiny part of him.” Alexis Carrel, Nobel laureate We all see the […]| Psych Safety
by Navya Adhikarla When we talk about creating inclusive workplaces, we often discuss accessibility and psychological safety as separate initiatives. Accessibility (also abbreviated as a11y) focuses on removing physical and digital barriers, while psychological safety addresses the emotional and social […]| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt How do you feel when you hear the words “You have a body“? And how do you feel when you hear it in a work context? You might find it confusing – a kind of “well, obviously”, or […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Doesn’t Mean Feeling Comfortable By Jade Garratt There are many misconceptions about psychological safety. One is that if we “achieve” psychological safety, it means that people will feel comfortable all the time. It’s understandable to see how that […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety and Micromanagement By Jade Garratt Those who have followed our work at Psych Safety for a while will know that we believe exploring not just what to do – the behaviours and practices that support psychological safety – […]| Psych Safety
The Spectrum of Participation by Jade Garratt Engagement and participation are terms we often throw around to mean “getting people’s take on issues that affect them.” But not all participation is created equal. Sometimes, “inviting participation” amounts to little more […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety in Practice Team Learning in the Field: An Organizing Framework and Avenues for Future Research This excellent paper from Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey affirms that teams learn most effectively when members feel safe to speak up, take interpersonal risks, […]| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt In our experience, the most effective lever for increasing psychological safety within a team is flattening the power gradient – the gap between those with the most power and those with the least. In practice, this usually […]| Psych Safety
The Speaking up Myth By Jade Garratt In the world of psychological safety, we focus a lot, maybe even too much, on the speaking up side of the equation. How do we make sure people speak up with their ideas, […]| Psych Safety
The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. One of the (many) barriers to speaking up is the knowledge or perception that your voice doesn’t carry as much weight as someone else’s. This can be particularly common when in the presence of those […]| Psych Safety
Addressing Power through “Flattening” Organisations Steep power gradients are one of the most significant factors that contribute to reducing psychological safety. These steep differentials in perceived power have contributed to many disasters including the Tenerife Airport disaster in 1977, Chernobyl, […]| Psych Safety
Work doesn’t have to suck By Jade Garratt The start of a new year seems like a good time to reflect on how work feels, and how we feel about work. For too many of us, going to work isn’t […]| Psych Safety
Typologies of Power In a few previous newsletters, we’ve gotten into power dynamics, power gradients, “power over” vs “power for” and “power to” (see Mary Parker Follett). Steep power gradients are the number one inhibitor of psychological safety, and addressing […]| Psych Safety
We’ve been rather busy this week, in the midst of this round of psychological safety online workshops, including fundamentals, practices, leadership, measurement, advanced, and workshop design and facilitation. With that in mind, we thought it would be a good time […]| Psych Safety
The Chatham House Rule By Jade Garratt We always begin our workshops with a social contract. These are important because they make sure at the very beginning, that we’re on the same page in terms of our expectations of each […]| Psych Safety
A team is only as safe as the least safe person When measuring the psychological safety in a team, we often are asked which measurement should be considered the “group measurement,” given that different individuals will likely experience rather different […]| Psych Safety
Being Approachable By Jade Garratt Most of us would probably like to think of ourselves as approachable at work. We might have bad moments, or bad days, but we will likely think that on the whole, we are approachable. Approachability […]| Psych Safety
The Definition Of Psychological Safety Psychological safety is defined as the belief, in a group, that we are safe to take interpersonal risks. It’s the belief that we are able to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes, and […]| Psych Safety
The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety I recently tried to work out how many people have attended one or more of our workshops on psychological safety, including our workshops for teams and organisations, our online workshops, and any we’ve […]| Psych Safety
How to foster psychological safety with your own manager. By Jade Garratt Psychological safety isn’t only the responsibility of those in leadership positions. We believe that if you have the power to destroy psychological safety for someone – if you […]| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt, Bea Poyton and Tom Geraghty In our leadership workshops, we often talk about failures of psychological safety – what happens when, in an absence of psychological safety, concerns are not raised, questions remain unasked, mistakes are hidden […]| Psych Safety
Experiments, bets and probes One of our mottos at PsychSafety is “everything is an experiment”. The outcome of work shouldn’t just be getting the thing done, it should be learning how to do it better next time. Experiments don’t mean […]| Psych Safety
(DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) We’ve recently seen more and more people (almost always white, straight men) jumping on the “DEI didn’t work” bandwagon, even some who are prominent in the psychological safety domain. And it’s really worrying, so […]| Psych Safety
How psychological safety emerges and changes over time in the workplace. Given that psychological safety itself is a relatively young field, there’s not a huge amount of published research that addresses the longitudinal dynamics of psychological safety in the workplace: […]| Psych Safety
The Interrelationship between Psychological Safety And Wellbeing When we talk about psychological safety in our workshops and sessions, the concept of wellbeing almost always comes up. This makes sense, since psychological safety is essentially about how people feel at work. […]| Psych Safety
The Pac-Man rule One of the main reasons to go to a conference, event or meetup is to meet people and have interesting conversations. I’ve found myself at day-long conferences where I’ve not attended a single talk, and instead found […]| Psych Safety
Ten Ways to Foster Psychological Safety in the Workplace We’ve been reflecting on our last few years of experience delivering psychological safety workshops, training and consultancy in organisations around the world. Based on all those wonderful experiences, working with industries […]| Psych Safety
We love to measure stuff, don’t we? Maybe it’s human nature, but we seem to have a strong desire to make the intangible tangible, and we tend (or at least many of us do) to believe in the robustness of […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety and Safeguarding Article by Jade Garratt Imagine suspecting, or even knowing, that something is terribly wrong, but feeling unable to speak up about your concerns. This feeling can be all too real in environments where safeguarding is essential, […]| Psych Safety
The Workplace Psychological Safety Act (WPSA) is proposed USA legislation aimed at addressing and mitigating psychological abuse, including bullying and mobbing, in the workplace. This act seeks to provide comprehensive protection for all employees, regardless of their membership in a […]| Psych Safety
The online Psychological Safety Community has been live since early 2021, and currently has around 800 members. It’s completely free to join, and we have some great conversations there. A lot of newsletter topics and sharing items come from discussions […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety and DevOps Practices This is a special edition article by Balázs Szakmáry Developing software of any real complexity is a task that goes well beyond one person and one computer. The people, the machines, and the processes involved […]| Psych Safety
Leadership and Empathy One of the most powerful capabilities that leaders and managers can possess is empathy. Arguably, the same could be said for anyone – we can best understand and help others when we’re able to see the world […]| Psych Safety
In the real world, psychological safety is political. There are some who say that psychological safety isn’t political. We think it is. What does “political” mean? At its broadest level, politics determine the ways people in groups make decisions. This […]| Psych Safety
Reviewing the link between psychological safety, respectful workplaces, and harassment, the importance of a workplace culture of prevention and support , links to MiHR tools and how this all ties-into the TSM 2023 Safe, Healthy, & Respectful Workplace Protocol update.| Akashic Communications
by Carly LeonidaMay 31, 2023 Safety is a non-negotiable construct in the mining industry today. It’s the number one concern on site and, when we think about safety, we naturally think of physical safety… Am I wearing the right personal protective equipment (PPE)? Am I...| Akashic Communications
After over 25 years of working in and consulting to the mining industry, I’ve grown accustomed to the need to create compelling arguments to get a variety of internal and external social performance topics higher-up on the organizational radar screen. Factoring in ample time for...| Akashic Communications
Mental health and the importance of psychological health and safety in the workplace were spotlighted at the annual Health and Safety awards breakfast at the Association of Mineral Explorers (AME) Roundup conference in Vancouver this week. Keynote speaker Michelle Hohn’s advice regarding addressing gaps in...| Akashic Communications
Michelle was honoured to be asked to speak at the 2023 AME Roundup Environment, Health & Safety Award Breakfast. Her talk focused on what Psychological Health & Safety means, as well as practical and realistic entry points on the adoption curve, including stage-appropriate ways to...| Akashic Communications