Psychological Safety
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is the belief that one can take interpersonal risks without suffering negative consequences. This includes speaking up with an idea in a meeting, challenging the status quo, making a change, or admitting a mistake.
Where does the concept come from?
In 1999, Dr. Amy Edmondson researched the performance of clinical teams and discovered that the best-performing teams admitted to more mistakes than lower-performing teams. From this, Dr. Edmondson developed the concept of psychological safety, proposing that it is a key factor in team performance.
Later, in 2013, Google’s Project Aristotle corroborated Edmondson’s findings, identifying psychological safety as the single most important factor for a team to perform at its highest potential. It topped their list of the five most influential factors in team performance:
Psychological safety
Dependability
Structure and clarity.
Meaning
Impact
In 2019, 2020, and 2021, the State of DevOps reports consistently showed that psychological safety is essential to the performance of not just delivery teams, but entire organisations. Other elements such as easy-to-use tools and readily available information are also valuable, but psychological safety is undoubtedly the keystone of high performance.
What are the benefits for your organisation?
Whether your organisation is a small startup, the NHS, a Council, a charity, or a governmental body, building psychological safety will reap rewards.
The tangible benefits of building psychological safety in your organisation range from improved innovation, better ideas, and products that thrill your customers, to reduced risk of failures, breaches, and non-compliance. Psychological safety results in happier teams that take more intelligent risks, raise concerns sooner, stay on the team longer, are more resilient to change and external threats, and ultimately result in a real improvement to the bottom line of your business or organisation.
Additionally, to build diversity in your organisation, you must first create a culture of inclusion. Inclusion is only fostered through psychological safety: people will not feel included without first feeling safe.
Whether you work for a private company, non-profit organisation, government agency, building psychological safety within your teams will return real results:
Greater likelihood of successful innovation, supporting creativity and trailblazing ideas and learning from innovation.
Enhanced ability to learn from mistakes, resulting in fewer issues or outages, higher quality, and improved governance and controls.
Increased reporting of concerns and security issues, reducing the risk of security, health and safety, or non-compliance incidents.
Higher employee engagement, leading to lower staff turnover and reduced costs related to recruitment and absenteeism.
Improved reputation, enhancing the ability to recruit the best talent.
Increased profitability because of all the above.
Fundamentally, building psychological safety is not only the right thing to do for members of your teams, but it’s the right thing to do for your business or organisation.