Psychological Safety at Work: What It Is and How to Build It

What Is Psychological Safety at Work?

Psychological safety at work is the shared sense in a team that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks. In practice that means someone can say “I don’t understand”, “I got that wrong” or “I think this plan has a problem” without being embarrassed, shut down or punished for it.

The CIPD’s evidence review on high-performing teams puts it this way, drawing on Amy Edmondson’s research: psychological safety at the group level is “a shared belief held by members that the group is safe for ‘interpersonal risk-taking’”, a sense of confidence “that others will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up”.

Two words in that definition matter. Shared means it belongs to the team, not to one confident individual. Interpersonal means the risk is social: looking foolish, being seen as negative, upsetting the boss. Those small fears decide whether problems get raised on Monday or discovered in an incident report on Friday.

It’s one of the ideas at the heart of The Way We Work, our flagship team day, and of the conversations we have with managers in our management training.

Where Does the Idea Come From?

The CIPD’s practice summary on trust and psychological safety traces the idea to Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis in 1965. It became widely known over the past two decades through the work of Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, whose 1999 paper “Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams” (Administrative Science Quarterly) set out the team-level definition and the survey most organisations still use to measure it.

What Psychological Safety Isn’t

Because the phrase is everywhere, it gets stretched. It helps to be clear about what it doesn’t mean.

• It isn’t being nice. A polite team where nobody raises concerns, to keep the peace, has low psychological safety. Psychological safety is what makes difficult conversations possible.
• It isn’t lowering standards. People are still held to account for their work. The difference is that mistakes and problems are talked about openly, so they get fixed.
• It isn’t the same as trust. The CIPD review explains that trust is about your view of other people, while psychological safety is about whether you believe others will give you the benefit of the doubt when you take a risk. Trust is usually between two people; psychological safety is a feature of a group.
• It isn’t a perk or a wellbeing extra. It’s a working condition that affects how well a team learns, decides and stays safe.

Why Psychological Safety Matters for Safety and Performance

The evidence on performance

The CIPD’s scientific summary on psychological safety found “compelling evidence” that psychological safety enables people to ask critical questions, seek help, report mistakes, raise concerns and offer suggestions without fear of negative consequences. Its meta-analysis findings link psychological safety strongly with, among other things, co-worker support, information-sharing, team learning, team performance, retention, engagement and safety outcomes.

The review is honest about the limits: many of those studies are cross-sectional, so the direction of cause and effect isn’t always certain. Its high-performing teams review adds that a large meta-analysis of 136 studies, covering 5,000 teams, found psychological safety has a moderate to large impact on team performance.

One finding is especially useful for managers. The CIPD reports that good leadership styles (empowering, transformational, inclusive and others) only produce better outcomes, including occupational safety, when people see their team as psychologically safe. In other words, leadership training on its own won’t land if people still don’t feel able to speak.

Why it matters for health and safety

Most hazards are noticed first by the person doing the job. Whether that knowledge reaches someone who can act depends on whether it feels safe to say it. The CIPD’s practice summary is direct about this: in high-stakes environments, “it is essential that people can speak up, report errors early and ask for help, so problems are found and fixed quickly.”

HSE makes the same point from a safety culture angle. Its guidance on learning organisations lists barriers to learning that include “scapegoating” rather than addressing deep-rooted problems, a culture of individual “error” rather than a systems approach, and “not listening to ‘bad news’”. Each of those is a sign of low psychological safety. That’s why it sits alongside behavioural safety and safety culture: you can’t build a culture where people look out for one another if they’re afraid to speak.

It also connects to wellbeing. HSE’s Management Standards for work-related stress include Support and Relationships. The standard for Relationships expects an organisation to promote positive behaviours at work “to avoid conflict and ensure fairness”, and to have systems that enable and encourage employees to report unacceptable behaviour. If you’re doing a stress risk assessment, the questions overlap.

Signs Psychological Safety Is Missing

You rarely see a lack of psychological safety directly. You see what people don’t do. Look for:

• Quiet meetings. The same two or three people talk; everyone else nods. Questions at the end are met with silence.
• Bad news arrives late. Problems surface only when they can’t be hidden any more, often as a missed deadline, a complaint or an incident.
• Near misses go unreported. Your near miss reporting figures are suspiciously low for the kind of work you do.
• Mistakes lead to blame. The first question after something goes wrong is “who?” rather than “why?”.
• The real conversation happens afterwards. People agree in the meeting and disagree in the car park.
• New starters guess rather than ask. They’d rather risk getting it wrong than look like they don’t know.
• Departments blame each other. “That’s production’s problem” or “sales promised it, not us”. This is often where silo working starts.

Edmondson’s survey turns these signs into something you can track. The CIPD reproduces the seven items; two of them are “Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues” and “It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help” (scored in reverse). HSE’s guidance on organisational culture adds a sensible rule for any survey: act on the findings and feed them back to employees, or the next one will be ignored.

How Managers Build Psychological Safety: Practical Steps

The CIPD’s recommendations for leaders and people managers give a practical starting list. Here they are, with what each looks like on a normal working day.

1. Involve people in decisions that affect them. Before you change a rota, a process or a target, ask the people who’ll live with it. You’ll get better decisions, and they’ll learn that their view counts.
2. Give people autonomy. Where you can, let people decide how to organise their own work. The CIPD notes that sharing power and encouraging participative decision-making help people feel able to speak up.
3. Treat mistakes as learning. When something goes wrong, ask what made it likely, not who to blame. Thank people who report their own errors.
4. Listen properly. Give your full attention, don’t interrupt, and don’t jump to conclusions. The CIPD names non-judgemental, empathetic, respectful listening as a leader behaviour that builds psychological safety.
5. Ask for feedback, and give it well. Ask your team what you could do differently, then act on one thing. Our guide to giving constructive feedback covers the other direction.
6. Go first with your own mistakes. The CIPD recommends leaders “lead by example, sharing mistakes and uncertainties with the team”. If the manager can say “I got that wrong”, so can everyone else.
7. Handle conflict fairly. Make sure everyone involved gets to put their side. The CIPD links a cooperative conflict style, built on concern, respect and open communication, to the trust that lets people speak openly.
8. Respond well to bad news. This is the moment people remember. If the reaction to a problem is anger, the next problem won’t be reported. A calm “thank you for telling me, what do we need?” does more than any poster.
9. Expect it to dip, and work through it. The CIPD notes that psychological safety varies with team development: new teams often start positive, then dip as differences and clashes surface, and well-managed teams come through stronger. Our guide to Tuckman’s stages of team development explains that storming stage.

None of these needs a budget. They need a manager who does them consistently, especially when under pressure.

Silo Working: What It Is and Why It Happens

Silo working is when departments, sites or teams operate as separate islands. Each protects its own information, priorities and targets, and the links between them weaken. Customer service doesn’t know what production has changed. The mill doesn’t hear about a problem the depot spotted last week. Each team is doing its best, but the organisation as a whole works less well.

Silos and psychological safety are closely linked. People share information and raise problems with colleagues they know and trust; they’re far more guarded with a department they never see. The CIPD’s practice summary gives an example: “when multiple departments compete for ownership of a particular project, a lack of trust may impede information-sharing or collaboration and hinder project success.” HSE’s Relationships standard lists “Employees share information relevant to their work” among the things that should be happening.

Silos tend to grow when:

• teams are on different sites or shifts and rarely meet;
• each department has its own targets and nobody owns the shared ones;
• there’s been a merger, takeover or restructure, and old loyalties remain;
• the only time departments talk is when something has gone wrong.

Breaking Down Silos: What Works

Breaking down silos starts with something simple: people need to know each other. It’s much easier to pick up the phone to someone you’ve met, and much harder to blame a department when you can picture the person on the other end.

• Put faces to names. Bring people from different departments and sites into the same room, with a reason to work together rather than just a buffet.
• Agree shared ways of working. Values on a poster don’t help. What helps is a short list of agreed behaviours that apply across every team: how we pass on information, how we raise a problem, how we treat each other.
• Make shared goals visible. Where teams depend on each other, set and review at least one goal together.
• Create cross-team routines. A regular handover, a joint review of incidents or near misses, a monthly call between site leads.
• Model it from the top. If senior managers criticise other departments in front of their teams, silos will follow. HSE’s culture guidance warns that senior managers should be prepared to have their own behaviours examined and challenged.

The evidence supports investing time in this. The CIPD’s high-performing teams review reports that teambuilding has a moderate positive indirect effect on team performance and a moderate to large direct effect on trust, social cohesion and internal communication, and that teamwork training has a large positive effect on team performance. Change programmes are a natural moment to do it: see our guide to change management models.

Psychological Safety Training: How The Way We Work Builds It

The Way We Work is our flagship training: a team day, usually a full day or a good part of one, that turns your company values into the way every employee actually works. You choose the focus, whether that’s values, a code of ethics, teamwork or customer focus. It’s designed around the ideas in this guide.

• It starts with ice-breakers across teams. People from different departments and sites get to know each other before the real work starts, which is often where silo working starts to break down.
• Your values become real do’s and don’ts. Each value is turned into behaviours people can see and practise, agreed in the room rather than handed down.
• Psychological safety is woven in. We work on helping people feel safe to speak up, ask questions and raise concerns, whatever their role.
• So is behavioural safety. Looking out for one another, so safety becomes part of what the team does rather than a separate rulebook.
• It ends with team building. People leave having put the new ways of working into practice together.

We can run it at each of your sites so everyone has the same conversation, face-to-face at your sites or a venue, or virtually on Microsoft Teams for smaller teams. Many clients give it their own name, such as “One Team”. Companies use it after a merger or takeover, during a rebrand, when diversifying, or when the business is stepping up and needs everyone pulling the same way.

If your managers need support keeping it going afterwards, our management training picks up where the day leaves off.

What to Do Next

This week, at your next team meeting, ask one question and then stay quiet for longer than feels comfortable: “What’s one thing that makes your job harder that I don’t know about?” Thank whoever answers first, and fix one thing before the next meeting. That single response tells people more about psychological safety in your team than any policy.

If you want to make it part of how your whole organisation works, across departments and sites, send us an enquiry about The Way We Work and we’ll reply within one working day.