How do you improve Psychological Safety? First you need to measure it
It’s taken almost 25 years, since Harvard’s Dr Amy Edmondson first coined the term in 1999, but the world is finally waking up to the importance of Psychological Safety in the workplace.
And, with beneficial effects that range from enhanced team performance, innovation, and problem-solving, to increased individual well-being and job satisfaction, to reduced staff turnover, it’s no wonder.
The sticking point for many, however, is the intangible nature of Psychological Safety. While there are many steps an organization can take to foster Psychological Safety and create an environment in which it can flourish, it’s not something you can see or easily measure.
Or rather it wasn’t until now.
After more than two years of intensive research and testing, I’m delighted to announce that Attuned has successfully created a new Psychological Safety Assessment that is truly the first of its kind.
Constructed from the ground up by our team of psychologists and data scientists, this easy-to-use, survey-based tool provides a clear and accurate score that shows organizations the exact state of Psychological Safety on any given team. That means no more guesswork, no more imprecise online quizzes, and no more expensive consultancies. Now you can know the level of Psychological Safety for your team definitively, and at-a-glance.
Why have we built a Psychological Safety Assessment?
Our mission here at Attuned is to make the invisible psychological data that exists around us, and between us, visible so that organizations can use it to make relationships better and work more meaningful.
Initially, we focused on Intrinsic Motivation. (In fact, we still do, and we’re very good at it! 😉) What we found, though, was that the most impactful outcomes our customers were gaining from using Attuned were improvements in Psychological Safety.
We learned that, for the most part, our customers bought Attuned to make a culture shift in their organization, to make it more agile and more resilient. Or, they wanted to fix specific people problems: reduce employee turnover, hire better, or improve the quality of 1-on-1s. And, with varying timeframes, Attuned delivered these results. But almost without exception, we found that our customers had to pass through the waystation of Psychological Safety to get to their destination.
Our Intrinsic Motivation solution is very strong at building 1-to-1 relationships—particularly at helping improve the relationship quality between two individuals with very different worldviews. Once understanding is increased between two individuals, trust can start to grow. And with trust comes better communication, which leads to better Psychological Safety.
The pathway looks something like this:
When brought to the team level, the process looks like this:
In short, our customers bought Attuned because they wanted to achieve better business outcomes, but for us to deliver those business outcomes, we first had to build higher Psychological Safety through the 1-on-1 usage of Attuned’s Intrinsic Motivation insights between individuals within each team.
But what we didn’t have was a way to measure the level of Psychological Safety, whether at the beginning of the process, or as team communication and interpersonal understanding improved.
We looked at pretty much all the existing options out there that claimed to provide visibility on Psychological Safety, but there wasn’t anything comprehensive enough, easy enough to use, or that felt like it could be reliable enough to base a people strategy on.
So we built it ourselves.
The building blocks of Psychological Safety
In creating our Psychological Safety Assessment, our R&D team took a deep dive into all the available research papers and academia around the topic and identified six “risky” behaviors that, if team members feel comfortable taking them, will add up to greater overall Psychological Safety.
These six behaviors can be seen as the building blocks, or sub-levels, of Psychological Safety:
As you may know, Psychological Safety is a team-based phenomenon. That is, it is something that exists within a specific team rather than across a whole organization, and different teams within the same organization could have completely different levels of Psychological Safety.
Here is what a team report using our Psychological Safety Assessment will look like:
This is the real Psychological Safety score for our Development team. The scoring is on a scale of 1–5, with 5 being the highest. And, with an overall score of 4.28, the Psychological Safety on our Development team is pretty good.
As you can see, as well as providing an overall Psychological Safety score, we’ve taken things further by adding subscales based on each of the six “risky” behaviors. These subscales break down Psychological Safety into the different components that create it to give you more visibility into individual areas that may need attention. This means you’ll have a clearer idea of where and how to start if you want to improve your team’s Psychological Safety.
Here is another team within Attuned, our International team:
Our Attuned International team has a very strong score of 4.51 for overall Psychological Safety. Moving down the subscales, ‘Knowledge Sharing’ is an exceptional 4.93, and ‘Making Decisions’ is also a standout at 4.76. But ‘Authentic Self-expression’ is 3.67, placing it in the ‘Average’ range. We need to make improvements there. But it’s encouraging for me as CEO to see that our current Psychological Safety scores are pretty high across all our teams.
However, many organizations around the world may have more work to do to achieve a high level of Psychological Safety. For comparison, here’s an example of a team with a score in the ‘Average’ zone, with some subscale areas rating ‘Low’:
For this team, it’s important that effective action is taken quickly to improve Psychological Safety, or things will likely get worse.
Being able to reliably and accurately measure Psychological Safety is a real breakthrough, but our Assessment also goes one step further: it lets organizations do this at scale. No matter how many teams a company might have, our Assessment provides a snapshot of the current level of Psychological Safety in any of those teams, both overall and at the subscale level.
To paraphrase Peter Drucker, “what gets measured gets done.” And with the ability to measure Psychological Safety at scale and across organizations, leaders will be able to introduce initiatives and strategies to improve it, and then track their progress, tweaking as they go.
What happens next?
It’s still early days for our Psychological Safety Assessment, and we are only just releasing our Alpha version. As we collect more data, we’ll refine the algorithms and release a Beta version. The visuals on the report will improve, and it will become more intuitive and even easier to use.
At the same time, we are building a library of tips and actions tied to each subscore, which busy managers can use to improve their team’s Psychological Safety. We believe that managers shouldn’t have to do the hard work of figuring out what to do next, so Attuned will chart the improvement journey for them, delivering bite-sized, actionable instructions and nudges every step of the way.
We’ll also continue to work on how and when these tips and nudges will be delivered. Our goal is to deliver the right tip, in the right context, at exactly the right moment. For example, before a 1-on-1 that doesn’t usually go well, we’ll deliver a nudge to help the manager change their approach to allow for a smoother, more meaningful conversation. Or, before a team meeting, Attuned might nudge the manager to talk less and instead try to bring the quieter members into the discussion to allow for more ‘Authentic Self-expression.’
For us, this will be a multiyear journey. Realistically, it will take years—possibly decades—until measurement of Psychological Safety for every team everywhere becomes the norm. But even during this transition period, teams will get better.
With higher Psychological Safety, members of teams will feel less anxious and have less fear. There will be less burnout, employees will stick around longer, and fewer catastrophic mistakes will be made because people will be more willing to point out the faults in a system or a decision before things go bad. More innovation will happen as team members will be more likely to share their half-baked ideas—because they won’t fear being shot down or looking stupid. More meaningful work will happen for more people, and the benefits of Psychological Safety will be experienced by a much broader swath of people, not just the lucky few with a great manager.
We care deeply about Psychological Safety, and about creating a solution that can be used by any organization, anywhere. As our learnings compound, we’ll make it easier for leaders to get the outcomes they want, to take real action, to change their behavior, and to create a more Psychologically Safe world.
I’m excited by this prospect. It feels like everything could change, like everything could be better. With a greater level of Psychological Safety, tomorrow can be different.
Please drop us a line if:
You’re interested in trying out the Alpha version of our Psychological Safety Assessment.
You’d like to partner with us as a coach or consultant.
You’d like to know more about how you can transform your work culture by focusing on Intrinsic Motivation and Psychological Safety.