Psychological safety

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is when you feel able to:

• express your ideas and concerns openly
• ask questions
• recognise your mistakes
• challenge others, including authority figures, without fear of negative consequences.¹

Psychological safety is crucial to having a positive, supportive and productive working environment. It's also a crucial component in the journey to advancing race equity.

Why is it important?

Any healthy workplace, especially one that strives for excellence, requires people to speak up and do the right thing without fear of consequences. The more we're able to do that, the more we're able to do good work. But most of us have experienced situations where we've not felt psychologically safe at work. For example, we might have felt intimidated to speak up or worried about whether people will accept our ideas.

No two people have exactly the same definition of psychological safety: one person might prefer to work in an environment where all ideas can be expressed freely. Another person might prefer for there to be certain 'ground rules' in place to ensure that topics are spoken about with care. Leaders cannot always cater to everyone's version of psychological safety, but their job is to try to make people feel as safe as possible.

The interviews we conducted to develop this resource highlighted that people who are often marked out as 'different' have extra challenges when it comes to feeling psychologically safe at work. People from the Global Majority reported feeling psychologically unsafe because daily they experience forms of racial prejudice and discrimination, such as unconscious bias and microaggressions. Some also reported feeling less psychologically safe in a team where they are the only person from the Global Majority. It's important to think about what we can do, as individuals, to ensure the psychological safety of others.

This is especially complicated when we're having conversations about race at work. We need psychological safety to have meaningful conversations about race. And people from the Global Majority may feel afraid to talk about their experiences out of fear of judgment or retribution, or simply because of the psychological toll of talking about difficult personal experiences. Many people who are not from the Global Majority struggle to talk about race for fear of being judged for saying 'the wrong thing'. We need psychological safety to be able to talk about how we can advance race equity.

What does psychological safety look like?

When psychological safety is present in a workplace, people feel free to:

• challenge the status quo
• make mistakes and admit to them
• share feedback with junior staff, peers and leadership alike
• work through disagreements together

Psychological safety doesn't mean everyone agrees all the time. In fact, disagreements might be more common in teams with psychological safety. The difference is that those disagreements are usually resolved, and the team is better off for having had them.

There are many benefits of creating a psychologically safe workplace, including:

• improved performance
• greater levels of creativity and innovation
• better communication
• increased openness to learning and improvement

How can I help to create a psychologically safe environment?