Quiet meetings can look healthy from the founder's chair. Everyone agrees, deadlines go unchallenged and client problems surface only once they are serious. The risk is that silence gets mistaken for harmony. That silence has a commercial cost: leaders make decisions with incomplete information, problems surface later and good ideas stay unspoken.
Psychological safety is the belief that you can take an interpersonal risk at work, such as asking a question, disagreeing, admitting an error or raising a concern, without expecting ridicule or punishment. The CIPD's Trust and psychological safety: An evidence review describes psychologically safe workplaces as environments where people feel more able to contribute ideas, share different views, ask questions and admit mistakes rather than spending their energy protecting themselves.
So when people ask how to build psychological safety at work, we do not start with a workshop or a values statement. We start with what happens after somebody speaks, because that is where people learn whether speaking up is actually safe.
What does psychological safety actually mean at work?
Psychological safety is not the same thing as being comfortable all the time. It does not mean constant agreement, avoiding difficult feedback or lowering performance standards.
The CIPD’s Trust and psychological safety: An evidence review draws a useful distinction: feeling safe to contribute is not the same as expecting every conversation to be comfortable. An employee should be able to question a decision or admit they need help without being humiliated. That is quite different from a team where everyone stays polite and the difficult issues never get raised.
Amy Edmondson’s study, ‘Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams’ (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999), examined 51 work teams. It found that psychological safety was associated with learning behaviour, which helped explain differences in team performance.
That distinction is important. A psychologically safe team can still have difficult conversations, because disagreement itself need not carry the threat of embarrassment or punishment.
The difference is that somebody can say, 'I think we are making the wrong call,' without spending the next three days wondering whether they have damaged their career. A junior employee should be able to ask the question everyone else assumed was obvious, while a manager can admit, 'I got that wrong,' and a team member can challenge behaviour even when the person involved has more authority.
Psychological safety makes those moments easier to have.
“Our intention has always been for our team to feel like they can be themselves at work”
Aliya Vigor-Robertson, Co-Founder, JourneyHR
Trust sits alongside it, but the two are not identical. The CIPD evidence review treats both as important workplace concepts because they affect communication, collaboration, teamwork and coordination.
We tend to think about trust as the broader belief that somebody, or the organisation, will act in a way you can rely on. Psychological safety is more specific.
It is the question: What will happen to me if I speak? That question gets answered in hundreds of small interactions.
What are the signs of low psychological safety in a team?
People stop challenging ideas
If every senior person's suggestion is met with immediate agreement, we would be curious. Particularly in a business full of capable people.
It is possible everybody genuinely agrees. Probably not every time.
A team with low psychological safety learns that disagreement carries a social cost, even if nobody has formally said so. That cost might come through a sarcastic reply, being labelled difficult or watching somebody else's idea get dismissed abruptly.
People pay attention to these things. Then they adapt.
Mistakes become private
Another of the common signs of low psychological safety in a team is that people try to fix errors before anyone notices them.
That sounds responsible on the surface. But there is a big difference between taking ownership and hiding.
If mistakes are consistently treated as evidence that somebody is careless, incompetent or not up to the job, people become very good at protecting themselves. That delays learning.
Edmondson's research is useful here because psychological safety was closely linked with team learning behaviour. Teams learn when people discuss problems, seek feedback, experiment and talk about what has not worked. You cannot learn properly from an error nobody feels safe admitting.
The same people do all the talking
In a leadership meeting, notice who speaks first and most often, whose view usually wins and who almost never disagrees.
We have worked with enough teams to know that participation patterns tell you quite a lot.
Some people will naturally speak more than others, of course. Personality matters. But when the quieter voices are consistently the more junior people, newer employees or people outside the dominant group, it is worth looking more closely.
Concerns arrive late
A problem that appears 'out of nowhere' often did not. Somebody saw it. They just did not think raising it would go particularly well.
The consequences of delayed concerns vary between businesses, but the behaviour is familiar: if employees believe nothing will happen, or something unpleasant will happen to them, they may delay speaking up.
People agree in the room and disagree afterwards
The useful conversation can end up happening after the meeting rather than inside it: everyone nods at the decision, then twenty minutes later two people are messaging each other saying it will never work. That gap is often less about communication skill than perceived interpersonal risk.
Why does psychological safety matter to performance?
There is a gap between believing psychological safety matters and making it part of everyday work. A leadership team can agree that openness is important while employees still hesitate to challenge a decision. Recognising the issue and changing how people respond are different tasks.
There is now a substantial body of research around psychological safety.
Frazier and colleagues’ ‘Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytic Review and Extension’ (Personnel Psychology, 2017) brought together 136 independent samples involving more than 22,000 people and nearly 5,000 groups. The researchers examined factors associated with psychological safety and its relationship with outcomes including task performance and organisational citizenship behaviour.
That breadth matters when deciding whether psychological safety deserves attention beyond a single team or workplace example.
Google's Project Aristotle is probably the best-known organisational example.
Google’s re:Work guide, ‘Understand team effectiveness’ (publication date not stated), describes Project Aristotle’s study of 180 teams. The researchers examined how teams worked and identified psychological safety as one of five important dynamics, alongside dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact.
The same Google guide reports that team dynamics were associated with employee retention, use of colleagues’ ideas and executive assessments of effectiveness. These are findings from Google’s own analysis, not a guarantee of equivalent results in another business.
That does not mean psychological safety single-handedly causes every one of those outcomes. It does mean there is good reason to take it seriously.
What we find useful about Project Aristotle is not the idea that every company should copy Google. It is that a business full of very intelligent people still discovered that individual talent was not enough.
The leadership question is hard to avoid. If a manager invites challenge on Monday and embarrasses someone for raising a concern on Tuesday, the team will remember Tuesday.
How do managers make employees feel safe to speak up?
Managers have an enormous influence here because employees watch what their manager rewards, ignores and reacts badly to. Policies matter. The reaction in the room matters more.
“They trust the behaviour, not the statement. Always.”
Sue Shaw, Co-Founder, JourneyHR
If you want to know how managers can make employees feel safe to speak up, start with these behaviours.
Ask before you tell
Managers often say they want input after already making their view very clear. 'I think option B is obviously the right answer, but what does everyone else think?' That is technically a question. It is not a particularly generous invitation to disagree.
A better approach is to ask for views before giving your own. 'What are we missing?' 'What concerns you about this?' 'Who sees it differently?' Those questions give people somewhere to go.
Respond properly when somebody disagrees
One reaction can undo months of saying that challenge is welcome, whether it is a visible eye-roll, a defensive answer, a joke at somebody's expense or closing the conversation down quickly.
We often tell managers that people learn more from how you receive difficult information than from what you say about openness.
If somebody challenges you and you disagree, you can still say: 'Talk me through what you are seeing.' That does not require you to accept their conclusion. It shows the disagreement itself is legitimate.
Admit when you do not know
Managers sometimes worry that saying 'I don't know' will reduce confidence in them. We think the opposite can be true.
Google’s re:Work guide draws on Edmondson’s work to suggest three useful manager behaviours: frame work as something that involves learning, acknowledge your own fallibility and model curiosity by asking questions.
A leader who occasionally says, 'I may be wrong about this,' gives everybody else permission not to arrive fully formed either. That is useful in businesses moving quickly, where pretending to know everything becomes fairly exhausting.
Separate challenge from insubordination
This is particularly important in founder-led businesses, where founders know the business extremely well and also carry a lot of positional power.
Those two things together can make challenging a founder feel risky even when the founder genuinely believes they are approachable.
We have seen founders say, sincerely, 'My door is always open.' But the test is not whether the door is open. The test is what happens after someone walks through it.
Case study: what Google learned from Project Aristotle
Google began Project Aristotle to understand why some teams were more effective than others.
The research looked across different types of teams and tested a large number of possible explanations.
One of the most useful findings was that team effectiveness was less about assembling the 'right' personalities or simply putting high performers together and more about the way people interacted. Psychological safety came first in Google's ordering of the five dynamics it identified, alongside dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact.
Google then moved beyond the research.
Teams were given surveys asking questions such as whether mistakes were held against people and whether members felt able to raise problems. Team leads received aggregated results and used them to hold discussions about how the team worked.
That part is particularly useful for smaller businesses.
The survey was a starting point for a team discussion, not an end in itself.
We would use the survey results to decide where a team discussion is needed, then look at the examples employees give before deciding what to change.
Businesses can invest heavily in reporting channels but not enough in what happens afterwards. A process people do not trust is only a process on paper.
What psychological safety actions can small businesses take?
For smaller businesses, psychological safety does not need to become a giant cultural programme. There are some very practical psychological safety actions for small businesses that can start immediately.
1. Change how meetings are run
If the same three people dominate every discussion, design the meeting differently. Ask people for views before senior leaders give theirs. Invite concerns explicitly. Give people time to think before answering.
For important decisions, consider asking everyone to write down their view first. The aim is not equal airtime for its own sake. It is preventing hierarchy and confidence from becoming the only routes into the conversation.
In a hybrid meeting, notice whether someone joining on screen is invited to contribute before the decision is made, or asked whether they agree once everyone around the table has settled it.
2. Ask what people are not saying
A useful question is: 'What are we not talking about?'
The first answer may be nothing. Ask it more than once. People often need evidence that the question is real.
3. Make manager behaviour observable
'Create psychological safety' is too vague to manage. Instead define behaviours.
For example: managers ask for challenge before giving their own view; concerns are acknowledged rather than dismissed; mistakes are reviewed for learning as well as accountability; employees receive feedback after raising an issue; people are not interrupted repeatedly; managers challenge disrespectful behaviour when it happens.
Those are things you can actually see.
4. Look closely at what happens after a mistake
There still needs to be accountability. Psychological safety is not permission to be careless.
But the first question after a genuine mistake should not always be, 'Who is responsible?' A more useful question can be: 'How did this happen, and what would stop it happening again?'
That difference changes the quality of information you get.
5. Train managers to handle challenge
A lot of managers are comfortable asking for feedback. Fewer are comfortable receiving feedback they think is unfair.
That is where the skill is. Managers need to be able to hear a difficult comment, regulate their immediate reaction, ask questions and decide what to do next without punishing the person for raising it.
That can be practised. JourneyHR's Learning + Development Workshops can help managers practise the behaviours that make challenge and difficult conversations safer and more constructive.
How do you measure psychological safety at work?
A survey might tell you a team is reluctant to disagree, but it will not necessarily show you the manager's reaction that taught them to stay quiet. Pair the numbers with conversations, examples and, where appropriate, observation of how meetings actually work.
You measure psychological safety by asking employees directly about the behaviours and consequences that tell them whether interpersonal risk feels safe.
Google used questions adapted from Edmondson's work, including whether mistakes are held against team members, whether people can raise difficult issues, whether asking for help feels difficult and whether people feel able to take risks within the team.
We would also avoid treating a higher score as the only sign of progress. As people understand psychological safety better, they may become more willing to recognise and report problems they previously accepted as normal. Look at what has changed in behaviour, not just whether the average has gone up.
For SMEs asking how to measure psychological safety at work, we would normally use more than one source of information.
Employee survey data
A short set of well-written questions can identify patterns. JourneyHR's Employee Engagement Survey can provide a structured way to gather and interpret this kind of employee feedback.
You might ask whether employees feel able to admit mistakes, disagree with their manager, raise a concern, ask for help, challenge decisions, contribute a different view and report behaviour they are uncomfortable with.
The important thing is to analyse the data by team or manager where the group is large enough to preserve anonymity. A company-wide average can hide a great deal.
Engagement survey comments
The comments often tell you more than the score.
Pay attention to phrases like: 'I don't see the point in saying anything.' 'You have to be careful how you raise things.' 'Some opinions matter more than others.' 'People don't challenge the senior team.'
Those statements are telling you about the perceived cost of speaking.
Employee relations patterns
Grievances, complaints, exit interviews and absence data will not measure psychological safety directly. But patterns can give you useful clues.
So can the absence of formal complaints. We would never assume zero grievances means zero concerns: it can mean concerns are being resolved well and informally, or that nobody believes the formal route is worth using.
What managers observe
Ask managers who challenges them, who never does, when someone last admitted a mistake quickly, when somebody last raised a difficult issue and what happened afterwards.
These are much better diagnostic questions than asking whether they think their team is psychologically safe. Most managers will say yes. The examples tell you more.
Why psychological safety is different in a small business
Smaller organisations have some advantages here: relationships are closer, senior leaders are more visible, decisions can change quickly and there is usually less distance between an employee and the people who can act.
But those same characteristics create risk.
If the founder is central to everything, disagreement can feel much more personal. If everyone knows everyone, confidentiality becomes harder. If the business has no People team, employees may not know where to go when their concern is about their own manager.
And because reputation travels quickly in a small team, one badly handled incident can have a surprisingly large effect.
That is why we would not copy a 20,000-person organisation's programme into a 60-person business. The principles can transfer. The mechanics should fit the business.
A JourneyHR example: building a shared language in a leadership team
JourneyHR’s ‘Psychometric Assessment’ case study (publication date not stated) describes a founder whose leadership team was experiencing personality clashes that slowed decisions and execution. We designed a tailored session using Lumina Spark to help the team understand differences in communication and behaviour, particularly under pressure.
The case study reports that the leaders developed a shared language for discussing challenges, improving communication and collaboration. This kind of work can also connect with JourneyHR’s Leadership Development support when senior teams need to strengthen how they challenge and lead under pressure.
We would not describe a psychometric exercise on its own as a psychological safety intervention. However, the example shows how shared language can make difficult conversations easier.
Instead of: 'You are impossible to work with.' You can get closer to: 'We make decisions very differently under pressure, and this is what happens between us.'
That is a much more useful conversation.
What does not build psychological safety?
Telling people to speak up
A leader can say, 'We want everyone to challenge us,' then carry on reacting to challenge in exactly the same way.
Anonymous surveys with no visible action
Anonymous feedback can be very useful. But if people repeatedly fill in surveys and hear nothing about what happened afterwards, the survey itself begins to reduce trust.
The message becomes 'We asked' rather than 'We listened'.
Treating psychological safety as being nice
A team can be extremely polite and still unsafe because nobody raises the difficult thing for fear of disrupting the atmosphere. Politeness is pleasant, but it is not evidence of psychological safety.
Putting the responsibility on employees
If the answer to low psychological safety is 'people need to be more confident', you are probably looking in the wrong place.
Confidence helps, but somebody should not need extraordinary courage to raise an ordinary concern; the environment around them matters.
How JourneyHR can help
A sensible starting point is to agree what speaking up should look like here, audit what employees actually experience, and then choose actions that address the gaps. That is more useful than rolling out the same workshop to every team and hoping something sticks.
We work with businesses to understand what psychological safety looks like in their organisation rather than assuming every team has the same problem.
Our psychological safety work begins with discovery across leaders and employees so we can understand existing perceptions, behaviours and pressure points. Depending on what we find, the work can include leadership expectations, policy reviews, risk assessments, internal communications, training, employee feedback mechanisms and practical action planning.
We can also work with leadership teams directly.
The biggest change does not always begin with a company-wide programme. It can begin with six people in a room becoming more aware of how they respond when challenged.
If your engagement data is telling you people do not feel heard, your managers are struggling with difficult conversations, or the senior team suspects employees are holding back, we can help you understand what is happening and decide what to change.
Find out more about JourneyHR's psychological safety work
Get in touch: Speak to the JourneyHR team
Final thought
Psychological safety becomes visible when somebody tells the founder a plan is not working or admits a mistake before it becomes a client problem. The useful question is how the business responds to that information, and whether the employee would feel able to raise it again.
FAQs
How do you build psychological safety at work?
Build psychological safety through repeated manager and leadership behaviours that make speaking up less risky. Ask for challenge before giving your own opinion, respond constructively when people disagree, admit mistakes, ask questions and follow up after concerns are raised. Psychological safety develops when employees repeatedly see that honest contributions are taken seriously rather than punished.
What are the signs of low psychological safety in a team?
Common signs include very little disagreement in meetings, mistakes being hidden, concerns surfacing late, junior employees rarely contributing, the same people dominating discussion, and employees agreeing publicly while raising objections privately afterwards. Low complaint numbers are not automatically evidence of strong psychological safety because employees may simply believe raising concerns will not help.
How can managers make employees feel safe to speak up?
Managers can make speaking up safer by inviting different views, listening without becoming immediately defensive, asking follow-up questions and showing employees what happened after they raised an issue. Accessible, confidential reporting routes and clear follow-up are especially important when the concern involves someone senior.
How do you measure psychological safety at work?
Use a combination of employee survey questions, qualitative comments, team discussions and behavioural indicators. Ask specifically whether people can admit mistakes, challenge their manager, ask for help and raise difficult issues. Team-level results are usually more useful than a single company-wide score because experiences of psychological safety can differ substantially between managers and teams.
What psychological safety actions work well for small businesses?
Start with practical manager behaviours. Change meeting routines so senior people do not always speak first, ask what the team is not discussing, review how mistakes are handled, give employees clear reporting routes and train managers to receive challenge well. Smaller organisations can often change these habits quickly.
