How to build psychological safety at work

Psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for taking risks, like admitting a mistake, asking a question, or disagreeing with a manager, without fear of punishment or humiliation.

The term comes from Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, who has spent more than three decades studying how teams learn and perform. Her research found that the strongest predictor of a team's success wasn't talent or resources, but whether people felt safe enough to speak up.

That's different from simply being nice to each other, and it's different from trusting your coworkers in general. Psychological safety is narrower: it's whether you believe you can take a specific interpersonal risk on this specific team, right now, without it costing you.

Teams with low psychological safety don't just feel worse to work on, they perform worse. People stay quiet about problems until they become expensive, hide mistakes instead of fixing them, and stop raising ideas that might have prevented a bad decision. None of that shows up cleanly on a P&L, but it shows up everywhere else.

It also shows up in how honest your surveys are. In SurveyMonkey's own research, 72% of HR professionals said they're concerned that employees aren't giving open and honest feedback about their experience at work. If people don't feel safe telling the truth out loud, they usually don't feel safe telling the truth in a survey either, which is why secure, anonymous response handling matters as much as the questions you ask.

These seven practices show up again and again in research on high-performing teams. None of them require a big program, just consistent behavior from whoever's leading the room:

Say when you don't know something. Admit a mistake out loud, in front of the team, before someone else has to point it out. When a leader goes first, it signals that admitting fault isn't career-ending here.

How you react the first time someone brings you a problem sets the norm for every time after. Thank them for flagging it, ask a clarifying question, and resist the urge to hunt for who's at fault before you understand what happened.

Don't just leave room for disagreement, ask for it directly. A simple "what am I missing?" or "who sees this differently?" at the end of a decision gives quieter voices a specific opening instead of a vague invitation.

The bigger the gap between the most senior and least senior person in a meeting, the less likely junior team members are to speak first. Ask newer or more junior team members for their take before the room hears from the most senior voice.

Nothing undermines psychological safety faster than feedback that disappears into a black hole. When someone raises a concern, or a survey surfaces one, tell people what you heard and what you're doing about it, even if the honest answer is "not yet, and here's why."

Teams that feel safe ask more basic questions, not fewer, because nobody's spending energy protecting their image. Ask a genuinely simple question yourself in a meeting sometimes. It gives everyone else permission to do the same.

One-on-ones and open-door policies only reach the people willing to walk through the door. A recurring pulse survey reaches everyone, including the people least likely to speak up in the room, and gives you a read on safety that doesn't depend on who's brave enough to say something out loud.

The most widely used way to measure psychological safety is the seven-item scale Amy Edmondson developed as part of her original research. It asks team members to rate their agreement with statements about whether mistakes get held against them and whether it feels safe to take a risk on the team, then looks at the pattern across the whole team rather than any single answer.

SurveyMonkey doesn't currently have a purpose-built psychological safety template, so the practical starting point is a recurring pulse survey that includes a handful of Edmondson-style items alongside your regular engagement questions. What matters most is asking the same questions on a regular cadence, so you can see whether safety is moving, not just where it stands today.

These three terms get used interchangeably, and they're related, but they aren't the same thing. Trust is the broader belief that your organization and leaders will treat you fairly over time. Psychological safety is narrower and more immediate: whether you feel safe taking a specific interpersonal risk with this specific team, right now.

Speak-up culture is the visible behavior that psychological safety makes possible, people actually raising concerns instead of staying quiet. If you want a deeper look at why employees still hold back even when a survey is technically anonymous, SurveyMonkey's guide to building a speak-up culture covers that ground, and the guide to building a healthy workplace culture covers the wider set of ingredients, like well-being and growth, that surround it.

A few habits quietly erode psychological safety, even on teams that think they're doing fine:

Leader behavior sets the tone, but nothing replaces a regular way to check whether it's landing. If you want to keep building on this, SurveyMonkey's guide to creating an effective employee feedback culture is a good next stop, and if you're ready to start listening on a recurring basis, start from a pulse survey template to check in on team sentiment between engagement cycles.