Healthy teams trust each other, believe their coworkers have their best interests at heart, and trust their manager. That’s psychological safety in a nutshell. But while one-on-one conversations can tell you if a specific employee feels safe at work, they don’t really help leaders understand safety at scale.
That’s where people analytics come in. Instead of relying on anecdotes and assumptions, HR leaders can get clear data on trends affecting psychological safety organization-wide. They can identify teams that need more support to feel safe and what actions they need to take to make that happen.
Data doesn’t replace the human touch in one-on-one conversations or follow-through. But it will give you what you need to know to make both those things more effective.
Here’s how.
Key takeaways
- Psychological safety means employees feel safe speaking up, asking questions, sharing ideas, and admitting mistakes without fear of punishment or embarrassment.
- Building psychological safety requires more than good intentions; leaders need consistent feedback loops and visible follow-through.
- People analytics can help HR teams identify patterns in employee engagement, manager effectiveness, feedback quality, and team trust.
- Employee engagement surveys, pulse surveys, check-ins, and feedback tools can reveal early warning signs that psychological safety may be low.
- The goal is not to “score” psychological safety in isolation, but to use data to guide better conversations, manager coaching, and workplace culture improvements.
What is psychological safety?
The term “psychological safety” comes from Harvard Business School professor Dr. Amy Edmondson and her 1999 paper “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” It refers to a shared belief, held within a team, that people can safely take interpersonal risks. It means feeling like you won’t be punished, rejected, or embarrassed for speaking up. It describes how safe employees feel when:
- Asking questions
- Challenging ideas respectfully
- Admitting mistakes
- Sharing concerns
- Offering feedback
- Taking interpersonal risks
Note, however, that psychological safety at work doesn’t mean avoiding accountability or lowering expectations. It’s about making employees feel safe enough to make and admit to mistakes, since they’ll be supported in rectifying and learning from them. It’s about having high performance standards and making people feel supported in reaching those standards, rather than feeling like they’re on their own.
Why building psychological safety matters for workplace culture
Psychological safety is a foundational layer for your organization. It allows people to bring their full selves to work, trust their coworkers, and believe that leadership has their best interests in mind. That has an impact throughout your organization, including with:
- Employee engagement: Employee engagement increases when people know their team has their back.
- Trust: Psychological safety is an essential element of trusting coworkers, managers, and leadership alike.
- Innovation: Employees who feel psychologically safe take more risks, because they know they won’t be punished for it. Risks lead to more innovation.
- Collaboration: Trust and safety are essential components of effective collaboration. The safer people are, the more willing they are to work with others.
- Retention: According to Gallup data, 21% of employees who left their job said more positive interactions with managers would have prevented them from leaving.
- Manager effectiveness: Psychological safety allows managers to create closer relationships with their teams, helping them be more effective in coaching, performance management, and leading.
- Learning from mistakes: Employees who feel psychologically safe don’t hide their mistakes and have the necessary support to learn from them.
- Healthier company culture: Healthy company culture doesn’t exist without psychological safety. A healthy work culture depends on people being able to bring their full selves to work.
Employees who don’t feel psychologically safe might avoid difficult conversations or fail to raise concerns they have. This can have a ripple effect throughout the organization, jeopardizing important projects and harming team cohesion.
Where people analytics fits into building psychological safety
Committing to psychological safety is important. But how do you know if that commitment is working? And how do you know where to commit? People analytics turns the activities of employees, managers, and leaders into data points you can use to prioritize HR initiatives and make better strategic decisions. For psychological safety, people analytics can help you turn what’s largely a feeling (safety) into data.
At the individual, one-on-one level, a manager can dig into what an employee needs to feel safe, explore situations where they might have felt unsafe, and identify changes that can increase safety. This is essential to building and protecting psychological safety. But it doesn’t scale.
The results of these interactions tell a manager or leader a lot about what an individual needs, but they aren’t as strong for identifying trends. That’s because these conversations create qualitative data, which is great for exploring individual cases, complete with nuance and context. But qualitative data is hard to extrapolate from and apply to a broader team, department, or organization.
People analytics creates quantitative data, which is less nuanced and has less context, but is easier to analyze and extrapolate from. This is what you need to identify trends, evaluate the impact of your psychological safety initiatives, and spot potential issues before they create bigger problems.
One type of data is not better than the other: you need both. Quantitative data could tell you, for example, that psychological safety is lower in one department than another, which might then prompt you to have interviews throughout that department to dig deeper into potential issues—giving you qualitative data.
People analytics can surface insights from employee engagement surveys, pulse surveys, manager check-ins, feedback trends, and other methods so you can get an impression of psychological safety organization-wide, just like tracking other HR outcomes.
What people analytics can reveal about psychological safety
Data is just one side of the coin. The other? What you do with it. Psychological safety can be difficult to observe directly, but people analytics can give you signals that help you evaluate how safe your people feel at work and how it impacts other trends, like turnover and employee engagement.
Here’s how.
Employee feedback trends
Employee feedback can tell you a lot about psychological safety. Look for recurring themes in the feedback you get, especially around collaboration between teammates and feelings about managers.
Another sign to watch out for? Low participation, whether that’s low participation rates or vague, noncommittal feedback. The former means people might not feel like their feedback matters at all. The latter means people don’t feel like they can be honest.
Engagement survey results
Employee engagement surveys can show you how committed employees are and how motivated they feel in their day-to-day work. Low employee engagement can be caused by many factors, including psychological safety, but the two aren’t synonymous. Consider it a warning sign that can prompt further exploration of psychological safety dynamics.
Manager effectiveness signals
People analytics and employee feedback can surface issues in manager effectiveness across your organization. Because managers have such a direct impact on an employee’s day-to-day work, they’re the frontline for psychological safety. These signals can surface a need to improve areas like:
- Active listening
- Feedback quality
- Follow-through
- One-on-one conversations
- Coaching
- Recognition
Team-level patterns and participation rates
Team-level data gives you the best of both worlds. It’s a step above the qualitative data you get in one-on-ones and similar meetings. It also gives you more detail and nuance than organization-wide data. Team-level survey participation rates, check-in completion rates, and employee sentiment trends can identify psychological safety issues that might be exclusive to the team.
How HR leaders can use people analytics to strengthen psychological safety
Now that you know what psychological safety is and how people analytics contributes to your understanding of it, here are concrete steps for doing that.
Ask better questions in employee surveys
Employee surveys need questions that address psychological safety directly. You don’t need a dedicated psychological safety survey on top of employee engagement surveys and pulse surveys, but you should consider adding questions like:
- “I feel safe sharing a different point of view.”
- “My manager listens to employee concerns.”
- “People on my team can admit mistakes without fear.”
- “I believe feedback leads to meaningful action.”
Compare trends across teams and time
Employee surveys give you snapshots of psychological safety, which allow you to identify trends over time. You can connect changes with different initiatives, communications from leadership, and more. You should also use this data to drill down and identify differences in psychological safety across teams, so you can identify the teams that need more support.
Turn insights into manager coaching
Managers are frontline support for psychological safety. They have the most context and nuance for what their teams need, and they’re best placed to give the support that improves safety. HR, however, plays a role in using that data to coach managers in improving their active listening, feedback delivery, employee recognition, and more. Dedicated manager enablement platforms can streamline this coaching.
Close the feedback loop with employees
Employee feedback needs to lead to visible action. Use the data you collect to inform the initiatives you plan and communicate the link between feedback and these initiatives. Employees should see that you take their feedback seriously and that it can improve their workplace.
Protect confidentiality and use data responsibly
Psychological safety requires that employees don’t feel like their words can be used against them. For some, that means they need total anonymity when they share feedback. Other ways you can protect confidentiality and use data responsibly include:
- Anonymizing survey results where appropriate
- Avoiding over-analysis of very small teams
- Being transparent about how data is used
- Focusing on trends rather than individuals
- Training managers to respond constructively
Common mistakes to avoid when measuring psychological safety
Committing to psychological safety can make your teams more cohesive, improve innovation, and build a healthier company culture. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t potential pitfalls to watch out for, such as:
- Treating psychological safety as a one-time score: Psychological safety is an ongoing investment, which means you need to continually test for it with regular surveys.
- Assuming high engagement means high safety: Employee engagement and psychological safety are linked, but don’t necessarily have a causal relationship. Employees can feel engaged by work that motivates and fulfills them without feeling safe.
- Not acting on feedback: Asking for feedback is an essential step in promoting psychological safety, but you need to act on it and do so publicly. Show employees that their feedback matters.
- Ignoring qualitative comments: Quantitative data gives you the ability to analyze trends organization-wide, but qualitative data gives you essential context to understand what safety means to different employees.
- Not explaining how feedback gets used: Employees need to know that the feedback they give you has a purpose. Link feedback to actions, changes, and initiatives.
- Overlooking team-level differences: People analytics gives you data across the organization, but you need to drill down to the department and team levels to see what affects safety for different roles.
Measuring psychological safety isn’t just about collecting and analyzing data. It’s about follow-through and intentional action.
How 15Five helps teams build psychological safety with people analytics
For too many organizations, people analytics involves patching together multiple tools and manual processes. But what if a single platform could give you the data you need and the tools to act on it?
15Five’s employee engagement software helps HR leaders better understand the employee experience and take action. It supports leaders, managers, and employees alike through:
- Engagement surveys
- People analytics
- Manager insights
- Check-in templates
- Employee feedback surveys
- Employee recognition tools
- Performance conversation management
- Manager enablement content
With 15Five, you can identify employee engagement and trust trends, support managers with better insights into how their teams work, strengthen feedback loops, improve workplace culture, and create stronger employee listening practices.
Want to see what 15Five can do for your teams? Book a demo here.
FAQ: Building psychological safety
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is a shared belief that people can safely take interpersonal risks within a team, without being punished, rejected, or embarrassed for speaking up.
Why is building psychological safety important?
Psychological safety is a foundational layer for trust, effective collaboration, learning, employee engagement, and a healthier company culture. Leaders and HR teams can build this through employee experience initiatives, transparency, and honest communication.
How can people analytics help with building psychological safety?
People analytics can reveal trends in employee engagement, employee experience, and turnover. That data helps HR teams identify where and how to give support, as well as validate the effectiveness of what they do.
What should a psychological safety survey ask?
A psychological safety survey should ask questions like:
- “I feel safe sharing a different point of view.”
- “My manager listens to employee concerns.”
- “People on my team can admit mistakes without fear.”
- “I believe feedback leads to meaningful action.”
Questions should center on trust, comfort, and willingness to take risks.
How can managers improve psychological safety at work?
Managers can have a significant impact on psychological safety through:
- Active listening
- Regular check-ins
- Giving constructive feedback
- Prioritizing employee recognition
- Promoting transparency
- Ensuring follow-through
Build safety with the right data
Building psychological safety is about more than just encouraging employees to speak up. It’s about making them feel like they can bring their full selves to work, that their team has their best interests in mind, and that everyone respects each other.
While managers have a key role to play in promoting psychological safety within their team, HR and leaders need data to analyze trends that can impact it more broadly. That’s why people analytics is so essential. It gives you the data you need to take action, evaluate the impact of that action, and make employees feel valued when they share feedback.
Platforms like 15Five can help you get that data, act on it, and measure the impact of your initiatives. Book a demo and see how.
