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
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
Measuring psychological safety isn’t just about collecting and analyzing data. It’s about follow-through and intentional action.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
A psychological safety survey should ask questions like:
Questions should center on trust, comfort, and willingness to take risks.
Managers can have a significant impact on psychological safety through:
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.