Psychological Safety Exercises to Help Improve Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has a direct impact on your bottom line. People who are motivated and feel like their day-to-day work contributes to a greater purpose go above and beyond, innovate more, and perform better. People who don’t? Well, they don’t.

That gap between engaged and disengaged employees creates repercussions throughout your organization in the best of times. When markets are a little rocky? That impact is magnified.

Employee engagement can’t happen without psychological safety. People need to feel like they can bring their full selves to work, that their team cares about them, and that they can trust the people they work with. Building psychological safety is a long-term investment, a combination of broad strategy and day-to-day actions. Individual contributors, managers, leaders, and HR can all participate in daily, weekly, and monthly work to build and improve psychological safety.

Here’s your practical guide for doing that.

Key Takeaways:

• Psychological safety exercises directly influence employee engagement, trust, and performance
• Organizations that prioritize psychological safety in the workplace see improved collaboration and reduced turnover
• Leaders play a critical role in fostering workplace psychological safety through consistent behaviors and structured activities
• Implementing psychological safety activities helps employees feel heard, valued, and empowered
• Building psychological safety connects to retention strategies like reducing regrettable turnover (link to 15Five solution page)
• Continuous reinforcement—not one-time exercises—is required to improve psychological safety for employees

What is psychological safety in the workplace?

Psychological safety is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Dr. Amy Edmondson in her 1999 paper “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” In it, she identifies the four main beliefs of psychological safety:

• You won’t be rejected for being yourself.
• Team members care about you and are interested in you as a person.
• Team members have positive intentions.
• Team members respect each other’s competence.

Since publishing the paper, Dr. Edmondson refined and fleshed out the concept in her book The Fearless Organization. That includes a framework called the Learning Zone, which maps what happens when psychological safety and accountability intersect.

That’s one of the key concepts of Edmondson’s research: psychological safety doesn’t mean there’s a lack of accountability. When people feel safe, they innovate and take big risks. That combination of risk and innovation is what leads to projects and initiatives that move the needle for your organization.

Psychological safety also improves communication, as everyone feels comfortable enough to talk more transparently, and collaboration, as team members trust each other more. Combined, these factors reduce burnout and turnover alike.

How to create psychological safety at work?

Psychological safety is part strategic priority and part day-to-day action. That means you need commitment from leadership, organization-wide practices, and knowledge of the common barriers to establishing this kind of safety.

Leadership behaviors that build trust

Leaders have three vectors through which they can help build trust and psychological safety: modeling vulnerability, encouraging feedback, and responding constructively to mistakes.

Modeling vulnerability means leaders should work transparently and in public. When they make decisions, they should communicate those decisions clearly and open themselves up for criticism. When they make mistakes, they should take accountability for them.

Feedback is another essential piece of this. Too many leaders keep themselves at arm’s length from the rest of the organization, but giving people opportunities to share their feedback (on a leader’s decisions or broader strategy) builds trust. That trust is an essential component of psychological safety.

Finally, leaders need to openly share their mistakes, take accountability for their part in making them, and allow employees to express their opinions about those mistakes. By showing that they can make mistakes and share them, they show employees that they can do the same.

Organizational practices that support psychological safety

Organization-wide practices can help create a foundation of psychological safety that everyone else can build on. Examples of these practices include transparent communication, inclusive decision-making, recognition, and accountability.

Transparent communication means employees can trust what a leader or manager tells them. That trust then encourages them to communicate in the same way. Inclusive decision-making means important decisions involve employees at every step in your org chart, giving them more input and more trust in the final decision.

Finally, recognition and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Combined, they allow everyone to know they’ll be rewarded for their hard work and they’ll be supported through their mistakes.

Common barriers to psychological safety in the workplace

Organizations that start doing the work to build psychological safety often run into these common challenges:

• Fear of judgment or retaliation: Employees often avoid bringing their full selves to work when they worry that their teammates will judge them. Similarly, fear of retaliation might cause them to hide their mistakes or avoid giving honest feedback.

• Hierarchical communication structures: When information flows exclusively from top to bottom, it’s hard for employees to feel like they communicate openly.

• Lack of consistent leadership support: Psychological safety is much harder to build without a consistent commitment from leadership. Leaders who are serious about building this sense of safety need to commit to daily, weekly, and monthly actions that support this.

Psychological safety exercises to improve employee engagement

Here’s your practical guide to consistent action that creates psychological safety and improves employee engagement.

Personal user manuals

A personal user manual is a document where employees can list their communication styles, preferences, needs, and any other information that facilitates collaboration. This allows people who might not work together very often to understand each other better, avoiding miscommunication and misunderstandings.

Make sure these manuals are stored somewhere everyone can access them and make them easily searchable. A team wiki is a great place to store these. Additionally, they should be reviewed at least quarterly; preferences shift, and personal user manuals should always be current.

“Failure share” sessions

These sessions formalize the sharing of mistakes, reinforcing the idea that employees can be held accountable without being punished for these mistakes. Teams meet regularly, sharing the lessons they learned from mistakes made in a given week or month. This normalizes smart risk-taking and turning mistakes into learning opportunities.

Give your sessions a consistent format. Cover what happened, what people learned, and what they’d do differently. Leaders should, well, lead by sharing their failures first.

Round-robin check-ins

This approach to team check-ins prevents managers from being the main voice in every meeting. Each member has a set sharing time, ensuring everyone gets heard. Use a consistent prompt that goes beyond project status, like “What’s one thing on your mind this week?” or “where could you use help?” This keeps people honest without forcing them to be overly vulnerable.

Anonymous feedback channels

A culture of continuous feedback ensures that leaders have better visibility on what’s going on throughout the organization and that employees feel heard. Anonymous feedback channels can ensure you get the feedback you need. Leaders need to commit to responding to this feedback promptly. Otherwise, employees will have little trust in the process.

Appreciation circles

Accountability shouldn’t be just about what happens after someone makes a mistake. Team members should have clear opportunities to recognize each other’s successes, whether that’s in meetings or through a specific channel in Teams or Slack. Keep recognition specific, since that will have more impact than a generic template.

Psychological safety retrospectives

These retrospective sessions can give teams the floor, allowing them to share the things that make them feel safe and those that don’t. As you put more and more effort into building and maintaining that safety, these retrospectives become increasingly valuable.

Inclusive brainstorming sessions

Involving employees in more decisions is one step; inviting them to the brainstorming sessions that lead to those decisions is another. Use structured brainstorming methods, like silent brainstorming or round-robin brainstorming so everyone has an equal voice without feeling intimidated.

Team norm-setting workshops

Everyone in your team should know what’s expected of them, and they should have a hand in setting these expectations. Co-created team agreements for communication and behavior gives everyone input in your team culture, which means everyone feels more committed to upholding it.

Measuring the impact of psychological safety on engagement

When you start investing in psychological safety, leaders are going to want to see results. Strategic HR teams need to demonstrate ROI with their initiatives, including those that support psychological safety. That starts with measuring the right metrics organization-wide, such as:

• Employee engagement scores: Measured through employee engagement surveys and similar tools.

• Turnover rates: Turnover rates can tell you a lot about your organization’s health, especially when you measure each type of turnover separately.
• Feedback participation: Low participation rates for feedback forms and surveys are typically a sign that employees don’t feel like expressing their opinion is safe. Increasing participation rates show that your initiatives are working.

Quantitative metrics aren’t all you need to pay attention to, however. Qualitative indicators you should pay attention to include:

• Increased participation in meetings: Pay especially close attention to team members who might have participated less previously. When these members get more comfortable in meetings, it’s a strong signal of increased psychological safety.

• More open communication: When teams start communicating more transparently, even with leadership, that’s usually a sign of increasing safety.

• Greater willingness to share ideas: This is one of the ultimate goals of psychological safety. When the quantity (and quality) of ideas coming from your teams increases, you know you’re on the right track.

Between the quantitative metrics and qualitative impacts you’re tracking, you can easily link psychological safety with the business outcomes leaders care about, like productivity, innovation, and reduced turnover.

How psychological safety exercises support retention and performance

Establishing psychological safety in your organization is an important goal. But without a strong commitment, it’s just that: a goal. Continuous investment and organization-wide activity is needed to build and maintain that safety. But beyond reinforcing your commitment to psychological safety, these activities have other impacts.

For one, they strengthen relationships both within and across teams. As people have more positive experiences (e.g., receiving recognition for their work, sharing feedback with leadership), any future collaboration they do is built on a stronger foundation. Psychological safety, and the activities that support it, improve relationships in general.

Employees who feel psychologically safe, and who frequently participate in activities that increase that safety, are also more satisfied in their job overall. That leads to better employee engagement, which keeps them motivated and aligned with your mission.

Psychological safety doesn’t just improve results on an individual level. It leads to downstream improvements in organizational performance by improving your talent pool. More engagement means less turnover, which means less attrition, retained institutional knowledge, and stronger teams.

The best way to see that impact? Dedicated performance management tools that draw that link for you. Tools like 15Five give you visibility on employee engagement, retention trends, and the like, as well as giving you the tools you need to address them.

Exercise regularly

Psychological safety is a foundational layer that builds employee engagement, innovation, and better collaboration. When you make the commitment towards building that safety and create opportunities for employees to contribute to it, you’re creating practical, scalable ways for employees to build trust as they work together.

These teams become more resilient, innovate more, and lose fewer members. Psychological safety is both a long-term, strategic commitment and a pursuit requiring daily action. Start with one of the practical exercises above, as a smaller investment, and you’ll see the impact psychological safety can have.