Teams
Psychological safety survey
Six questions written for this survey, drawing on Amy Edmondson's research on how safe people feel taking risks with their team.
Opens this survey in Gists as a draft you can edit. Sign in with Slack, Google or your work email. 30 days free. No card needed.
Talk to the manager before the results land. Low scores here are easy to take personally, and a defensive reaction at the next team meeting would undo a good part of the point of asking.
Sent to one team at a time
Run it quarterly, and only where at least 5 people will answer.
How comfortable do you feel sharing an unfinished idea with your team?
1 = not at all, 5 = completely
How comfortable are you asking a question that might reveal you don't know something?
1 = not at all, 5 = completely
When someone on your team gets something wrong, how is it treated?
1 = held against them, 5 = treated as something to learn from
Can you be yourself at work without worrying about how you will be judged?
Pick one
- Never
- Rarely
- Sometimes
- Usually
- Almost always
- Prefer not to say
Is there a topic your team avoids talking about that would be worth raising?
Yes or no, optional
What would make it easier to be open on your team?
Written answer, optional
We wrote these questions for this survey and they are not a validated scale. You can edit them once the survey opens in Gists. If you copy them into another tool, check what it records about who answered.
Before you run this
Tell the team that no one will be asked who said what, and hold to it. A written answer can report something serious, and in that case a duty to act may override what people expected, so follow your policy and talk to your legal adviser. Set where people report concerns in Reporting and support (Surveys › Planning).
The decision it helps with
Should this team work on how it handles mistakes and disagreement, and what's the first step?
Running it
Quarterly for teams where at least 5 will answer. Talk to the manager before results land, because low scores are easy to take personally. Treat it as one team's result, read with the people in it.
What the results might look like
These are made-up examples to show the patterns, not real data.
Low on unfinished ideas and on mistakes
2.6 on sharing unfinished ideas, 2.4 on how mistakes are treated.
- What it means
- People are protecting themselves.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't say the manager is hostile. Past incidents and pressure from above produce this too.
- What to do
- Have the manager share a rough idea first and describe one of their own mistakes.
A topic is being avoided
“Yes” on question 5 from half the team.
- What it means
- Something is going unsaid.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't tell you what it is, and asking who said it can make things worse.
- What to do
- Ask the team to agree how they'd like to raise difficult topics.
Scores spread widely within the team
answers from 1 to 5 on question 1.
- What it means
- Some people feel safer than others.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't identify who.
- What to do
- Look at how meetings run and whether everyone gets a turn.
What to tell people afterwards
Share the results with the team and ask what they make of them. Agree one thing to change together.
What to measure next, and when
Read the trend across two or three quarters. One result is too little to act on as a score.
What the term means
Edmondson defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In her study of 51 work teams at one manufacturing company, it was associated with learning behaviour, and learning behaviour linked it to performance (Edmondson, 1999).
Since then a meta-analysis has pooled 136 independent samples, more than 22,000 people and nearly 5,000 groups, to map what predicts psychological safety and what it predicts (Frazier et al., 2017). In the restaurant chain Detert and Burris studied, managers' openness was related to employees speaking up more consistently than transformational leadership was, and the link ran through people's sense that speaking up was safe (Detert & Burris, 2007).
Question 3 asks how mistakes are treated, since that is where the risk of speaking up shows most plainly.
Compared with a team health check
The team health check is a quick monthly look at trust, clarity and pace. This is the one to use when the suspected problem is that people aren't saying what they think.
Who sees a team's score
Results show only when 5 or more people answer. A team below 5 rolls up into the team above it. A group is also held back when comparing it with another group could reveal a small team. HR and named leaders see every team with 5 or more answers. Each manager sees only their own team. Employees see no team scores. Themes only by default. Word-for-word answers are a company setting, off unless turned on, and employees see a notice before they write.
Related
Sources
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, 350-383. doi:10.2307/2666999
- Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological Safety: A Meta‐Analytic Review and Extension. Personnel Psychology, 70, 113-165. doi:10.1111/peps.12183
- Detert, J. R., Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open?. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 869-884. doi:10.5465/amj.2007.26279183