Psychological Safety Assessment for Teams

Measure how safe your team feels to speak up.

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What is a psychological safety assessment?

Psychological safety is a shared belief that it's safe to take interpersonal risks on your team: to admit a mistake, raise a problem, ask for help or offer a half-formed idea. Amy Edmondson defined it in her 1999 study of work teams and built a seven-item scale to measure it. This assessment covers all seven items, one statement each, in TeamRetro's own wording: learning from mistakes, raising tough issues, feeling heard, risk taking, asking for help, team support, and skills and talents. Everyone answers anonymously on a five-point scale. The combined result shows which items are strong and which need work, and the spread shows whether some people feel much less safe than others. Run it every quarter to see whether what you changed made a difference.

Dimensions

Psychological Safety

How safe team members feel to take interpersonal risks, share ideas, and be their authentic selves.

  • Learning and Growth

    Mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn rather than reasons for blame.

    • Held against me
    • Sometimes
    • Never held against me

  • Tough Issues

    Team members can openly raise problems and difficult topics without hesitation.

    • Stay silent
    • Sometimes
    • Speak freely

  • Feeling Heard

    Every voice is respected, and no one is dismissed or rejected for being different.

    • Dismissed
    • Sometimes heard
    • Fully heard

  • Risk Taking

    It feels safe to try new approaches and take risks without fear of negative consequences.

    • Too risky
    • Sometimes safe
    • Safe to risk

  • Asking for Help

    Team members can comfortably reach out to one another for support when needed.

    • Hard to ask
    • Sometimes easy
    • Easy to ask

  • Team Support

    Colleagues act with good intent and do not undermine each other's efforts.

    • Undermined
    • Mostly supported
    • Fully supported

  • Skills and Talents

    Each person's unique strengths are recognized, valued, and put to good use.

    • Overlooked
    • Sometimes valued
    • Fully valued

When to use this health check

  • When you want to measure trust on your team and work out how to build it.
  • After a period of change, conflict or restructuring that may have shaken people's confidence to speak up.
  • On a regular rhythm, to track how open the team feels over time.
  • When people seem hesitant to raise concerns or share ideas.
  • When a team forms, to set expectations about safety and respect from the start.

Tips & tricks

  • Keep responses anonymous so people can answer honestly.
  • Share the combined results with the team and interpret them together.
  • Talk about behaviors and what to change, not about who scored what.
  • Run it again periodically to see whether the changes you made are working.
  • Turn each low score into a concrete team agreement.

Frequently asked questions

What is psychological safety?
It's a shared belief that the team is a safe place to take interpersonal risks: to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes and offer ideas without being embarrassed, punished or rejected.
Why does psychological safety matter for teams?
When people feel safe, they raise problems and admit mistakes early, while those are still small and cheap to fix. Edmondson's research linked team psychological safety to more learning behavior, such as asking for feedback and discussing errors.
How often should we run this check?
Quarterly works for most teams, plus after big changes such as new members, a reorganization or a period of conflict, so you can track the trend and act on it.
Should responses be anonymous?
Yes. Anonymous answers are more candid, so you get a truer picture of how safe people feel.
What questions are in a psychological safety assessment?
Seven statements, one for each item on Amy Edmondson's psychological safety scale: learning from mistakes, raising tough issues, feeling heard, risk taking, asking for help, team support, and skills and talents. Everyone answers privately on a five-point scale, and the team sees the combined result and the spread before discussing it.
How do you measure psychological safety on a team?
You can't observe it directly, so you measure it by asking people to rate how safe the team feels on the same statements at a regular cadence and watching the trend. A single score is weak evidence; a score that moves after you change something is strong evidence. Anonymous answers matter, because the people who feel least safe are exactly the ones who won't say so with their name attached.
How is this different from Amy Edmondson's psychological safety scale?
Amy Edmondson's scale comes from her 1999 study of work teams and has seven items. They ask whether mistakes are held against you, whether people can bring up problems and tough issues, whether people are rejected for being different, whether it's safe to take a risk, whether it's hard to ask teammates for help, whether anyone would deliberately undermine your efforts, and whether your unique skills and talents are valued and used. This check covers all seven, one statement each, in TeamRetro's own positively worded phrasing, so a team can run it repeatedly and discuss it rather than produce a research-grade score. TeamRetro isn't affiliated with Amy Edmondson or Harvard Business School.

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