What is Psychological Safety?
The Psychological Safety health check is an insightful tool that helps you see how comfortable people feel within their work team by getting feedback on dimensions that are used to measure levels of safety. The more they agree with a statement, the more safe they feel.
Professor Amy C Edmondson of Harvard University coined the term psychological safety as a way to describe a workplace environment free from interpersonal fear. A psychologically safe space is one in which the members of a group share the unspoken belief that theirs is a safe space in which they can take interpersonal risks.
Those interpersonal risks may mean –
- conflict is observed. This is because safe spaces can allow for quite direct, and very candid conversations to take place.
- ideas are rigorously explored and assessed.
- errors are made and failure is experienced as people feel safe to take risks and experiment with different solutions.
The benefit of psychologically safe workspaces is that they remain productive and professional with members being thoughtful and considerate. This health check surfaces the degree to which each team member feels safe. A team leader can then see how safe the group feels and talk through what that means for the team.
Understanding the core dimensions to psychological safety
A safe work space is one in which an employee doesn’t fear adverse actions for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It is a space in which people feel comfortable being themselves. The indicators of such safety have been distilled down to the seven dimensions below.
Learning and Growth
My mistakes are not held against me.
Tough Issues
I can bring up problems and tough issues.
Feeling Heard
I do not feel dismissed, ignored, or rejected for being different.
Risk Taking
It is safe for me to take a risk.
Asking for Help
It is easy for me to ask other team members for help.
Team Support
People on the team do not deliberately act to undermine my efforts.
Skills and Talents
My unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.
How to create a Health Check in TeamRetro
Your template is ready to go
Under Health Checks, select the health check you’d like to complete. Decide if you want to survey the team anonymously, using aliases or openly.
Reveal and discuss the results
Your health check data is displayed showing the average response and tally of each response. Sort dimensions by most positive, negative or mixed responses to make discussions more meaningful.
Keep conversation on track with Presentation Mode
Switch to presentation mode to sync devices making it easier to facilitate and focus conversations. Capture comments and actions along the way.
Review your action plan
Assign action owners and set due dates for new items and review prior actions. This action list can be tracked, shared or integrated into your other workflow tools.
Share the results
Great work, you are all done! Share the results with your team via email, download and print or publish to tools like Jira, Asana and Trello. Results can be tracked in your dashboard.