Psychological Safety Assessment for Teams

Amy Edmondson's research found that the strongest teams are the ones where people feel safe to speak up. Measure how safe your team feels to take risks, raise issues and be themselves at work.

Try this health check live

Build a team where everyone feels safe to speak up

Psychological safety is the foundation of high-performing teams, where people feel free to speak up, take risks, and learn from mistakes without fear of blame or ridicule. This check measures how safe team members feel to be themselves, voice concerns, and contribute their best work. By surfacing where trust is strong and where it needs attention, teams can build the conditions for honest dialogue, innovation, and continuous growth. Use the results to spark open conversations and strengthen the everyday behaviors that make people feel respected, valued, and heard.

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 assess and build trust within a team.
  • After a period of change, conflict, or restructuring that may have affected team trust.
  • As part of a regular cadence to track team culture and openness over time.
  • When team members seem hesitant to raise concerns or share ideas openly.
  • During team formation to set expectations around safety and respect.

Tips & tricks

  • Keep responses anonymous so team members feel free to answer honestly.
  • Share aggregate results openly and invite the team to interpret them together.
  • Focus discussion on behaviors and actions rather than assigning blame.
  • Re-run the check periodically to see whether interventions are improving safety.
  • Pair low-scoring dimensions with concrete team agreements to address them.

Frequently asked questions

What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is 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 fear of being embarrassed, punished, or rejected.
Why does psychological safety matter for teams?
Teams with high psychological safety learn faster, innovate more, and perform better because members feel free to share concerns, challenge assumptions, and contribute their full talents.
How often should we run this check?
Many teams run it quarterly, or after significant changes such as new members, reorganizations, or periods of conflict, so they can track trends and act on what they learn.
Should responses be anonymous?
Yes — anonymity encourages candid responses, which gives a more accurate picture of how safe people genuinely feel.
What questions are in a psychological safety assessment?
This check asks the team to rate statements about speaking up, admitting mistakes, asking for help, raising hard problems, being valued for your differences, and whether taking a risk here is held against you. Everyone answers privately on a rating scale, and the team sees the combined result and the spread before discussing it.
How do you measure psychological safety on a team?
You cannot 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 will not say so with their name attached.
How is this different from Amy Edmondson's psychological safety scale?
Edmondson's 1999 seven-item scale is the academic instrument used in research, and it is the origin of the construct. This health check is TeamRetro's own team-facing assessment built on the same idea, designed to be run repeatedly with a team and discussed, rather than to produce a research-grade score. TeamRetro is not affiliated with Amy Edmondson or Harvard Business School.

Related health checks