Psychological safety audit

In this section, we'll look at how to measure current levels of psychological safety in your teams.

The term was coined in 1999 by Amy Edmondson, an organisational scientist from Harvard. She defines psychological safety as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking". In other words, the team environment feels safe enough to speak up in.

The only way to know if your employees are afraid of speaking up — in other words, how psychologically safe or unsafe they feel — is to ask them. Anonymously, of course.

At Spill, we're starting to think that this is the most important employee metric a company can track — especially a fast-growing company where the culture can change equally fast. We've just started anonymously surveying psychological safety and plan to do it every quarter from now on, to keep an eye on the health of our company culture.

We've added a couple of our own questions to, and slightly rephrased, Amy Edmondson's original questionnaire from her Harvard paper so that it's more relevant to startups and fast-growing companies like Spill.

The questionnaire asks to what extent employees agree or disagree with these nine statements:

1. "People on this team feel comfortable challenging each other about their plans and approaches."
2. "Members of this team are able to flag problems, even if doing this slows our progress."
3. "People on this team won't reject others for thinking differently to them."
4. "It's safe to take a risk or propose a weird idea with this team."
5. "I feel comfortable giving people on this team constructive criticism, even if they haven't asked for it."
6. "It's always easy to ask other members of this team for help, even when they've got loads on."
7. "No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts."
8. "Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilised."
9. "I feel confident that I won’t receive retaliation or criticism if I admit getting something wrong."

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We've made a Google Docs version of the questionnaire that you can use to copy the questions and score bracketing into whichever anonymous survey tool you prefer.

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The Google Doc also contains a scorecard to interpret the aggregate results once you have them back in:

Here's how we scored at Spill on the most recent psychological safety questionnaire we sent out (July 2021). Overall we scored 37 out of 45, which puts us just on the boundary of 'quite psychologically safe' and 'very psychologically safe', but there were two questions (in red on the left) where we scored pretty low, so we are trying to work on improving these areas in particular over the next couple of months:
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Once you've got a sense of how psychologically safe your employees feel, you can start introducing initiatives to try and improve it. That's what we'll go into on the next page.