Psychological Safety is the stage you can provide people on which they can take the interpersonnal risks necessary to provide maximum value.
Have you ever wanted to increase the output of a team? Do you aim to enhance the engagement of your coworkers? Or do you want to help them collect and contain collective knowledge needed to outperform the competition? Then Psychological Safety might be the solution you are looking for!
Amy Edmondson
We need people to bring their absolute full selves to the challenging jobs ahead.
Amy Edmondson
Coined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who discussed the concept in her TEDx talk, she argues that teams who dare to discuss their mistakes learn from their mistakes. Compared to teams that do not acknowledge mistakes and therefor lose the opportunity to gain new insights and innovate, teams who have an environment in which they can learn and grow are better suited in a world that is everchanging.
You can watch her TEDx talk here:
The Aristotle Project
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Aristotle
Researches at Google set out to use their vast amount of collected data to discover what sets high performing teams apart from the rest. Inspired by Aristotle, they believed that a team is more than the collected knowledge and skills of the individuals who make up the team. The researches came to the conclusion that Psychological Safety is an essential part of making teams perform better. You can find their findings here.
Other data about Psychological Safety
Ever since the big results mentioned above, a lot of other researches have gained data about the benefits of enhancing Psychological Safety. Here are a few of these results:
- Gallup 2017 has found out that only 3 out of 10 US workers strongly agree with the statement that their opinions count at work. They found out that enhancing Psychological Safety will result in
- a 27% reduction in turnover
- a 40% reduction in safety incidents
- and a 12% increase in productivity
- Accenture has discovered in 2021 that the benefits of Psychological Safety are:
- 27% reduction in turnover
- 76% more engagement
- 50% more productivity
- 74% less stress
- 29% more life satisfaction
- 57% more collaboration among employees
- 26% greater skills preparedness
- 67% higher likelihood of employees applying what they’ve learned
- The Predictive Index has shared in 2021 that 1 out of 4 organizations report that psychological safety is the top driver of employee retention
- Harvard Business Review has shared in 2022 that teams with higher levels of Psychological Safety, diversity is positively correlated with higher performance and that individual team member satisfaction rised with the level of diversity in a team.
- MIT Sloan has stated in 2022 that Psychological Safety affects whether employees feel they have a voice at work and are comfortable bringing up ethical issues and misconduct.
- MeQuilibrium has shared in 2022 that
- 60% of people with low resilience and low Psychological Safety feel burned out
- 34% of these people are thinking about quitting
- Only 5% of people with high resilience and high Psychological Safety feel burned out
- Only 3% of those people are thinking about quitting
- Josh Bersin has shared in 2021 that 77% of respondents claim that their organizations prioritizes Psychological Safety, which makes these healthy companies:
- 2.2x more likely to surpass financial targets
- 2.8x more likely to embrace change
- 3.2x more likely to retain employees