---
title: "What is psychological safety at work? Definition"
url: "https://simplepoll.rocks/glossary/psychological-safety/"
description: "Psychological safety is a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. What it means, how to ask about it, and where anonymous polls fit."
---

# What is psychological safety?

**Psychological safety**: Psychological safety is "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking", as Amy Edmondson defined it in 1999. In practice: people can ask, disagree, admit mistakes and raise problems without fear of embarrassment or punishment.

Also known as: team psychological safety.

Edmondson introduced the idea of team psychological safety in her 1999 paper "Psychological
Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams". It's a property of the team, not of one person:
it describes what people expect will happen when they speak up.

## Example polls

Paste any of these into the message box in Slack.

```text
/poll "When something goes wrong on this team, what usually happens next?" "We fix it together" "We fix it, then move on quietly" "Someone gets blamed" "Not sure" anonymous limit 1
```

A behaviour-based question, anonymous, one answer each. *Premium: vote limits.*

```text
/poll "Speaking up check" "Anonymous. Three questions." anonymous close after 3 days --- "In the last month, did you hold back a concern in a team meeting?" "Never" "Once or twice" "Often" limit 1 --- "How comfortable are you disagreeing with your manager in front of the team?" scale --- "What would make it easier to raise problems early?" short text optional
```

A short anonymous survey on speaking up. *Premium: surveys (several questions), closing automatically.*

## What it looks like

- People say "I don't know" and "I got that wrong" in front of the team.
- Juniors disagree with seniors in the meeting, not afterwards in DMs.
- Bad news arrives early.
- Questions in retros get real answers instead of silence.

It isn't the same as being nice or agreeing. A psychologically safe team argues more
openly, because disagreement doesn't cost anyone.

## Asking about it

You can't measure psychological safety by asking people in public whether they feel safe
to speak up. Ask anonymously, and ask about behaviour rather than feelings: "When something
goes wrong on this team, what usually happens next?" is easier to answer honestly than
"Do you feel safe?". Track the same questions over time rather than reading one round.

## Where anonymous polls fit, and where they don't

An [anonymous poll](https://simplepoll.rocks/glossary/anonymous-poll/) in Slack lets people raise things they
wouldn't say with their name on it, and that's useful on any team. But it's a workaround,
not a cure. If honest input only arrives anonymously, that tells you something about the
team.

The signal to watch: what you do with what comes in. Acknowledge hard answers in public,
thank people for them, and act on one. That builds the safety that eventually makes the
anonymity less necessary.

## FAQ

### Is psychological safety the same as trust?

Close, but not the same. Trust is usually about one relationship. Psychological safety is
a shared belief about the group as a whole.

### Do anonymous surveys build psychological safety?

Not by themselves. They collect honest input. Safety builds when people see that speaking
up, including with their name attached, leads to something good.

## Related

- [What is an anonymous poll?](https://simplepoll.rocks/glossary/anonymous-poll/): An anonymous poll records votes without showing who cast them: everyone sees the totals, and nobody can see which person picked which answer. In Simple Poll that includes the person who created the poll.
- [What is a retrospective?](https://simplepoll.rocks/glossary/retrospective/): A retrospective is a meeting at the end of a piece of work where the team looks at how it worked, not what it built, and picks changes to try next time. In Scrum it closes every sprint.
- [Anonymous manager feedback survey for Slack](https://simplepoll.rocks/templates/manager-feedback/): When a manager wants to know how they're doing from the people who report to them, and wants answers more honest than a one-to-one will get.
- [Team mood check-in poll for Slack](https://simplepoll.rocks/templates/team-mood-check-in/): When you want an early, honest signal on how the team is feeling, before it shows up as missed deadlines or resignations.

## Sources

- [Psychological safety definition (Edmondson, 1999), UC San Diego](https://psychiatry.ucsd.edu/research/programs-centers/instep/tools-resource/definitions/emergent-states/affective-emergent-states/psych-safety.html)
- [Wikipedia: Psychological safety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_safety)

---

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