Psychologically unsafe workplaces have crashed planes.

After 346 people lost their lives in two crashes involving Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, internal Boeing communications revealed employees discussing the company’s negligence and the overriding focus on cutting costs and meeting deadlines. 

“Would you put your family on a [MAX] simulator-trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.” wrote one employee. 

After a disaster like this, why isn’t psychological safety the bare minimum in every workplace? And how does hybrid work change what leaders need to do to attain it? 

Here, we’ll cover what workplace psychological safety is (and isn’t), five barriers to achieving it in hybrid workplaces and how to overcome each of these. 

What does workplace psychological safety mean? 

Professor Amy Edmonson coined the term back in 1999: “Team psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”

But there’s confusion around what psychological safety actually means in today’s workplace context. Let’s dispel it.  

What psychological safety is: 

• The knowledge that you can voice concerns to anyone in your organisation without the fear of retaliation or career consequences.
• An environment where disagreements and difficult conversations are positive things.
• An environment where everyone brings their authentic selves to work. 
• A leadership team that models psychologically safe behaviours before expecting employees to do the same.

What psychological safety is not: 

• Never disagreeing with colleagues or leadership. 
• A free pass to say whatever comes into your head. 

Five challenges to creating psychological safety

For all its benefits to employee wellbeing and workplace experience, hybrid work reduces face-to-face time. This makes psychological safety tricky to nurture without the right approach. 

Here are five challenges of creating psychological safety in a hybrid workplace – and how to solve them. 

Challenge one: There’s less time to witness leadership authenticity in person. 

82% of employees feel it’s important to bring their authentic selves to work, but only 42% actually do. 

Seeing leadership behave authentically creates psychological safety. But Teams messages don’t have quite the same gravity as in-person interactions. 

How to fix it: 

Be even more deliberate about being vulnerable with your team. In our podcast Workplace Visionaries, we spoke with workplace consultant Bex Moorhouse about her experiences creating psychological safety at organisations like Nike and JLL. 

“The places where I’ve seen [creating psychological safety] be really successful is when the manager or the leader turns around and says, ‘I really struggle with this.’” Bex said. 

“Sharing that humility really helps to create that environment where everybody feels okay about it.”

Challenge two: Hybrid meetings make voicing and noticing disagreement more difficult. 

There’s a discrepancy in the number of leaders who feel they can show up authentically in the workplace versus their subordinates – 51% of leaders versus 31% of junior managers. One of the results is agreeing to save face and succumbing to groupthink. 

Nowhere is this more evident than in boardroom discussions on hybrid policies.

How to fix it: 

Not everyone feels comfortable speaking up in a meeting, whether it’s in-person or over Zoom. Be open to people dropping you a message or having a one-on-one later on. 

Give employees enough time to consider what has been discussed and frame their thoughts, rather than asking ‘what do we think?’ immediately.

And finally, be aware of how you’re responding to people sharing in meetings, as you could be shooting ideas down without meaning to. 

One executive reported using a framework called LCS: state that you like the idea and appreciate the person who shared it, state any concerns you have, and share suggestions for improving or implementing it. 

Challenge 3: Reduced face-to-face time can increase social isolation and reduce familiarity.

Hybrid work can leave us feeling more isolated and lonely. Environments where no one has any idea who their colleagues are as individuals usually aren’t the most psychologically safe ones. 

How to fix it: 

Ensure that in-office time facilitates making what researchers from Berkely University call high-quality connections. The study identified that ‘play’ is one of the ways to facilitate these connections. 

Create and communicate workplace amenities, events and socials that people want to come into the office for. Design informal spaces where people can create workplace friendships. 

Challenge 4: Reduced face-to-face time means less time for building trust. 

Online communication doesn’t provide the same trust-building advantages as in-person connections, research shows. Trust is a core ingredient of psychological safety – if you don’t trust your colleagues or manager, you’re not going to risk speaking up. 

How to fix it: 

The fixes for challenge three – relating to activities, amenities and workplace design – also apply for trust building. When people come into the office, they’re more likely to build high-quality connections that create trust. 

The previously mentioned Berkeley researchers also identified two more ways to build high-quality connections that can be achieved online:

• Trusting – giving autonomy over resources and decision making.
• Task enabling – providing people with extra resources and removing obstacles.

Even if it’s not done in-person, giving someone autonomy over a new project and sending over some resources you think they might need creates the trust needed within a psychologically safe workplace. 

Challenge 5: Using AI to make communication faster on remote days can damage authenticity and nuance. 

40% of people already use, or are planning to use, AI to write work emails. Less time staring at a blinking cursor sounds great, but it may come at the cost of “distorting certain social cues, leading to misinterpretation, mistrust and even digital hostility,”

How to fix it: 

Providing clear guidelines about AI use in your organisation is a logical first step. 

Model the behaviour you want to see by taking the time to respond authentically. Keep the more serious topics for catch ups, not emails. 

Don’t just keep a seat warm

Ultimately, creating a psychologically safe organisation takes a lot more than these five fixes. But, as a leader, there’s a plethora of options available to you every day to create psychological safety within your team. 

As Bex Moorhouse puts it: “Standing by your guns and saying what you think is right for the business is something that every leader should be doing. Otherwise, you’re just keeping a seat warm.”

HubStar’s new podcast, Workplace Visionaries, explores bold ideas and practical strategies from workplace leaders and innovators. We’ve covered more ways to create workplace psychological safety, the right and wrong ways to measure productivity, where leaders are wrong about workplace usage and more. New episodes drop every month. Watch, listen and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Hubstar is the proud Leadership Partner of Culture Pioneers – a campaign to both support organisations driving impactful culture change, and commend those who are leading forward and challenging the status quo at work.