The Happiness Index

CHAPTER 5Psychological Safety

I am often asked where to start focusing on employee happiness. After I provide psychological safety as the answer, people often reply with some version of this: “It makes sense, and it is kind of obvious when you think about it, but it is nice that the data and research can help us prioritize this.”

As well as directly and strongly influencing performance at the individual (Singh et al., 2013) and team levels (Schaubroeck et al., 2011), psychological safety has been found to influence performance indirectly through facilitating learning behavior at both the individual (Li and Tan, 2012, Li and Yan, 2009) and team levels (Brueller and Carmeli, 2011, Edmondson, 1999, Hirak et al., 2012, Huang and Jiang, 2012, Kostopoulos and Bozionelos, 2011, Ortega et al., 2014).¹

Once you know that psychological safety is important, it makes complete sense that your number‐one job when working with employees is first and foremost to make sure they feel safe. However, some managers and organizations consciously and unconsciously do the opposite.

Think about the company that spends 12 months trying to headhunt someone who worked at their previous company for ten years and then puts them on a long probation period. Is that the best way to make someone feel safe when they join a company?

Implementing psychological safety is easier said than done, but it is definitely a great place to start.

What Is Safety?

Safety is the sense that we are in a safe environment. This ...