Starting a new job often brings excitement and high hopes of mingling with colleagues, sharing innovative ideas, and making a positive impact on an organization. Soon, however, a new employee’s excitement may start to wane, if the person notices that questions and suggestions aren’t actually welcome.
In fact, new hires often enter fresh roles feeling optimistic and confident their organizations are eager to hear from them, but over time, employees increasingly feel less “psychologically safe” to contribute ideas, new research by Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson shows.
When employees believe it’s too risky to speak up, many decide it’s safer to put their heads down and keep their opinions to themselves—but that muting of views creates barriers to learning and collaboration that can be detrimental to both team morale and the organization’s performance, Edmondson says.
“Delivering patient care is one of those situations where timely speaking up can be a matter of life and death, or frequently a matter of high- or low-quality care.”
“Psychological safety describes a belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risks and speaking up about a question, concern, idea, or mistake,” says Edmondson, who identified the importance of psychological safety in team effectiveness 30 years ago and has continued researching its impact on teams and companies. “It’s very important.”
Particularly at a time when the economy feels uncertain, Edmondson says, business leaders should understand that an employee’s input can sometimes make the difference between failure and success in a task or project — and managers can and should encourage employees to candidly voice their opinions to bolster both the quality of work and the employee experience. After all, when employees clam up, the overall performance of an organization often suffers—and the effects can be dire, especially in an industry like health care.
“Delivering patient care is one of those situations where timely speaking up can be a matter of life and death, or frequently a matter of high- or low-quality care,” says Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at HBS.
Edmondson and her colleagues studied the survey responses of clinicians at a midwestern health organization over a four-year period; they report on the dynamics of psychological safety in a new paper published in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries. She coauthored the research with Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Assistant Professor Michaela Kerrissey and HBS doctoral student Derrick Bransby.
Do employees feel safe to call out mistakes?
The research team studied a health care organization, knowing the high-stakes industry suffers from significant levels of turnover and spends an inordinate amount of time and money onboarding new staff. In fact, one industry source estimated nurse turnover at more than 20 percent, which costs the average hospital more than $6 million per year.
Boosting psychological safety could be a game-changer, improving health care workers’ emotional wellbeing and reducing burnout, which could boost an organization’s retention rates and lower recruitment costs, Edmondson says.
Edmondson and Bransby analyzed surveys from more than 10,000 clinicians, who answered questions every two years about how comfortable they felt offering their opinions and calling out mistakes of colleagues or superiors on a 5-point scale. For example, clinicians indicated whether they agreed or disagreed with statements like: “I can report patient safety mistakes without fear of punishment.” And: “Caregivers feel free to question the decisions or actions of those with more authority.”
Three rounds of surveys were conducted from 2017 to 2021, allowing the researchers to track how individuals’ responses changed over time.
Restoring lost psychological safety might take decades
The research team found:
- Newcomers are eager to share, then soon start holding back. On average, new employees, those with less than one year of service, had higher psychological safety than their more-tenured colleagues, but lost it over time. This implied that new employees were increasingly likely to hold back ideas, concerns, and questions to maintain a positive image, the team says.
- Once psychological safety is lost, it’s hard to get back. Newcomers’ loss of psychological safety was followed by a long period of small gains, which the data suggest could span 20 years or more. Why does psychological safety tend to bounce back over time? One possibility is that employees gain it back after realizing the benefits of speaking up outweigh the risks. “Although it can be uncomfortable to speak up, share ideas, or ask questions, veteran employees may feel that when their input is used productively in pursuit of learning, some discomfort is OK,” Bransby says. That is, people may get more comfortable with feeling uncomfortable over time.
- The dynamics of a particular team matter.
While psychological safety can quickly and easily be squashed, the researchers did find that new hires who joined teams with high psychological safety experienced a less severe drop in their willingness to take interpersonal risks. This finding reveals a bright spot, showing that a supportive context can make a big difference in creating a healthy work environment where people feel comfortable speaking up, Edmondson says.
Why psychological safety takes a dive
The researchers’ findings revealed that new employees were losing psychological safety just as they may have needed it most—during the early months on the job when learning the ropes quickly is essential. Edmondson and Bransby say the decline in safety many employees experience could result from:
- Not knowing all the answers is easy at first, but over time feels uncomfortable.
When employees are brand new, they may feel quite comfortable asking questions, figuring they are not expected to know the answers. But that could change over time; as other people’s expectations of them grow, they may believe they are expected to have adjusted to the organization and shouldn’t be asking questions or suggesting new ways of working. - Feeling rebuffed when they provide input.
An individual’s willingness to speak up may depend on the feedback they receive when they do, says Edmondson. If others respond sincerely with curiosity and genuine interest to an employee’s queries or comments, that person is more likely to keep asking questions and contributing ideas. “If I ask for your help and you kindly give it to me, you didn’t harm my psychological safety one bit,” Edmondson says.
“As we gain tenure and become increasingly accountable for our actions, and responsible for leading others, we may feel that asking questions is less acceptable,” Bransby says.
On the other hand, if a colleague reacts negatively to an employee’s comments, for example by ridiculing or harshly disagreeing with the person, the employee will be less likely to open up again, believing it is unsafe to take interpersonal risks. Even a subtle reaction, such as a look of exasperation or an uncomfortable silence, can lead an employee to feel it’s not OK to chime in, she says.
How to prevent a decline in psychological safety
Organizations clearly benefit when everyone feels comfortable weighing in, so how can managers prevent psychological safety from sliding? First, it takes realizing that a psychologically safe environment must be actively cultivated and nurtured, Edmondson says. The research team outlined concrete steps managers can take to build psychological safety:
- Recognize the risk. Managers should realize that newcomers are likely to experience a drop in psychological safety, “probably sooner rather than later,” Edmondson says. “That allows you to double-down on the leadership behaviors and communication that help people believe you are serious about wanting to hear from everyone.”
- Encourage a culture of speaking up. Managers can’t just tell people their opinions are valued once, Edmondson says. Instead, they must regularly reiterate to employees that their thoughts are welcome—and that includes inviting people to push back on a company’s strategies when they disagree with plans or recognize flaws. “You are training people to contribute by constantly asking questions: What are we missing? What are you seeing?” she says.
- Accentuate the positive. While not every employee comment and concern should be embraced or addressed, a company can cushion the disappointment of a negative interaction by creating a culture of positive feedback. “It can counterbalance the inevitable negative moments when people are stressed or harried if you go out of your way to acknowledge and appreciate people,” says Edmondson.
- Create safety in numbers. The researchers found that departments with high levels of psychological safety tend to insulate new employees from a decline in their psychological safety. With that in mind, managers can intentionally place new hires in supportive environments. “A team with low psychological safety may not be the best place to put your new hire” says Bransby. Yet if placement on such a team is necessary, managers should provide coaching in departments that are struggling, the team advises.
- State a higher purpose. Some research shows that people are more likely to speak up when engaging in so-called pro-social behaviors, in which they are thinking of others, rather than themselves. In a medical environment, that might mean stressing the importance of openness for the sake of patient care, while in a manufacturing company, managers can stress the importance of speaking up in order to create the best product possible for customers.
- Model vulnerability. It’s powerful for employees to see bosses admit when they are wrong. As difficult as it can be sometimes to say, “I don’t know,” Edmondson says, “saying as a leader that you are also prone to feeling this way and we are all human here can help others reciprocate.”
Edmondson and Bransby hope their research findings will spur business leaders to look more deeply into whether people feel comfortable speaking up in their own organizations—and find ways to prevent a drop-off in psychological safety to create more satisfied and productive teams.
“Although the promise of a work environment where one’s ideas and expertise feel welcome may not be paradise, it is surely a source of meaning and fulfillment at work,” the research team writes. And, they say, “when it’s lost, much is lost with it.”
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