How communications plays a role in psychological safety at work

Psychological safety has become a familiar term in workplace conversations, especially with the introduction of psychosocial hazard legislation here in Australia.

Organisations talk about creating psychologically safe teams, leaders are encouraged to make people feel comfortable speaking up, and employees are told that their opinions and perspectives matter. All of that is important, but psychological safety isn't created by a policy, a survey or a statement on the intranet - it’s done through the everyday interactions between people, which means communication plays a significant role in whether people actually feel safe to speak, question, challenge and contribute.

At its simplest, psychological safety is about whether people believe they can express themselves, admit mistakes, ask questions, raise concerns and disagree without being punished, humiliated or unfairly judged. It doesn't mean everyone has to agree, and it certainly doesn't mean everyone needs to feel comfortable all the time.

In fact, a psychologically safe workplace will still have difficult conversations, competing perspectives and moments of discomfort. The difference is that people trust the environment and the relationships around them enough to believe they can have those conversations without being personally attacked or shut down. So, how do we create that?

Psychological safety is revealed when people speak up

One of the easiest mistakes organisations can make is confusing the absence of conflict with the presence of psychological safety.

A quiet meeting might mean everyone genuinely agrees with the decision… or it might mean several people have concerns they don't feel confident enough to raise. From the outside, those two situations can look exactly the same.

This is where communication becomes particularly important because organisations can tell people they want them to speak up, but employees form their own view based on what happens when someone actually does. If someone challenges a decision and is dismissed, labelled as difficult or left out of the next conversation, everyone else in the room is learning from that interaction. If a leader asks for honest feedback but becomes defensive when they receive it, people quickly learn that being invited to speak isn't necessarily the same as being genuinely heard.

Over time, those experiences can encourage people to self-censor where they might decide it is safer not to raise the concern, question the decision, share the idea or admit they don't understand something. When that happens, organisations lose information that might have helped them identify a risk, improve a project, solve a problem or make a better decision. Silence can be expensive.

Psychological safety doesn't mean avoiding disagreement

There is another common misunderstanding around psychological safety: the idea that making people feel safe means removing anything that might make them uncomfortable.

However, disagreement isn't necessarily a sign that psychological safety is missing. In many cases, the ability to disagree constructively is evidence that people feel secure enough to express a different point of view.

The best workplace conversations aren't necessarily the ones where everyone walks away agreeing with everyone else. Sometimes the value is simply in understanding why someone sees the situation differently.

You might not change your mind, and that's OK, because understanding another perspective can still lead to better thinking, better decisions and better relationships. Which requires curiosity, instead of immediately defending our own position when someone disagrees with us, we can ask questions about how they arrived at their perspective and what experiences or information have shaped it. Curiosity creates enough space to understand before deciding how to respond.

That matters because workplaces are full of different perspectives. Marketing might see an issue differently from Finance, Technology might have a completely different view from Operations and moreso, leaders will often see a situation from a very different position to the people experiencing it on the frontline.

Leaders communicate psychological safety through their reactions

Leaders have an especially important role to play because people pay close attention to what happens when someone says something difficult.

They notice how a leader reacts when a strategy is challenged, when someone points out a mistake, when an employee asks a question that seems obvious to everyone else, or when someone provides feedback that isn't particularly flattering.

Leaders don't have to get every conversation right - they're human. Sometimes they'll become defensive, respond poorly or realise afterwards that they could have handled something differently, but what matters is what happens next: Do they shut the conversation down or stay engaged? Do they become defensive or curious? Are they willing to acknowledge that they might have missed something?

Being able to repair a conversation is just as important as getting it right in the first place which means leaders need to be willing to receive feedback, not just dish it out. If employees are expected to speak honestly while leaders are unable to hear anything that challenges their assumptions, psychological safety isn't going to get very far. The goal is to create enough trust and respect for people to have them without damaging the relationship.

Safe doesn't necessarily mean comfortable

Psychological safety and psychological comfort are not the same thing. A workplace should absolutely protect people from bullying, harassment and unacceptable behaviour, but that doesn't mean every interaction should feel comfortable.

Someone challenging your decision might be uncomfortable, receiving difficult feedback might be uncomfortable, discovering that something you said had an unintended impact might be uncomfortable, and being asked to reconsider an assumption you've held for years can certainly be uncomfortable. However, none of those things automatically make a conversation psychologically unsafe.

A psychologically safe workplace allows people to experience some discomfort without making that discomfort the reason the conversation has to stop. It also recognises that people will occasionally get things wrong, whether that’s through misinterpretation, assumptions, the wrong words or something that seemed perfectly reasonable to one person might not even land that way with someone else.

That's why the ability to repair conversations matters. Being able to acknowledge what happened, listen to another perspective and come back to the conversation creates resilience in relationships. Psychological safety just requires people to have enough trust to keep communicating when things don't go perfectly.

Psychological safety is built through repeated experiences

This is also why psychological safety can't be created through a single workshop. An organisation can run training about speaking up, send an email about having an open culture or ask employees to complete a psychological safety survey. Those activities won't achieve much if people's everyday experiences tell them something different.

People learn whether an environment is psychologically safe by watching what happens around them.

They notice whether leaders ask follow-up questions or shut ideas down. They notice whether mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn or used against people later. They notice who gets interrupted, whose opinions are taken seriously and what happens when someone challenges the popular view.

Those experiences gradually create an understanding of what is safe to say and what isn't. That's why communication capability needs to be practised. Listening properly, asking questions, disagreeing without attacking, receiving feedback and staying curious are skills. Like any skill, they improve through practice and experience.

A poster telling people to speak up isn't a substitute for an environment that gives them a reason to believe they can.

Give important conversations enough time

Time is another factor that can easily be overlooked. If an organisation wants people to have honest conversations about complex or sensitive issues, it needs to create enough space for those conversations to happen properly.

We're accustomed to tightly managed agendas, short meetings and an expectation that every discussion should result in a decision or action… but some conversations don't work that way. People need time to think, to ask questions, clarify what they mean and listen to what someone else is actually saying. Sometimes the issue someone raises at the beginning of a conversation isn't even the issue that ultimately needs to be addressed.

Trying to make an important conversation more efficient doesn't necessarily make it more effective. Sometimes the most efficient thing an organisation can do is give people enough time to properly work through an issue rather than having the same issue resurface again and again because nobody had the time or space to deal with it properly.

Communication matters even more when things get difficult

Psychological safety is relatively easy to talk about when everything is going well. The real test comes when something changes, when a project isn't working, when people disagree about a decision or when uncertainty starts to increase. That's when communication becomes one of the ways people make sense of what is happening and work through uncertainty together.

Plus there is certainly no shortage of uncertainty for organisations to navigate. Technological disruption, changing expectations about work, geopolitical uncertainty and ongoing organisational change all create situations where leaders can't necessarily provide certainty or make everything comfortable. What they can do is create an environment where people can talk about the uncertainty.

Someone should be able to say, "I'm worried about this" without immediately being labelled negative. An employee should be able to say, "I don't understand" without feeling incompetent. A team member should be able to challenge an idea without being dismissed as difficult. Leaders should be able to hear something they don't agree with without immediately becoming defensive.

So, is your communication supporting psychological safety?

Perhaps the most useful question isn't whether your organisation has psychological safety initiatives in place. It's whether people are actually able to communicate honestly when something is difficult.

Can someone tell their manager they disagree with a decision? Can an employee admit they've made a mistake? Can someone ask a question that challenges an assumption everyone else seems to accept? Can a team member raise a concern about a project before it becomes a major problem? Can people give leaders feedback without worrying about what will happen afterwards? Most importantly, what happens when someone does?

Perhaps the better question for leaders isn't simply, "Do our people feel psychologically safe?"

It's: What are our people able to say here that they wouldn't feel able to say somewhere else?

The answer can tell you a lot about the culture you've actually created.