How to Enable Psychological Safety in the Workplace
Psychological safety is the glue that holds the most successful teams together — and it is only ever as strong as the safety felt by the people who need it most.
Which is the problem. Because the people who feel least safe are, by definition, the least likely to tell you that they don't.
That makes it the responsibility of the people who already feel safest — the ones with positional or social power — to do the work of lifting it. Nobody is going to raise their hand and ask you to.
So where do you start?
#1 factor
Google studied 180 teams and 250 attributes. Psychological safety beat every other variable.
Not niceness
It's the belief the team is safe for interpersonal risk. Candour, not comfort.
Now a legal duty
Australian employers have a positive duty to manage psychosocial risk — and NSW went further in 2026.
ℹ️ About this article
Originally contributed by Sean McGinn, Director and Founder of Callo, a CX design consultancy, with more than 25 years leading large operational teams through CX transformations. His central argument — that psychological safety is only ever as strong as the safety felt by those who need it most, and that the burden of lifting it falls on whoever already has it — remains the spine of this piece, along with the eight practices he set out.
ACXPA publishes practitioner contributions to lift the standard of the conversation. The views are the author's, and ACXPA remains vendor-agnostic — Sean's consultancy is one of many in the market, and you'll find others in the ACXPA Supplier Directory.
The article has since been substantially expanded by ACXPA: the research and definitions (Edmondson, Project Aristotle), the Australian legal position, the contact centre analysis and the diagnostic signals are ours, not Sean's. Nothing here is legal advice — for that, speak to a WHS professional.
What Psychological Safety Actually Is — and What It Isn't
The term was coined by Harvard's Amy Edmondson in a 1999 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly, where she defined it as:
"A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking."
Note what that does not say. It doesn't say comfortable. It doesn't say pleasant. It doesn't say everyone agrees.
Psychological safety is not niceness. A team where nobody argues, nobody challenges the plan and everybody says the meeting was great is often the least safe team in the building — it's just that the fear has gone quiet. Safety is what makes candour possible: the confidence that you can admit a mistake, ask an obvious question, disagree with your manager or flag a problem without being embarrassed, rejected or punished for it.
Why it's worth the effort
Google spent two years on Project Aristotle, studying 180 teams across 250 attributes to work out what makes a team effective. They expected the answer to be about who was on the team — seniority, tenure, personality mix.
It wasn't. Psychological safety was the strongest predictor of team effectiveness they found, ahead of every other variable they measured.
In Australia, This Stopped Being Optional
Here is the part that has changed since this article was first written, and it is the reason psychological safety has moved off the "culture" agenda and onto the risk register.
Under Australian WHS law, employers now have a positive duty to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable. Safe Work Australia's model Code of Practice on Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work sets out what that means, and every state and territory now has enforceable obligations. Psychosocial hazards include how work is designed and managed — not just bullying and harassment.
⚖️ NSW went further — and it's aimed squarely at contact centres
In February 2026, NSW passed the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act 2026 — a nation-first law targeting the psychosocial risks created by systems that allocate work, track workers and monitor performance.
Under it, employers must consider whether a digital work system creates:
- "excessive or unreasonable metrics to assess and track the performance of workers"
- "excessive or unreasonable monitoring or surveillance of workers"
Read that as a contact centre operator. Adherence. Occupancy. Handle time targets. Every call recorded. Screen monitoring. Real-time sentiment analysis. Automated scoring. That is not an edge case for this legislation — it is close to a description of a contact centre floor.
This applies in NSW. Other states and territories have the psychosocial duty but not (yet) this specific digital-work-systems duty — though the direction of travel is not subtle. This is general information, not legal advice.
The practical upshot: if your handle time target is set at a level nobody can hit while doing the job properly, that is no longer just a bad metric. It is a potential psychosocial hazard that you have a duty to identify and control.
Why Psychological Safety Is Harder in a Contact Centre
Most writing on this topic imagines an office team in a meeting room. A contact centre is a fundamentally different environment, and the generic advice underestimates it.
Everything is recorded and scored
In most workplaces, a mistake is a conversation. On the phones, it's an artefact — recorded, retrievable, and potentially attached to a QA score. Admitting an error takes markedly more courage when the evidence is on file.
The clock is always running
"Speak up if something's wrong" is easy to say and hard to do when the next call is already waiting and your metrics will register the pause. Safety needs time, and time is the one thing the floor doesn't have.
The hierarchy is unusually steep
Agent to Team Leader to manager, with monitoring flowing one way. Edmondson's finding is that safety is lowest where power distance is highest — and few environments have a steeper gradient than a contact centre floor.
The AI conversation is being had about them
Only 21% of frontline agents are excited about the AI being deployed around them. When people believe a technology may replace them, admitting they're struggling with it feels like handing over the evidence.
Which is why the single most valuable thing psychological safety buys a contact centre is not comfort. It's information.
The agent who says "this process is broken and I've been working around it for a month" is worth more than any dashboard. So is the one who admits the customer got the wrong answer, or that the new system is beyond them, or that a colleague isn't coping. Every one of those is a data point that only exists if someone feels safe enough to hand it to you — and every one of them is currently being swallowed somewhere in your operation.
8 Ways to Build Psychological Safety
Encourage open communication — and listen properly
Create an environment where people feel able to say what they think, and then demonstrate that you actually heard them. Active listening is a skill, not an attitude, and most people are worse at it than they believe.
The test: when someone raises something inconvenient, what visibly happens next? If the answer is "nothing", everyone watching has learned what speaking up is worth.
Build trust deliberately, not passively
Trust isn't a mood that settles over a team. It's built by doing what you said you'd do, repeatedly, especially when it's inconvenient — and by being straight about the things you can't change.
The test: do your people find out about decisions that affect them from you, or from the grapevine?
Support diversity and inclusion — because safety isn't distributed evenly
This is the crux of the whole thing. Psychological safety is not a team-level average; it is an individual experience, and it is almost always lowest for the people with the least power in the room — the newest, the youngest, the only one of their background, the one on a different contract.
The test: in your last team meeting, who spoke, and for how long? If it was the same three people, you don't have a safe team. You have a confident minority.
Set clear expectations and guidelines
Ambiguity is a safety hazard. When people don't know what "good" looks like, or where the line is, they default to keeping their heads down — which is the opposite of what you want.
The test: could each person on your team state their top three priorities without looking them up?
Make mistakes survivable
Edmondson's original research found something counter-intuitive: the better teams reported more errors. Not because they made more — because they were willing to say so.
If your error rate went down after you got tough on errors, you probably didn't fix anything. You just stopped hearing about them.
The test: when did someone last tell you about a mistake before you found it yourself?
Provide real mental health and wellbeing support
Access to genuine support — not a poster with a phone number on it. Stress management, workload that a human can actually carry, and leaders who notice.
This is also where the legal duty bites hardest: workload, exposure to abusive customers, and monitoring intensity are all recognised psychosocial hazards, and abuse in particular needs a firm line and a clear process, not more resilience training.
Check in regularly — and make feedback go both ways
Regular contact keeps people connected and surfaces problems early. But the direction that matters most is upward: how often does your team give you corrective feedback?
The test: if the honest answer is "never", that's not because you're doing everything right.
Reward the risk, not just the result
Praise people when they take an interpersonal risk — speaking up, sharing an idea, questioning someone more senior — and do it in public, even when they turn out to be wrong.
Because everyone is watching what happens to the first person who challenges you. That moment sets the price of honesty for the next twelve months. Pay it generously.
How to Tell Whether You Actually Have It
Nobody will answer "do you feel psychologically safe?" honestly, because answering it honestly requires the thing you're asking about. Look at behaviour instead.
✅ Signs you have it
- People tell you about mistakes before you discover them
- Someone in the room disagrees with you, out loud, and nothing bad happens
- New starters ask questions in week six, not just week one
- Quiet team members contribute without being called on
- Bad news travels upward as fast as it travels sideways
🚩 Signs you don't
- Meetings are agreeable and the car park conversation is the real one
- You find out about problems from the metrics, not from people
- Absence and attrition are climbing with no stated reason
- The same three people speak in every meeting
- Nobody has challenged a decision of yours in months
If you're seeing the right-hand column, resist the urge to run a survey about it. Start by changing what happens the next time someone brings you something you don't want to hear — because the team is far more interested in that than in the survey.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is psychological safety in the workplace?
The term was defined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson in 1999 as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking". In plain terms: the confidence that you can admit a mistake, ask a basic question, disagree with your boss or raise a problem without being embarrassed, rejected or punished for it. It's about candour, not comfort.
Is psychological safety just about being nice to people?
No — and confusing the two is the most common way organisations get this wrong. A team where nobody disagrees, nobody challenges the plan and every meeting is pleasant is frequently the least safe team in the building; the conflict hasn't gone away, it's just gone underground. Psychological safety is what makes robust disagreement possible, not what prevents it. If your team never argues, that's a warning sign rather than a win.
Is psychological safety a legal requirement in Australia?
The term itself doesn't appear in the legislation, but the substance increasingly does. Australian employers have a positive duty under WHS law to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, and every state and territory now has enforceable obligations, guided by Safe Work Australia's model Code of Practice. Psychosocial hazards explicitly include how work is designed and managed — workload, job demands, role clarity, and exposure to aggression. In February 2026 NSW went further with the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act, which requires employers to consider whether systems that allocate work and track performance create "excessive or unreasonable" metrics, monitoring or surveillance. This is general information, not legal advice.
What does the NSW Digital Work Systems Act mean for contact centres?
Potentially quite a lot, because contact centres are among the most intensively measured and monitored workplaces in the country. Adherence, occupancy, handle time, Call Recording, Screen Capture, real-time sentiment analysis and automated quality scoring are all digital systems that track performance and allocate work. The Act doesn't ban any of them — it requires employers to consider whether their use creates excessive or unreasonable metrics or surveillance, and to manage the resulting psychosocial risk. A target nobody can meet while doing the job properly is the obvious place to start looking. This is general information, not legal advice — take it to a WHS professional.
How do you measure psychological safety?
Carefully, because the act of measuring it runs into the same problem it's measuring: the people who feel least safe are the least likely to say so on a form with their name attached. Edmondson's seven-item team survey is the standard research instrument, and anonymity is essential. But behavioural signals are more reliable than any survey — do people report mistakes before you find them, does anyone disagree with you out loud, do the quiet team members ever contribute? If bad news only ever reaches you through the metrics, you have your answer.
Whose job is it to build psychological safety?
The people who already have it. That's the uncomfortable core of the idea: safety is lowest for those with the least positional or social power, and they are the least likely to raise it — so waiting to be asked guarantees nothing changes. It falls to whoever holds the power in the room to spend some of it deliberately, and the most powerful single act available is how you respond the first time somebody tells you something you didn't want to hear.
Where to Next
Related Articles
Summary
Psychological safety is not a soft topic, and it is not about being nice. It is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk — and Google found it to be the strongest single predictor of whether a team performs.
In a contact centre it is harder to build and more valuable to have, because everything is recorded, the clock never stops, and the AI conversation is being conducted about people rather than with them. What safety buys you there isn't comfort. It's information — the broken process, the wrong answer, the person who isn't coping — none of which reaches you unless someone decides you're safe to tell.
And in Australia it has quietly stopped being discretionary. Employers have a positive duty to manage psychosocial risk, and from February 2026 NSW employers must consider whether their performance metrics and monitoring are "excessive or unreasonable". For an industry built on adherence, occupancy and recorded calls, that is not a small sentence.
Start where Sean started: the people who feel safest have to spend some of that safety. Nobody is going to ask you to.
