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We may have killed Psychological Safety y’all and it may not return until the “new guard” takes over completely. This sadly, is not an overstatement or click-bait, but bitter observation. With the exception of isolated pockets in smart enterprises, Psychological Safety is by and large at the lowest I’ve ever seen it after 6 years of studying it.
People are the least open, the least collaborative, the least willing to risk position and limb to express their honest opinions and companies are suffering from this, but they aren't measuring anything that would reveal it. So how do I know? The hundreds of interviews a week we have with the teams that are not yet our clients shows it and, much more concerningly, even the data from the teams that are using our software shows an overall decline of all indicators now. Are the teams using it and doing the Human Work regularly better off than their counterparts? Of course they are, the dialogue is open and they have a tool to actively work on the actual components of Psychological Safety - they can improve their communication, their EQ, their resilience, their flexibility, genuine engagement and so on but they are having to do a lot more work to maintain levels that are keeping their teams functional than before. I say “functional” and not “efficient” or “productive” because the last two are not really measured. Anywhere. Ask whoever your preferred Silicon Valley giant may be, how they measure the last two or even a general “team performance” category and if you are to dig into their data you’ll have to concede it’s shambolic.
Why is that? The fear of real dialogue has enveloped this area of HR if we are to be honest. Genuine data and knowledge of how one’s employees truly feel and think, is no longer a North Star in most places. They may claim it is, and “WeDOCare Theatre” still has regularly scheduled performances, but I’m here to tell you it’s not important to anyone to know the innermost feelings of their employees or keep them expressing themselves fearlessly.
In the tech industry in particular, after the hundreds of thousands of layoffs and the daily messages on social media of big names not finding gainful new challenges, the climate of fearful silence is well and truly generalised now.
Not only is Psychological Safety at an all time low but so is morale and engagement in general. The situation is far grimmer than any exec is willing to admit and the lack of loud deploring of the topic will give you a clue of how this is unfolding silently and adding to an already massive Human Debt.
Let’s be honest, the desperate need for Psychological Safety never really landed. The term was either too soft, too scary or just generally unfit for purpose (as its biggest pioneer Dr. Amy Edmondson has hinted to herself of late) and the firm connection to the $ bottom line, whilst skirted over, never landed in the minds of anyone else but well-meaning enthusiasts in DevOps, Risk or Engineering and other unlikely places where the lack of innovation and performance in its absence, was obvious every day.
I used to qualify how it hasn’t landed with a resounding “YET!”. I would do, after literally hundreds of thousands of hours and of dollars sunk into it, but I no longer think I should qualify it at all. It won’t land at all.
At least not like we were hoping it will when we first saw the results Google got in the Aristotle study or when we were all going to conferences that had abandoned the tech talk in favour of the bits that mattered most - the humans and how they interact in teams and their dire need of fearless cultures to innovate and perform. What changed other than the overall dejected and defeated demeanour we are all sporting in various industries these days at the end of a long masking career and a global traumatic event? Good question. Is this stance maybe just my (and my team’s) cape fatigue? I wish. Is it, perhaps, that Psychological Safety has serendipitously and under the hood found a way to self-regenerate and strengthen without direct intervention and it’s generally there for most companies? Heh. Are these companies perchance all just actually generative organisations living their fearless best selves with oodles of safety at every level and we just can’t tell? Come on now…
No, we just have to face it, it will not land.
Why do I say it will not? Because, if it has not done so when the climate towards how people do matter was at its peak, it will not now, when careless RTO and blatant disregard for employees is firmly here and any mention of how people are “capital” and not “resources” is pure demagogy.
All of the hallmarks of systemic change that we were counting on to see this firmly become embedded in the DNA of organisations have either been and went with little to no effect, or never will arrive at all. The WHO (World Health Organisation) has raised all the alarm signals about the mental state of employees (and particularly leaders) that it can. The various regulators have already issued standards such as the ISO 45 001 and others to bring it to the fore. The “human centric” HR theatre has already seen its last acts in many places and the dialogue around “employer brand”, “talent”, “adaptation”, “belonging”, “vulnerability” and “authenticity” is all but gone.
The firm re-engineering of cultures around being fearless and EQed through measurable Psychological Safety increase should have gone from “Lighbulb “A-ha! That’s how we get high performing teams!” Moment”, to “Overall Awareness of What and WHY It Is”, then swiftly transitioned into a “Frenzied Scramble to Get More of It to Perform” (you can find more about these exact terms of the non-evolution in “Academic Phases of Psychological Safety In the Workplace That Never Came To Be”, 2025, ChatGPTPublishers undoubtedly:) but it didn’t.
It got a bit of the first part -how could it not, anyone reading the definition and casting their minds back to a moment when they ever worked in a psychological safe team recognises the magic of it intrinsically and can never unsee it- and it managed fairly clear recognition at scale - who here reading this doesn’t know the definition of Psychological Safety being the ability to express one’s self fearlessly without fear or repercussion in one’s team? And who, having related and understood, doesn’t think of it every time they see themselves or their teams harmfully holding back?
So yes, the term is popularised enough that most professionals will be aware of it, but as it turns out, widely spread recognition and awareness does not push any of our modern workplaces to that last blessed phase of actually doing anything about it.
Why not? Aside from how they have not genuinely agreed on the need beyond a “nice-to-have” and the connection to every imaginable KPI is not clear, no one "owns" Psychological Safety and no one is safe enough to push it.
Firstly, let’s be clear - the people who see its dire need on a daily basis in a lack of results are not the decision makers that could have firmly ushered it in. Those are the much more removed execs and HR structures who could have done something about it but didn’t and won’t. Not because they’re evil, no. Because they’re impotent. I am fully aware of the bile that’s rising in the chest of the guilty reading this, but it is impotence. Non-generative cultures’ impotence. Immense HumanDebt™.
The same lack of ability that stops them from sorting other common sense and deeply needed hallmarks of workplaces that are healthy, such as genuine engagement and inclusivity. This isn’t a slight, this is a fact of our organisations today. They can not heal, erase or even reduce any of their Human Debt and that’s because they are unable to genuinely audit it with honesty. Why? They lack the self-awareness and, irony of all ironies, the Psychological Safety to do so.
HR doesn’t have the safety to stand up to "delulu" (demure GenZ term which will make the younger readers cringe) executives that can’t find ways to shed their status quo love of yesteryear and bravely forge new cultures where respect and care of their employees is firmly at the core instead.
Good-egg execs who know what’s what on the people front are in the midst of their own burnout-caused "menty-b’s" (another one, and hopefully last!:) and can not talk about it to their own team because of that same lack of safety, so they can’t bring themselves to listen when HR occasionally does manage to call out insane decisions as the demands for bums on seats, or the cost-cutting exercises that sees them dissolve DEI efforts or asks them to create fake job ads.
On the sidelines of this, the techies and “opies” (is that a term?) who can evidently see how the lack of psychological safety keeps their teams in quiet-quitting and mental anguish land in Jira or Salesforce every day, can do very little when they aren’t feeling so hot themselves and have no genuine say-so and resources.
So with the top busy and quietly dissolving internally, the bottom exhausted and the new generations being kept out by either the fearful organisations or their own sense of self-respect and preservation, who all remains to usher in the behaviours that make teams not impression manage to each other all day, but instead genuinely collaborate with open minds and open hearts and eliminate the fear that’s eating at every team these days?
Who will insist on the habitual Human Work the teams need? Who will buy the tools (obligatory own plug for PeopleNotTech’s Psychological Safety Dashboard and Plays for teams which BTW NEVER get proactive demo requests once this newsletter goes out to tens of thousands of professionals because the ones reading it either have no power or no strength to care enough to try to change this downwards trajectory and that in itself is a major signal of where we are) to empower their teams, and who will intently hold those spaces for the teams and find ways to remunerate them for the hard work it takes to become -and stay!- psychologically safe?
You may think that’s a to-do for the armies of external consultants and coaches and perhaps that’s true. But if so, we ought to stop cutting them at the knees and normalise body-doubling at work for as long as we need to get up to speed on these complicated “soft skills” topics but that’s a story for another day and for now be honest that all their -valiant!- efforts rarely amount to more than a notch in the book of the internal stakeholders that brought them in for the obligatory trimestrial WeSoCareAboutOurPeople Theatre. What can they really do to reduce the masses of HumanDebt they come up against and what psychological safety do they have as “the externals” to challenge “the internals” on how working on increasing good behaviours is never at the end of a one-and-done workshop or a two hours webinar?
I hope this is not an easy read (content-wise but feel free to insert snark remark on style here:). I know many will get up in arms and annoyed, roll their eyes and unsubscribe and that’s fine.
I hope you do get genuinely worried whoever you are and wherever you are in a company reading it, because we’ll have to either do something radical about all this - shall we call it “high performance team behaviour hygiene” or “productivity sine qua non condition”? would that help?- or drop it all together for our generation and accept that living fearfully, not sharing, dreading, hiding and suffering are just the norm in our workplaces for the foreseeable future. That we don’t need innovation or high performance. That honesty and bringing one’s full human, curious and courageous self to work is overrated. That humans are disposable to the workplace and the Human Work will never come to be before machines take over and the new generation rethinks and -hopefully- redesigns work from the ground up.
But don’t worry, aforementioned HR and execs desperately concerned about job security and preserving the unrocked boats afloat (for now), the emperor will remain butt naked quietly, no one will acknowledge this out loud or accuse it in public either way, because that would require them to be safe enough to do so.
I re-read all this myself (thank you if you have as well, it's certainly long!) and realised I can’t end it on that note and without a shoutout to the handful of places already being intelligent enough to do better and bank themselves the biggest competitive advantage there is because they do exist, and they are all we can pin our hopes on.
So to all of you brave enough, open enough, human enough and smart enough: keep up the Sisyphean work and find ways to recharge enough to double-down on it, but above all -please shout from the rooftops about it! Show how invested your leaders are in psychological safety and lowering their HumanDebt with concrete examples of the human work you do every day. Lift the veil on some of your internal numbers that show the correlation to the many wins you gained since you started the human work. Let your psychological safety champions who took the fear out of teams, speak up and inspire others, be a team with the rest of your industry, competitors included, yes, and help pull them up with examples and true stories of your experiences.
We all need it desperately.
Related: The RTO Trap: Ignoring Data and Humanity Will Cost Companies Top Talent