Improving Physical Safety Through Psychological Safety

The United Nations estimates that 7,500 people die every day due to unsafe and unhealthy working conditions. That’s 2.8 million deaths from occupational accidents and work-related diseases each year — more deaths than from road accidents, war, violence, and HIV/AIDS combined. Another 374 million workers sustained non-fatal injuries and accidents in the workplace. In the United States alone, a worker died every 101 minutes in 2021. How many of those deaths could have been prevented? And why were those lives lost in the first place?

Most people would point to disregard of safety procedures as the root cause of the catastrophe. Sure, sometimes injuries and crises occur because of equipment failure and mistakes, but oftentimes they’re made because of oversight and a fear of speaking up when something goes wrong. In many cases, that negligent behavior is actually a symptom of cultural problems rooted in distrust, disengagement, and fear.

Psychological safety is the key to creating a true culture of accident and injury prevention. Unless workers act as active and vigilant participants in monitoring and managing the environment, workplace safety follows the pattern of a breakdown system rather than a preventive or predictive system. You simply can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. With psychological safety as the central enabling condition, workers are much more likely to voice concerns and problems before they turn into accidents, injuries, and deaths.

What is safety?

For more than two centuries, we have classified hazards into four tangible categories. Ergonomic hazards are workplace situations that cause wear and tear on the body. Chemical hazards relate to storing, using, and disposing of hazardous chemical materials. Physical hazards refer to anything that hurts employees’ bodies, even indirectly, including extreme temperatures, radiation exposure, and excessive noise. Biological hazards are usually associated with industries that work with people, animals, or infectious plant materials.

The high-hazard industries for physical safety — those with 200% of private sector average injury rates — include agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, wholesale and retail trade, water and remediation services, and healthcare and social assistance.

Organizations have a “duty of care” and moral obligation to provide preventative measures and procedures to protect their employees who face these hazards every day. Since British Parliament passed the Chimney Sweeper’s Act of 1788, the world has increased its efforts to improve workplace safety, and to good effect. Millions of lives have been saved. But as injury and fatality rates have risen in recent years, we seem to have reached a point of diminishing returns. Why do we still fall short of the promised levels of prevention and prediction? Turns out, there are some safety hazards that aren’t so easily identified.

Safety is both visible and invisible

Safety, in reality, has two domains: one is physical, and the other is psychological. Physical hazards are visible. Psychosocial hazards are invisible, and we experience them in the workplace all the time. They affect our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and eventually behavior as we interact with others. If something has triggered mental or emotional or social fear, then our ability to mitigate risks in the physical world becomes compromised.

If we can’t provide a culture of psychological safety alongside physical safety, team members won’t be equipped with the respect and permission they need to look at the physical environment and identify, speak up about, and remove inevitable, preventable hazards. That makes psychological safety the 5th hazard category. As Dr. Timothy R. Clark said, “A leader’s stewardship is to protect people not only physically but also psychologically.”

Current workplace safety regulations regarding personal protective equipment, communication standards, accident report guidelines, and fall protection still matter. However, in order to experience a step-jump in safety, organizations must put equal weight, concern, and care into the levels of psychological safety on their shop floors, in their plants, and across their teams.

Hazard detection

As a form of protection, we live our lives in a constant state of threat detection. Our heads are on a swivel. What are we looking for? Signs that speaking up may be dangerous or harmful. If someone else gets punished for raising a safety concern, no one else is going to bother. If leaders don’t model a speak-up culture, who’s going to point out a problem?

When our acts of vulnerability are met with rewarded vulnerability, we experience what’s called a blue zone. In blue zones, we can show up as our authentic selves. We give our discretionary effort, communicate candidly, and work towards innovation. We become active participants in our cultural environment.

Negative interactions — acts of punished vulnerability — bring out a natural fear response called a red zone. When vulnerability is punished, it triggers the pain centers of the brain, activates the self-censoring instinct, and freezes discretionary effort. In that state, workers seldom point out potential hazards in the workplace and frequently hide mistakes and errors.

Psychological safety, in essence, hands your employees the microphone. Since they have boots on the ground and eyes on the situation, they’re equipped to notice issues quickly and prevent hazards from happening. But they need to know that you, as the leader, are listening. If you don’t allow the circulation of local knowledge from the bottom to the top, and from side to side in the organization, you are doomed to treat symptoms and repeat the same unforced human errors that lead to accidents and injuries.

What is psychological safety?

In five words, psychological safety is “a culture of rewarded vulnerability” where people feel safe to speak up and challenge the status quo as full members of their team. Vulnerability is an inherently human experience. Every time you do something that exposes your insecurity, makes you feel uncertain, or otherwise pushes you out of your comfort zone, that’s an act of vulnerability. Common acts of vulnerability include making a mistake, giving an incorrect answer, receiving feedback, raising a concern, asking for help, admitting you don’t know, and trying something new.

Without a foundation of inclusion, a preventative attitude toward failure, a dedication to contribution, and an expectation of candor, physical safety measures will continue to fall short in protecting employees on the job. A culture where acts of vulnerability are rewarded, not punished, gives employees the permission they need to (1) identify risk, (2) predict failure, and (3) speak up.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™

Developed by Dr. Timothy R. Clark, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ framework acknowledges that we’re humans first and employees second. It follows a universal pattern that reflects the natural progression of human needs in social settings: teams that want to innovate need to feel included and safe to learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo.

Stage	Definition of respect	Definition of permission	Social exchange
1. Inclusion Safety	Respect for the individual’s innate need to be included, accepted, and gain a sense of belonging	Permission for the individual to interact and be their true and authentic self	Inclusion in exchange for human status and the absence of harm
2. Learner Safety	Respect for the individual’s innate need to learn, grow, and develop mastery	Permission for the individual to engage in the learning process and make mistakes	Encouragement in exchange for engagement
3. Contributor Safety	Respect for the individual’s innate need for autonomy, contribution, and recognition	Permission for the individual to work with appropriate autonomy and independence	Autonomy with guidance in exchange for performance and results
4. Challenger Safety	Respect for the individual’s innate need to innovate and improve the status quo	Permission for the individual to make challenges to the status quo in good faith	Air cover in exchange for candor

The benefits compound in environments where physical safety is on the line — the high-hazard industries for psychological safety include transportation, healthcare, mining, manufacturing, and construction. When you respect your teams’ innate humanity and give them permission to engage across the four stages, people will feel safe to be their authentic selves and create value.

The full guide continues with the 3 safety systems — breakdown, preventive, and predictive, and the behavioral comparison that shows where your organization sits between passive observation and active participation — then covers how psychologically safe teams self-diagnose and self-correct, how to break the chain of command by moving from hierarchical to distributed authority, the four reasons fear-based systems are dangerous, and the logic-of-safety model that connects it all.