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Seven principles for measuring people without mistaking them for data.

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In theory at least, we measure psychological safety because we want more of it. That, in fact, is often part of the problem. The act of measuring changes the thing being measured, and not always for the better: as soon as a survey score becomes something a manager is rewarded for, we stop measuring safety and start measuring how much influence that manager has over the answers (such as whether they decide to simply fire the psychologically unsafe members of the team!).

Measurement isn’t neutral. Someone chooses what to count, what it means and how to present it, and those people are rarely the ones being counted. A heat map of red and amber squares may tell us where safety is low but it cannot tell us why, and it does not tell the person filling it in that anything will change as a result. In fact sometimes it suggests the opposite, because one of the fastest ways to teach people that speaking up is pointless is survey theatre – asking them how psychologically safe they feel and then doing nothing about it.

This newsletter issue is a collation of all our primary pieces on measuring psychological safety using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, what the risks are (and they are significant!), why there’s a tendency to measure the easy thing, not the important thing, and what to think about before we even start.

The seven principles below are our attempt to codify our fundamental approach to measurement, inspired by UKRI’s principles of ethical research. They’re constructed about psychological safety, but they apply to most, if not all, aspects of surveying and measuring people in organisations.

Psych Safety Principles of Ethical Measurement in Organisations

1. Measure to benefit, not to surveil. Ask only for what you need and only what you’re going to use. What people tell you should serve their working conditions and not be turned back on them.
2. Make participation voluntary and informed. Tell people what they’re being invited to contribute to, who will see it and what happens next. Declining should cost nothing.
3. Be honest about power. Measurement is not neutral. Name who’s asking, who’s answering, and what the gap between them means for what gets said.
4. Protect the people who answer. Confidentiality must be built into the process, not an afterthought. Nobody should be worse off for having told the truth.
5. Focus on learning, not judgement. Read scores as data about conditions, looking for learning opportunities, not who can be fixed or blamed.
6. Work with integrity and transparency. Be honest about what the data can and can’t tell you. Don’t overstate certainty and don’t bury inconvenient findings.
7. Close the loop, or don’t open it. People have given you their time and their honesty. Tell them what you found and what you’re doing about it, or don’t ask at all.

Further reading

1. Measuring Psychological Safety The fundamental question: what are we actually capturing when we measure psychological safety, and what does the measuring do to it? This piece works through the epistemology (why averages obscure the least safe person, why the act of measuring shapes what gets valued) and ends on caution: reach for qualitative understanding over metric fixation.

2. Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law and the Cobra Effect When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law and the Cobra Effect explain why: even just the existence of a metric results in optimising for the metric, not the thing it was meant to stand for. Applied to safety surveys, this is how a programme designed to increase safety can end up creating the appearance of it instead, masking much more serious problems.

3. The Streetlight Effect We sometimes search where the light is, not where the thing is. Measurement gravitates towards what is easy to count rather than what matters, and those choices are never neutral: deciding what to measure is deciding whose experience counts. A short, sharp argument that the convenience of a metric and its importance are two entirely different, and easily confused properties.

4. Beyond Metrics John Snow found the Broad Street pump by going beyond the numbers, not by collecting more of them. This piece uses his 1854 cholera map to show that over-reliance on metrics produces measurement-shaped knowledge rather than reality-shaped knowledge, and that the things which matter most are often precisely the ones that resist counting.

5. The Strange Confidence of 360° Feedback Every problem in this edition shows up in a single tool. Jade traces 360° feedback from 1930s officer selection to its 1980s trademarking, finds an evidence base far thinner than its ubiquity would suggest, and shows how averaging many biased ratings does not cancel the bias but smooths it into something harder to challenge. Anonymity, she argues, cannot be a shortcut to safety. 360 Feedback is the real world example that this whole edition points towards.

6. The Qualitative Measurement of Psychological Safety A survey can tell you where safety is low; a conversation can tell you why: the competitive bonus scheme, the threat of redundancies, or the unclear purpose behind a team. The best research is talking to people: Jade makes the case that words are not softer data than numbers, and offers concrete ways to gather them.

7. Measuring Psychological Safety: Questions First Before we measure anything, a pre-flight checklist. What is the measurement for? Longitudinal or cross-sectional, quantitative or qualitative? This piece walks through the questions worth answering before we send a single survey. Poorly designed measurement is worse than none at all.

See also

Explore this Trail on the Psych Safety Knowledge Map, and take detours into relevant academic papers too. If this edition leaves you wanting more, here’s two more from the archive. A team is only as safe as the least safe person makes the case that reporting safety as an average actively hides the one person it most matters to. And Reflections Part Three: The Safety to Dissent is where survey theatre is explored, and where the decisions about what and how to measure are shown to be usually made by people other than those being measured.

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