Video Transcript: Why Is Psychological Safety So Important in Health Care?

​Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School

I want to describe four important outcomes of psychologically safe work environments. The first one is learning. The second one is risk management. The third is innovation, and the fourth is job satisfaction, job meaning. First, let's talk about learning a little bit, and by learning, I mean two things; I mean, your own learning, if you're in a psychologically safe work environment, you're more able to listen, to ask for help, to gain better data on what's happening around you. But maybe just as important, or even more important your organization is able to learn, your team, your unit.

Let's say you work in an intensive care unit, psychological safety allows you to speak up about what's happening, about what you see. It allows you to point to something that might be a process failure, that might be a discrepancy from what you think should be happening. It allows people working together in intense interdependent work environments to speak openly with each other, and often very importantly, to ask for help, to ask for input. A second one is just plain risk management. Because people are able to discuss risk thoughtfully, skillfully, they are better able to manage them as a collective.

In health care, like many work organizations, but often in an even more extreme form, the work is highly interdependent. That means that patients' outcomes, patients' health very much depends on the skillful coordination, discussions, decision making among different clinicians, different caregivers. Psychological safety is an input that helps people discuss risks thoughtfully, make decisions skillfully, and that way, they're better managing the very real risks that are always present in the health care setting.

Innovation is another crucial outcome from psychological safety. When people have a sense of psychological safety at work, they're better able to brainstorm, they're better able to offer possibilities. They're also better able to assess and test ideas, and see what works and engage in rapid cycle learning processes that allow us to work together to figure out what really works, and what's going to be a great new opportunity for the future.

A fourth outcome of psychologically safe work environments is job satisfaction. People who have a high sense of psychological safety at work feel more valued, and feel more respected by their colleagues, by their bosses, by the environment. They feel better about the job. They feel better and more committed to keeping that job over time. This is obviously a really valuable outcome of psychological safety. When people have longer tenure in their jobs, it's better for the patients, it's better for the organizations, and it's better for the colleagues.