In high-pressure, fast-moving contact centre and team environments, innovation, performance, and wellbeing all hinge on one critical factor: psychological safety.
It’s the foundation that allows people to speak up without fear, share ideas, challenge the status quo, and admit mistakes, and all without risking embarrassment or blame.
Which is why Megan Jones, Editor at Call Centre Helper, spoke to Rob Clarke at Elev-8 Performance to unpack what psychological safety really means and, most importantly, how leaders can create it, model it, and sustain it.
Video: How to Create Psychological Safety
Watch the video below to hear Megan and Rob discuss what psychological safety is and what leaders can do to create safety in the contact centre:
With thanks to Rob Clarke, Director at Elev8, for contributing to this video.
This video was originally published in our article ‘How to Develop Psychological Safety in the Contact Centre’
What Is Psychological Safety?
At its core, psychological safety is a team environment where individuals feel safe to speak up, take risks, and share ideas without fear of failure or ridicule.
“Psychological safety is something that I think people are hearing more and more about, and there’s two answers to your question I want to bring.
The first is like a book answer. The book answer would be that psychological safety is about essentially the environment in business, or in teams, or anywhere really, where individuals feel comfortable speaking up, sharing ideas, and without the kind of fear of failure that maybe you might get in a kind of less psychologically safe environment.
There’s a longer answer which I think is bringing it to life.”
It’s not about being soft or avoiding accountability, it’s about creating a culture that encourages learning, collaboration, and innovation.
An example comes from the clothing brand Spanx, where monthly “Oops Meetings” required employees to share their biggest mistakes, as Rob explained:
“We’ve all probably heard of the business Spanx – hopefully we have. And the leader of Spanx, the CEO – a woman called Sara Blakely – she actually introduced something called oops meetings. You might go: what’s an oops meeting?
Basically, the concept around an oops meeting was every month employees had to stand up and share their biggest screw-up from the past few weeks.
At first, obviously, people were absolutely mortified, but then something happened as a result of doing that. The meetings became a cherished part of Spanx’s culture because by normalizing that oops moment, employees became more willing to take risks – innovation goes with risk-taking, problems got solved because they were surfaced, and actually, the company developed more and more reputation for creative problem solving.
Essentially by creating a culture where your team aren’t terrified to fail or make a mistake, they’re going to be more productive, more innovative, more engaged. And for me, that’s a nice example of quite a well-known brand doing something to instil psychological safety.”
7 Ways to Create Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is often invisible, until it cracks, and when it’s missing, silence, mistrust, and disengagement take root, but when it’s present, teams are more innovative, collaborative, and resilient.
To help you lead with intention and build long-term trust, here are seven practical ways to instil psychological safety in your team:
1. Ask: “What’s It Like to Be Led by Me?”
One of the most effective starting points is also the simplest: ask your team what it feels like to work with you.
“If you never stop to ask yourself the question “what’s it like to be led by me?”, you risk leading kind of blindly by your own biases, your own assumptions, and not through insight.
That reflection also builds a bit more empathy, so if you understand how you’re showing up, how your behaviour is landing with others, you can lead with more intention.”
This encourages honest feedback and gives you insight into how your leadership style is landing, and without this awareness, it’s easy to lead based on assumptions or personal habits, rather than real impact.
Regularly asking for feedback and reflecting on your approach helps build trust and models the openness you want to see from your team.
Example: The ‘Magic Weekend”
It is common in contact centres that new leaders experience what’s often called the “magic weekend” – where they go from being a team member on a Friday to a team leader by Monday, without any real preparation, as Rob explains:
“I think being a leader is a tough gig – I mean depending on your level and your history. We meet a lot of leaders who go through a process we call the magic weekend, which is Friday I was a team member, Monday I’m a leader.
The only thing that’s happened in the intervening period was a weekend, and actually that’s quite a daunting thing for a leader.
But there’s always been this propensity to believe that you have to show up knowing all the answers, being almost faultless and without making mistakes yourself.
And I think that kind of ability to reflect on your impact a little bit, reflect on the legacy, and the shadow you cast, becomes super-important because it shapes how you show up and how your team behave.”
This sudden shift can lead to pressure to have all the answers, act with certainty, and avoid mistakes.
But good leadership is not about having all the answers, it’s about being reflective, open, and aware of the influence you have on others.
2. Say: “It’s Okay to Disagree With Me”
A crucial step in creating psychological safety is making it clear that disagreement is not only accepted – it’s encouraged.
Saying “It’s okay to disagree with me” opens the door, but it’s also important to explain why it matters, according to Rob:
“The first step would be to say it’s okay to disagree with me, but then importantly here’s why it matters. So, there’s the setting out your stool around it’s okay to disagree with me and here’s why it matters: you know I value your input, I don’t have all the answers.
We interview a lot of senior leaders – really, really big hitters in leading sectors – and they’re good not having all the answers.”
Your team needs to understand that different perspectives lead to better outcomes, and that you value their input, even when it challenges your own.
To embed this in daily team life, create simple rituals that normalize dissent:
- Ask someone to act as devil’s advocate in team meetings.
- Include a regular agenda item like “What are we missing?”
- Actively praise constructive challenges to reinforce the behaviour.
These habits help shift disagreement from something to avoid to something to welcome.
3. Balance Praise and Constructive Feedback
There’s a sweet spot between excessive praise and constant criticism. Falling too far in either direction can weaken trust and stifle learning.
Being overly positive without substance (“That’s great!” for everything) can feel insincere, while overly critical feedback can create defensiveness and fear, as Rob continues:
“We have this spectrum we talk about which we call ‘illuminate awesome’. There’s this concept around there’s no point being a mindless cheerleader, if you’re a team leader that just says ‘wow, Megan, that was awesome’ at everything – that’s one end of the spectrum, versus super-critical, picking up on all the little detail points, the things that they personally wouldn’t do.
Rather than that sweet spot around a bit of constructive challenge but recognizing the steps they’ve taken.
So that becomes like a self-fulfilling cycle of I’m inviting you to, I’m signposting why I value that, and I’m building rituals or habits around me that demonstrate that that’s also, it’s not just a talking shop, it’s a reality.”
This shows your team that feedback is about growth, not judgement, and encourages open conversations about performance.
4. Normalize Mistakes Through Team Rituals
Mistakes are inevitable. The way a team responds to them determines whether they learn and improve – or hide and repeat them.
Using the example of Spanx, which introduced monthly “Oops Meetings” where team members stood up and shared their biggest mistake from the previous month.
While this felt uncomfortable at first, over time it became a treasured part of the culture, and created an open, honest environment where problems were surfaced earlier, risk-taking was encouraged, and innovation increased.
You don’t need to copy this format exactly, but you can adopt the same principles:
- Host regular “learning moments” or “fail forward” sessions.
- Use retrospectives to openly discuss what didn’t go to plan.
- Encourage team members to share mistakes, and what they learned from them.
The goal is to show that mistakes are a natural part of progress and not something to fear or hide.
5. Run Regular Psychological Safety Check-Ins
Many teams assume they’re psychologically safe – until something goes wrong.
Running informal “safety audits” or check-ins helps you spot problems before they become bigger issues. It doesn’t need to be a formal process, but it should be intentional.
“I guess a bit of a shift of thinking for the purpose of this could be leading with intention. As I said in the previous point, what’s your intent?
Well, a safety audit, a process, some sort of mechanism, is a way that you can kind of provide some rigour. You can’t fix what you don’t measure, or what you’re not conscious of, so teams often think they’re safe until you dig deeper.”
You can ask questions like:
- “When was the last time someone challenged an idea in this group?”
- “Do you feel comfortable speaking up if something doesn’t feel right?”
- “Have you ever held back a suggestion because you weren’t sure how it would be received?”
You may also want to collect feedback anonymously, particularly in teams where people are hesitant to speak freely.
“Encouraging a bit of reflection around when was the last time someone challenged an idea – I’ve come with a lot of suggestions, but no one’s challenged me on them – does that mean you all agree with me? Let’s drill into that a little bit.
If you need to layer because people don’t actually feel safe at the moment, you could do things like collect responses anonymously.
We see a lot of surveys, interestingly, for big corporates having to be anonymous because there’s a belief that actually people will be identified. I mean that’s almost like a great example of where psychological safety does not exist.”
If you do gather feedback make sure you act on it, as failing to follow up will quickly erode trust.
Better yet, involve your team in co-creating the solutions, to reinforce a sense of shared responsibility and build momentum for positive change:
“I think a lot of employee engagement leading companies, when they’ve done their employee engagement surveys, they’ll invite their team to co-design fixes, and they’ll do things like retros, or they’ll do working labs, or whatever.
And actually that oops meeting that I spoke about earlier that Spanx do, that’s kind of like a safety audit in disguise, or a safety audit by another name.
They created a safe ritual for surfacing the problems, making it normal to talk about the failure early and putting fixes in place.”
6. Create Space for Open, Inclusive Dialogue
Psychological safety doesn’t only exist in one-to-one relationships, as it’s a group dynamic.
A team member might trust you personally but still feel reluctant to speak up in front of others, as Rob continued:
“Maybe one-on-one you might find that someone brings something to you as a leader, but then in a group dynamic, there’s stuff unsaid.
That would almost reflect you have a trust with somebody as a leader to an individual, but trust and psychological safety are actually separate concepts.
Psychological safety is about a group dynamic. So as a group you feel safe to do that. And it can be a little bit kind of invisible until it breaks or it starts to show cracks, then it becomes painfully obvious.”
Make space for inclusive conversations by:
- Inviting quieter team members to share first.
- Using silent brainstorming or anonymous idea tools.
- Encouraging input from all voices, not just the loudest.
And importantly, model the behaviour yourself: be willing to share your own learning moments, missteps, and uncertainties, which helps to build trust and shows that it’s safe for others to do the same.
7. Build a Culture of Continuous Reflection
Psychological safety is not a one-off exercise, it’s a continuous process, and the most effective teams regularly reflect on how they’re working together and where things can improve.
You can build this into your culture by:
- Running regular retrospectives or “temperature checks”.
- Co-designing fixes with your team, not imposing them.
- Asking: “What helps us work well together, and what gets in the way?”
Remember, culture isn’t built through a single workshop or initiative, it’s shaped through the behaviours, rituals, and conversations that happen every day.
Author: Megan Jones
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson
Published On: 13th Nov 2025
Read more about - Video, Communication Skills, Culture, Employee Feedback, Health Wellbeing and Stress, Leadership, Rob Clarke, Team Management, Videos
