Unpacking Psychological Safety: A Session with Bob Batchelor & Oliver Brecht 

Psychological safety may not be easy to measure as hours worked or quarterly revenue, but you know when it’s there—and you certainly know when it’s not.  

Stagnant innovation, stifled creativity, chronic burnout, disengagement, and high turnover are just some of the consequences organizations risk when they fail to create an environment where people feel safe to speak up, contribute new ideas, take risks, and fully engage in their work. 

To close out the Center for Organizational Effectiveness’ four-day virtual summit, Thriving in Uncertainty: Leadership and Wellbeing in Turbulent Times, Bob Batchelor, VP of Global Marketing and Communications, and Oliver Brecht, VP and General Manager of Enterprise Solutions at Workplace Options, led a critical conversation on “Psychological Safety as the Cornerstone of High-Performing Teams.” 

In this final session, Batchelor and Brecht made a compelling case for why psychological safety is more than a lofty aspiration, but a business imperative in today’s culture-driven world. They explored the tangible costs of low psychological safety and how it impairs performance, weakens morale and collaboration, and puts long-term success at risk.  

Drawing on Brecht’s cross-industry consulting experience and WPO’s global insights from supporting organizations around the world, the session examined real-world case studies and early warning signs of low psychological safety—and unpacked practical, evidence-based guidance on how to foster trust and create the space for people to thrive. 

Read an excerpt from the session below: 

Bob: Psychological safety, as we all know, is sometimes called a “soft skill,” but we all know it drives hard outcomes.  

Oliver, can you share a moment when psychological safety—or the lack of it—had a measurable impact on team performance, turnover, or client outcomes? 

Oliver: Yeah, absolutely. This question takes me back to a past project I worked on with a tech startup. 

I was brought in for a specific kind of marketing technology—focused on reviewing the performance of marketing activations and helping strategize the next move. It had all the classic hallmarks of the tech world: two people in a garage, scaling to 50 overnight, and then to 200 employees by the time I joined. But what really stood out was the complete absence of psychological safety—unlike anything I’d seen before. 

Despite tremendous success over the prior 6 to 18 months—and a general consensus that their tech was truly disruptive—they couldn’t retain staff. Founders were threatening to walk out. Clients were starting to leave. I was brought in to figure out what was going wrong. 

And within five minutes of arriving, one of the founders pulled me aside and said, “I enjoy office politics. I find it more appealing than the actual work. And my mission with you here this week is to get rid of the other founder.” 

That set the tone. It became clear very quickly that psychological safety had eroded completely. People couldn’t challenge ideas or raise constructive suggestions without it turning into a political game. We observed minimal input in meetings, minimal innovation after this initial tech had been built, and found that people were leaving because they didn’t feel like they could really do their own work or undertake the task in a way that was meaningful, purposeful, and appropriate to them. 

In short, it put a handbrake on the entire organization. What once looked like a breakout success I haven’t heard anything about in years. 

Bob: Thank you for that, Oliver. That’s a powerful case study, and it leads nicely into the next question I was going to ask—and one that’s just come in from our audience. 

What do you do when it looks like you have high performance on the surface, but psychological safety is eroded underneath? Are there red flags you’ve learned to look for? 

And the question from our audience is: How do you measure psychological safety—formally and informally? What signs tell you things are off track?  

Oliver: There are definitely a few informal things you can do. The first is simply walking around—through your team, department, or your organization, depending on your situation—and getting a feel of how people are interacting and how people are interacting with you, as well.  

A couple of key questions to consider as do this are: “When people ask a question within our organization or our team, does everyone look at the same person to talk to or do people volunteer their own thoughts and opinions? Is everyone waiting in line for a particular individual to speak beforehand?” And then, “Is the phrase, ‘That’s not the way we do things around here,’ used quite frequently?”  

Both those questions are going to indicate that the right to challenge or bring fresh ideas isn’t really present in your organization. 

Another thing I watch for is overuse of the phrase, “Just playing devil’s advocate.” Often, that’s a way to dismiss ideas under the guise of open debate. When people constantly frame opposition that way, it can become a subtle but powerful barrier to innovation. Maybe it’s about protecting turf—maybe people see other ideas as threats—or it’s about resisting change—again, back to that, “That’s not the way we do things around here,”—but either way, it can dampen the psychological safety in the room when used constantly and not in a way to appropriately or constructively challenge back a challenge. 

Then, in the sweet spot between formal and informal, I recommend looking at your EAP utilization data—and comparing it to insights from the WPO Psychological Safety Study, which outlines the common psychological risks or stressors across 18 countries. If your organization’s usage patterns don’t align with those trends, that could indicate something different—and possibly problematic—is happening within your organization. 

To give you one benchmark: 18.6 percent of WPO’s EAP cases are tied to workplace concerns. So, if your percentage is significantly higher, that may indicate issues with the work environment, interpersonal relationships, job demands—any number of factors tied to psychological safety. 

And just to note, that 18.6 figure is based on our 2025 running data. So that’s a live number you can use. 

Formally, there are several psychological safety questionnaires you can deploy to gauge how employees resonate with statements like, “I know what’s expected of me,” or “I feel safe sharing a new idea.”  

If you’re in a position of power, it’s important to remember that your perception of the organization likely differs from that of your frontline workers. We call that the “executive blind spot.” So don’t assume your view reflects the full reality. You need to get perspective from employees, and you can do that with surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, etc. That would be a way of more formally assessing psychological safety within your organization.  

Bob: Thanks, Oliver. Those are good.  

So, looking at the Psychological Safety Study, one of the things I wanted to point out is that, if you look at the top three workplace concerns in the 18 countries that were included in this year’s study, seven of the 18 countries name as one of the top three workforce concerns… 

Curious what workforce concern is top of mind for most organizations today? 

Click here to view the full library of session recordings from #2025COEWeek and stream the full session now to learn more.