Assessment · psychological safety
Find out whether people on this team can say the difficult thing.
Seven statements, answered in about three minutes, produce a single team score and one of four bands. It measures whether admitting a mistake, raising a risk or disagreeing carries a cost here — the condition that decides whether every other measure you take is answered honestly.
You receive
There is one construct here, not a profile of several. The seven statements approach it from four directions.
Whether an error can be named early, while it is still cheap to fix, or whether it is absorbed quietly and found later by someone else.
Whether flagging a risk is read as useful or as obstruction, and whether the person who flags it pays for having done so.
Whether asking is treated as ordinary practice or as evidence that someone is not up to the work.
Whether a dissenting view survives the meeting it is raised in, and whether people unlike the majority are valued for it.
Every statement is rated on a five-point scale and the seven ratings are summed, giving a total between 7 and 35. Three of the seven are reverse-keyed — agreeing with them indicates less safety, not more — and those are inverted before the total is taken.
The reverse-keyed items are there to counter agreement bias. A questionnaire where every statement points the same way invites a respondent to settle into a rhythm and answer the pattern rather than the question; alternating the direction makes that behaviour visible instead of invisible.
A raw sum out of 35 invites false precision — a 23 and a 24 are not a meaningful difference, and treating them as one leads teams to chase a number. Four bands, each with a written evaluation, keep the conversation on what is actually happening in the team.
One total and one of four bands, each with a written evaluation of what it means for the team. The number shown against each band below is the top of its range.
When issues are consistently discovered downstream, the question is usually not detection. It is whether anyone felt able to say so upstream.
Three minutes to establish whether the longer instrument you are about to run will be answered candidly at all.
A first reading taken early, and the same reading taken again two quarters later, is the cheapest evidence of whether anything changed.
Rigour
This is a team climate reading, not a clinical instrument and not an individual assessment. It describes how a group reports its own conditions at one point in time. No result from it should be used as an input to a hiring, promotion or disciplinary decision, and a single administration is a starting point for a conversation rather than a conclusion.
Team Safety Check