To increase Safety, 15Five recommends...

  • Improve role clarity

    Encourage People Ops/HR to improve role clarity and add job titles and job descriptions to each person’s Career vision section in 15Five.

  • Create an aspirational job title

    Encourage team members to self reflect and create an aspirational job title. Encourage teammates to add their aspirational job title to the Career Vision section in 15Five.

  • Conduct a feedforward interview

    Encourage People Ops/HR to leverage 15Five’s Best-Self Review™ Recommended Growth and Development Questions Template Question #2: What are up to three wins you want to celebrate since your last review. What led to those wins?

  • Encourage help seeking

    Encourage People Ops/HR and managers to include a standard question in the 15Five Check-in such as “Are there any challenges you’re facing?” to regularly encourage team members to ask for help. Managers are then able to quickly identify issues and loop in the right people to provide additional support to their team members.

  • Ensure clear expectations from the start

    Encourage People Ops/HR to work with managers to ensure clear role responsibilities, performance expectations, and standards of excellence with their team members during the Best-Self Kickoff or at the start of the relationship.

  • During the first 1-on-1 prioritize role clarity

    Encourage managers and team members to review their job description together to ensure role clarity.

  • Practice active-constructive responding

    Encourage managers to respond to team member High Fives and wins with enthusiastic support such as “This is great news!” and “Tell me more!” to strengthen the relationship.

  • Celebrate wins

    Encourage People Ops/HR and managers to include a standard question in the 15Five Check-in such as “Are there any wins you’d like to share?” to help team members regularly celebrate wins

  • Begin development conversations with role clarity

    Encourage managers to begin the Best-Self Review™ with for psychological safety.

  • Hold managers accountable for role clarity

    Encourage People Ops/HR to hold managers accountable for role clarity conversations.

  • Request feedback

    Encourage all leaders and managers to request feedback through 15Five’s Request feedback feature.

  • Encourage managers to request feedback regularly

    Encourage People Ops/HR and managers to include a standard question in the 15Five Check-in such as “Do you have any feedback for me, your manager?” to promote psychological safety and make it safe to ask for feedback.

Additional resources

Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams by Amy Edmondson (1999)

Learning Behaviours in the Workplace: The Role of High-quality Interpersonal Relationships and Psychological Safety by Abraham Carmeli, Daphna Brueller, & Jane E Dutton (2009)

Psychological Safety: A Foundation For Speaking Up, Collaboration, And Experimentation in Organizations by Nembhard & Edmondson (2011) 

🌟 Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytics Review and Extension by Frazier, Fainschmidt, Klinger, Pezeshkan, & Vracheva (2017)

Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle (2017)

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy Edmondson (2018)

Bigony, C. (2019). 15Five: Technology aligned to the science of thriving. (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

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