Team Psychological Safety Survey Template

Psychological safety is a property of a team rather than of a person: it is the shared sense that speaking up here — with a mistake, a doubt, a half-formed idea — will not be held against you. This template measures it with seven statements written for this form: what happens when something goes wrong, whether difficult issues can be raised directly, whether people who work differently are taken seriously, whether trying something that might not work is acceptable, whether people are judged for asking for help, whether the team represents each other fairly when someone is not in the room, and whether particular strengths get used. Three of them are worded so that agreement is the bad answer. That is a deliberate design choice, not a formality — mixed wording is what stops a respondent ticking straight down one column — and each of those fields carries a description saying which way round it scores.

These are our own questions, not a published academic scale. Well-known psychological safety scales exist in the research literature and are the right tool if you need a score that can be set against published studies; this form makes no claim of that kind, and nothing here is benchmarked against other organisations. What it offers instead is a repeatable internal measure: ask the identical seven questions of the same team twice, six months apart, and the movement between the two rounds is the finding. Compare a team with itself, not with a number from somewhere else.

Because the subject is the team, the unit of analysis is the team, and the number only means something if you can attach it to one. That is why this template asks almost nothing about who you are: no name, no email, no department dropdown. The one exception is the optional tenure question, which earns its place on a larger team because newcomers usually score lower and that gap is worth seeing. On a team of fewer than about eight people it identifies the newest and the longest-serving member as surely as a name field would, and on that standard it is an identifying question — so delete it before you send this to a small team. This template ships flat and cannot hide a field for small teams — generated templates carry no conditional logic — so the only real control is which fields exist at all. Run one copy of the form per team and put the team's name in the form title; do not add a department field to a single company-wide copy, because on a small team a department answer plus one strongly worded comment is an identification.

Be honest about what anonymity means here. formformform does not ask who filled the form in, but it does record the IP address and browser of every submission, the form owner can see both, and IP address is a column in every CSV export, encrypted forms included — end-to-end encryption seals the answers from the platform, it does not make a respondent anonymous to the person holding the key. If you are going to tell a team the survey is anonymous, tell them that too; a team that later discovers the caveat will not answer the next round. And do not run this on a team of three or four people at all. It will produce numbers, they will not be meaningful at that size, and the people who answered will assume you know who said what.