PERFORM: Psychological safety is the foundation mental fitness is built on

Part 5 of a 5-part series on mental fitness and sustainable performance: Perform.

Over this series we have looked at why awareness is not enough, why the people carrying the most are the last to ask for help, what burnout looks like before it looks like burnout, and how much of an employee's mental health is shaped by the person they report to. Each of those ideas rests on the same condition.

That belief has a name, Psychological safety. It is not comfort, and it is not the avoidance of hard conversations. It is the condition that makes hard conversations possible.

What silence costs

University of Melbourne researchers, found that people with mental health problems were more likely not to tell their supervisor than to tell them. The later stages of unaddressed problems are costly. Safe Work Australia reports that mental health conditions now account for 12% of serious workers' compensation claims, and the median time lost from work in those claims, 35.7 weeks, is almost five times the 7.4 weeks recorded across all serious claims.

Research in 2026 by Mental Health First Aid England found that 45% of UK employees do not feel safe raising mistakes. Nearly half (49%) do not feel comfortable expressing their needs at work, and 35% do not feel safe asking for help.
These figures connect directly to what we explored earlier in this series. If employees are more likely to stay silent than to speak, the high performer who answers "I'm fine" is not an outlier. They are responding sensibly to the environment around them.

Not a luxury

When budgets tighten, programs that build psychological safety are often among the first to go, because they are seen as a nice to have. Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health tested that assumption across two surveys representing more than 27,000 employees. They found a strong correlation between psychological safety and protection against stress, which suggests the ability to speak up helped people hold up when conditions became difficult.

A University of South Australia study of more than 4,000 employees, examined psychosocial safety climate, the shared belief that senior management protects and supports employees' psychological wellbeing. Employees in workplaces with a low climate had 43% more sickness absence and reported 72% higher performance loss at work than those in high scoring workplaces. The estimated cost to employers was $1,887 per employee per year, or about $6 billion a year nationally.

The implication is uncomfortable for any organisation under pressure. Psychological safety matters most in exactly the periods when it is most tempting to cut. Edmondson describes burnout as what happens when people hold everything in and cannot get the help they need, and she points to a direct connection between burnout and turnover.

Safe does not mean fewer mistakes

One of the most instructive findings in this field is also one of the most counterintuitive. In Edmondson's early research in hospitals, units with higher psychological safety reported more errors, not fewer. They were not making more mistakes. They were able to see them, because people felt safe enough to report them.
This is the same dynamic that makes distress invisible. Where speaking up carries a cost, problems stay hidden until they become too large to ignore. Where it does not, they surface early, when they are still small enough to address.

Relational, not just regulatory

Under Australia's model Work Health and Safety laws, organisations must manage psychosocial risk. But psychological safety extends well beyond compliance. It is built in relationships, through trust, through how feedback is given and received, and through a culture in which people see that raising a concern leads to something constructive. Leaders play a pivotal role in every one of those.

The moment after someone speaks up

The most important moment in psychological safety is the one immediately after a person speaks. A leader who responds with curiosity makes the next disclosure more likely. A leader who responds with defensiveness, or with silence, teaches the whole team what to do next time. In the University of Melbourne survey, feeling supported at work was among the factors associated with employees telling their supervisor about a mental health problem.
Three responses make the difference. The first is to thank the person, because the courage it took to speak is the thing worth reinforcing. The second is to ask questions before offering solutions or judgement, so the person feels heard rather than managed. The third is to follow through and let the person see what happened as a result, because people judge whether it is safe to speak by what they see happen next. Leaders who go first, naming their own mistakes and uncertainty, make all three easier, because it shows the team that speaking up is part of how they work.

Measuring what matters

Psychological safety is hard to improve if it is never measured. Enmasse's PEARL Index looks at five factors of workplace flourishing: Positivity, Energy, Activation, Relationships and Life purpose. Relationships and connections sit at the heart of psychological safety, which makes the Index a practical starting point for understanding where your people currently stand.
Mental fitness is not a program, and it is not a month on the calendar. It is a capability built through practice, in leaders and teams, in a culture where people can say what is really going on. Build that, and everything else this series has described becomes possible.

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References
Becher, H. and Dollard, M. (2016). Psychosocial Safety Climate and Better Productivity in Australian Workplaces: Costs, Productivity, Presenteeism, Absenteeism. University of South Australia, for Safe Work Australia.
Edmondson, A. (1996). Learning from Mistakes Is Easier Said Than Done. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.
Edmondson, A. and Kerrissey, M. (2025). In Tough Times, Psychological Safety Is a Requirement, Not a Luxury. Harvard Business Review.
Mental Health First Aid England (2026). Research on psychological safety and speaking up at work.
Mental Health Research Canada (2025). Research on workplace disclosure of mental health challenges.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (2014). Creating a Mentally Healthy Workplace: Return on Investment Analysis. National Mental Health Commission.
Reavley, N.J., Morgan, A.J. and Jorm, A.F. (2018). Disclosure of Mental Health Problems: Findings from an Australian National Survey. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 27, pp. 346 to 356.
Safe Work Australia (2025). Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025.