Psychological safety is keeping workers at home, survey finds

There’s likely no turning back. More than two years of work-from-home or hybrid work solutions and employees are reluctant to go back to the way it was. Many are enjoying the better work-life balance of working from anywhere.

However, there is another reason workers are more prone to stay at home – remote and hybrid work employees feel they have a higher degree of psychological safety at work than on-site employees. That’s according to a meQuilibrium survey of 3,900 employees, which found that 66% of on-site employees say they are more likely to feel like mistakes are held against them, they are 57% more likely to say that people are rejected for being different, and 36% more likely to find it difficult to ask teammates for help.

“There is a real difference in psychological safety among work settings,” says Brad Smith, PhD., Chief Science Officer, meQuilibrium. “In many remote-for-the-first-time environments where everybody is the same size square on the video call, it’s often easier to speak up and be heard.”

The survey found that those working on-site are less likely to feel at ease discussing difficult topics, less likely to feel safe taking risks and less likely to feel that the team respects and values each other. Nearly half (44.5%) of the employees surveyed said they would quit if there were a requirement to work on site without a remote or hybrid option.

Read more: How to get the hybrid work balance right. Hint: Stop giving employees ultimatums

“As employers continue to consider how best to structure the workplace, leaders will need to address this very real gap in psychological safety across work settings in order to ensure that innovation, creativity and change-readiness is not compromised in the return to on-site work,” Dr. Smith says.

Considering psychological safety across different levels of resilience, the study found that 60% of employees with low resilience and low psychological safety feel burned out and 34% are thinking about quitting their job. Just 5% of highly resilient employees who feel psychologically safe reported feeling burned out and just 3% were thinking about quitting.