Building trust you can measure with
Safety Steps
TM
We’re pleased to bring Safety Steps™ to our clients here in the UK, working in partnership with Sitomo, the Finnish organisational psychologists behind the tool.
Sticky Change is a Safety Steps™ practitioner, and we’re proud to be the first organisation to bring it into the UK, using it as a practical foundation for the trust and safety work we do with our clients.
Why Safety Steps™?
Psychological safety is one of those things everyone agrees matters, right up until the moment someone is asked to measure it. Most teams have a sense of where the atmosphere feels open and where it feels guarded, but a sense isn’t evidence, and evidence is what makes a development conversation land. Safety Steps™ gives teams a clear, anonymous picture of where trust is genuinely strong and where it’s more fragile than it looks, broken down by the specific behaviours that build or undermine it rather than a single score in a report.
This isn’t about making everything comfortable, it's about building a team’s capacity for healthy challenge, the willingness to take a social risk, raise a concern or try something that might not work, because the people around you have shown they can be trusted with it.
There’s good evidence behind why this matters. People working in higher trust workplaces tend to report less stress, more energy and strong performance, alongside lower burnout, than those in lower trust environments.
Overcoming common challenges
A lot of psychological safety work stalls at the same point. A leader knows something isn’t quite right in a team, perhaps meetings feel flatter than they should or the same few voices do most of the talking, but turning that feeling into a specific, actionable conversation is hard without evidence to work from. General engagement surveys rarely help because they tend to produce a single score rather than insight into what’s actually driving it.
Safety Steps™ closes that gap. The survey takes around 25 minutes to complete, sits entirely online with no login required, and gives every participant a personal yet anonymous link, so people can answer honestly without worrying about being identified. The results come back broken into the specific behaviours and conditions that shape psychological safety, communication, collaboration, atmosphere, shared learning, the boundaries people feel able to hold, and the way leadership and the wider organisation show up day to day.
How it works
The process runs in three stages. Before the survey goes out, we make sure everyone understands what it’s for and why their honest answers matter. During the survey window, each team member completes the questionnaire in their own time, with the option to add context to any answer that feels particularly low or high. After the results are in, we bring them back to the team for review, and work through what the data is actually saying before agreeing the specific actions that follow.
We run this process for you from start to finish and can tailor team building workshops around your results. The point isn’t the score, it’s the conversation the score makes possible.
What it measures
Atmosphere – whether people feel valued, treated fairly and able to count on each other’s goodwill.
Communication – whether information flows openly and whether the harder issues actually get raised rather than avoided.
Collaboration – how well the team reflects on its own practices and works through disagreement until people are genuinely satisfied.
Innovation – whether unconventional ideas get a fair hearing, not just the safe ones.
Shared learning – how willingly people try something new and how openly they share what they know with each other.
Being humane – whether people feel able to show up as themselves, including on the harder days.
Keeping boundaries – whether people feel able to speak up when something doesn’t sit right, and whether shared rules are actually upheld.
Leadership and organisation – a dedicated view of how the team leader and the wider organisation are shaping all of the above, since psychological safety rarely lives or dies at team level alone.