Do younger workers feel less psychologically safe?

When HR magazine asked me to comment on this new research about younger workers and psychological safety, I was delighted to do so.

I don’t believe that younger workers are “less resilient”, but I do think many organisations still misunderstand what psychological safety is.

Psychological safety is not a corporate cuddle, comfort, political correctness, reassurance, or consensus. It is when employers create the conditions for people to speak up, embrace divergence of views, challenge convention, take risks, innovate, and admit mistakes without fear of humiliation, blame, or punishment.

Psychological safety is all about accountability and sustainable, healthy, high-performance in pursuit of the team’s purpose. It is not a soft skill.

Younger workers are entering organisations during a period of profound uncertainty: economic instability, digital hyper-visibility, burnout cultures, and leadership models still too often organised around hierarchy and performative busyness. Many young people have grown up highly emotionally responsive but are entering systems emotionally underdeveloped.

When workplaces trigger chronic threat responses such as fear of judgement, exclusion, or failure, then people move into self-protection rather than learning, creativity or contribution, and many younger employees quickly find themselves labelled as either powerless, over-functioning with attitude or blamed “problem people” for speaking uncomfortable truths.

I don’t think that employers need to provide different psychological safety approaches for older and younger workers. Instead, corporate leaders need to be thoughtful about the environment they are cultivating for all. Done right, every generation of worker will benefit as will multi-generational collaboration.

HR has a critical role here. Psychological safety is not part of your wellbeing strategy; it needs to be incorporated into every fibre of recruitment, onboarding, appraisal, development, and performance management system.

Leaders must learn and role model how to regulate themselves, respond productively to challenge and create adult-to-adult cultures where speaking up is treated as organisational intelligence, not disloyalty.