Googlers prize 'psychological safety,' but it won't save them from layoffs

• Some Google employees said the company's layoffs violated its commitment to psychological safety.
• But psychological safety describes the freedom to take risks and make mistakes — not job security.
• Still, Google's handling of the layoffs may hurt trust and innovation within the organization.

Few companies can guarantee employees that they'll have jobs forever — even Google.

The tech behemoth has long been touted as one of the best workplaces in the US. And according to the company, that's in part because it cultivates "psychological safety," a scientific term for the freedom for people to ask questions, take risks, and make mistakes.

Now, in the aftermath of the company's largest-ever layoffs — Alphabet, the parent company of Google, last week shed about 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of its global workforce — some Googlers are saying the company pulled the emotional rug out from under them.

"How can we reestablish psychological safety for Googlers after these layoffs?" one employee asked at a tense all-hands meeting on Monday. "How are we supposed to ever feel safe again?" wrote another in the UK.

Research suggests that psychological safety is critical to team success and helps drive creativity, build resiliency, and improve decision-making. But psychological safety is not meant to protect workers from layoffs. No company can ever promise lifetime employment, after all. 

"It's so important to be clear that psychological safety is not the same thing as job security," Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School who pioneered research on psychological safety, told Insider.

Yet Google might have gone astray — and hindered psychological safety within the organization — by what some workers described as the abrupt and opaque way it managed the layoffs.

"How you handle those challenging moments," Edmondson said, "will have an impact on psychological safety and others' willingness to take risks." (Edmondson said she doesn't work directly with Google and can't comment on the company's workplace practices.) She added that in the wake of a challenge like mass layoffs, an organization will "have to take special care to reinvigorate that innovative risk-taking culture that they value."

Google employees were already worried about their job security before the layoffs

Weeks before the layoffs were announced, many Google employees were already nervous.

The company's tougher performance-review system was making them uneasy about job security, as they watched other Big Tech companies, including Amazon and Meta, slash more than 20,000 jobs.

Google leadership, at the time, didn't rule out layoffs when pressed, but top execs didn't say it was a sure thing either, a Google employee told Insider last year.

"Our billionaire bosses pit us against one another in hunger games-like competition for our jobs," Jenny Rosewood, a technical editor at Google and a member of the Alphabet Workers Union, which represents about 1,000 Googlers, wrote then. Then they "arbitrarily fire thousands of our colleagues and comrades," she added.

Google execs said psychological safety doesn't guarantee job security

At the all-hands meeting, Google's leadership took issue with the notion that it breached its commitment to psychological safety.

Google executives including the chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stressed that the layoff process was not arbitrary and involved analysis about the long-term health of the company. 

Schindler said that psychological safety refers to "an environment where people feel safe to speak up, where they want to take risks, where they want to solicit feedback, make mistakes, question the status quo for example."

He made clear that it does not refer to job security. "If you interpret psychological safety as removing all uncertainty, we can't do this," he said at the all-hands meeting, adding that "the reality is sometimes we need to adjust priorities based on the external environment."

Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist and executive coach in New York City, agreed with the company's assessment. "Psychological safety is about interpersonal dynamics, not about economic or organizational reality," he told Insider, adding, "You can still have psychological safety without necessarily having job security."

Dattner said that what employees might be experiencing is Google's apparent violation of the psychological contract, or the unwritten agreement between workers and their employer that describes the informal expectations and understanding of their relationship.

Google has long aspired to be an employer of choice by offering high pay and lavish perks, and making people feel valued. "What we're seeing is a reaction to the ending of those things," said Dattner. "They feel betrayed because of the very standard that Google set."

Harvard's Edmondson said the fact that employees felt bold enough to raise concerns about psychological safety at an all-hands meeting suggests that there might still be room for risk-taking at Google.

"One can readily imagine that most people would think that, but not say it aloud," she said. "That's almost a potential irony."