Frequently Asked Questions

The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment is a set of free resources to help organizations and leaders assess and address strategies pertaining to psychological health and safety. It is based on the requirement for competent leadership as described in the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. Leaders complete a self-assessment which helps identify positive strategies they are currently using consistently as well as those they could implement to promote psychological health and safety.

• Organization-wide approach - The assessment can be assigned to all or select leaders by an administrator authorized by an organization.
• Individual leader approach - There is a separate option that allows individual leaders to confidentially take the assessment for their own learning and development.
• Employee feedback - The optional employee feedback version obtains perspectives from the leader's direct reports. This helps to see whether the employees are aware of the extent to which these strategies are being implemented. Any discrepancy in perception provides an excellent opportunity for team discussion and engagement towards a psychologically safer workplace.

This is not a personality or character assessment. It focuses only on the extent to which strategies known to support psychologically safe work are being implemented.

The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment is meant to be part of continual improvement of leaders and can be accessed as many times as desired.

The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment and related resources found on the Workplace Strategies for Mental Health website are provided at no cost. Any organization using the free tools may also choose to allocate additional resources in terms of employee time spent supporting implementation of the strategies identified by the assessment.

The leader self-assessment and employee feedback version each take approximately 20 minutes to complete.

Individual leaders can select "Create an account" from the homepage for a personal and confidential account. If required by an organization as part of leader development, only the authorized administrator will need to create an account. The administrator will then send a unique link to each leader to complete the assessment.

• Your results can only be seen by you if you created your own profile and dashboard.
• If an administrator sent leaders a link to the self-assessment, the results will be available to the administrator.
• If using the Employee feedback version, a link is sent to all direct reports of a specific leader. All employee feedback responses are anonymous. We recommend sending the link to a minimum of three employees to reduce the likelihood that responses may be assumed to be from a specific person.
• The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment shares only aggregate information from all users, without any personal identifiers, with qualified independent researchers.

Yes, the Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment can be taken multiple times. If the organization has an administrator assigning the link, the administrator can send a new link whenever a leader is ready to do it again. Alternatively, an individual account could be set up by a leader in addition to their organization’s account. The results from an individual account are not shared with the administrator. Leaders taking the assessment on their own can retake the assessment as many times as they wish through their individual account. Assessments taken before July 2022 cannot be compared to assessments taken during or after July 2022. For more information, see the “Why can’t I compare my January 2022 results with my August 2022 results?” question below.

It is recommended the assessment be completed on a yearly or semi-yearly basis, coupled with a tailored action plan to enhance leadership strategies. This allows for continual improvement.

Micro-changes that are easily integrated with existing leadership responsibilities can be more effective and sustainable than trying to implement many changes at once. Start with those known to be doable and those that can have the greatest positive impact. Once these become part of the regular leadership approach, an updated assessment can identify additional positive strategies to be considered.

The items for the assessment tool were developed through empirical and grey literature reviews and consultation with key stakeholders in the area of workplace mental health, members of the Human Resources Professionals Association, Workplace Strategies for Mental Health, compliments of Canada Life, and Mindful Employer Canada.

Yes, you can. From your Dashboard, select the Edit Information tab. In the Manage Leaders section, select Browse to upload an Excel spreadsheet file (.xls or .xlsx, maximum file size of 2MB).

To re-open an assessment, select the Re-open Last Assessment button in the Completed Assessments section of your Dashboard. If a leader has multiple closed assessments, only the leader's most recent assessment can be re-opened. Also note that a leader can only have one active assessment open at a time. Due to the assessment scale change, any assessments taken before July 2022 cannot be re-opened. Only assessments taken after July 2022 can be re-opened.

Assessments taken before July 2022: Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment uses a five point scale which allows the respondent to express how much they agree or disagree with each statement in the assessment as follows: 1=strongly disagree; 2=disagree; 3=neither agree or disagree; 4=agree; 5=strongly agree. Assessments taken during or after July 2022: Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment uses a five point scale which allows the respondent to express the extent to which each statement is occurring as follows: 1=never; 2=rarely; 3=sometimes; 4=often; 5=always.

On July 1, 2022, the assessment scale was updated from agreement (strongly disagree to strongly agree) to frequency (never to always). Because of this change, the results won’t be comparable.

The change from an agreement (strongly disagree to strongly agree) to frequency (never to always) scale helps to more accurately assess the extent to which leaders are implementing strategies known to protect psychological safety. While most supervisors and managers agree with the strategies, many do not have the time or resources to consistently apply them. Assessing how frequently these strategies are applied allows the leader to create their own action plan for improvement or inform their organization on the need for necessary time, resources or skills.

If you completed an assessment prior to this change, and you complete another one now, it is expected that the new results will appear to be “worse”, but in fact are just more accurate. Strongly agreeing that a strategy is important is quite different than stating that you always use it in every situation. It’s more likely that any leader’s answer will be sometimes or often rather than always. This doesn’t mean your leadership has gotten worse. It means you have a more accurate representation of where there is room for improvement.