Find out whether group members believe their ideas are being listened to and if they feel confident to challenge ideas from others or to ask a ‘stupid’ question. It doesn’t have to be a long survey, just a few questions which promote deeper conversation, perhaps as part of a team meeting.

You could also ask: ‘how would you describe the culture in our group in one word?’ and use the resulting word cloud to explore team values. Invite individuals to share what these words actually mean for them in practice, with specific examples. For example, if people say that the team is ‘respectful’, does this mean the same for everyone in all roles? What are the types of behaviours that the PhD students, professional services staff or technicians in your group see as ‘respectful’?

Try out an anonymous question box in a group meeting, where people can ask things they might otherwise be embarrassed not to know. This might be about research protocols or methods or about the wider academic ecosystem such as peer review processes, equitable partnerships, decolonising research or open data sharing. Sometimes postdocs will feel like they ‘should’ know things as they are more senior, but they could be coming from different disciplines. This surfaces hidden knowledge about how things work and often people realise that others don’t have all the answers.

If some key themes emerge, a next step might be to then invite group members to learn about and then lead a short discussion at a future meeting (e.g. digital image manipulation, when and how to share your metadata…).

Instead of allowing the loudest people to jump in first to a meeting, pose a question for the group and invite everyone to gather and write down some thoughts in response. You can then go round the group and invite everyone to share their ideas, post them on the wall to look at, or go for a ‘think, pair, share’ approach where you pair people up for discussion before sharing to the wider group. This lets more introverted people do their thinking first and less confident people test their ideas with others and get peer support.

For more on building psychological safety in meetings and collaborations, have a look at the Valuing Voices tool and reflective questions. This toolkit is a partnership project between colleagues from the University of York and Mahidol University. It aims to enhance the support you provide to researchers in developing research projects and grant applications. It brings together five principles for equitable and responsible research, curated practical resources for each principle, and a guided results based planning tool to support thoughtful research design.