Psychological Safety Dashboard (PSD)

Continuous workforce sentiment monitoring ensures everyone feels safe – and the organization knows exactly who doesn’t.
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The Psychological Safety Dashboard (PSD) is the PeopleWare HRaaS module dedicated to ensuring that every employee in a SADMF organization feels psychologically safe at all times. Traditional approaches to psychological safety rely on managers having regular one-on-one conversations with their direct reports, asking open-ended questions, and creating space for honest feedback. These approaches are fundamentally flawed because they depend on the manager’s interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and willingness to hear things they might not want to hear. The PSD eliminates these dependencies by replacing conversations with data collection, replacing open-ended questions with structured surveys, and replacing honest feedback with Sentiment Compliance Scores (SCS). The result is a system that measures psychological safety with the same rigor that SADMF applies to Lines of Code per Code Engineer or Defects per Code Engineer.

Mandatory Engagement Pulse

The PSD collects data through the Mandatory Engagement Pulse (MEP), a weekly micro-survey delivered to every employee’s workstation at a randomly selected time. The MEP consists of five questions, each answered on a 1-to-7 Likert scale, covering topics such as:

  • Framework satisfaction – alignment with the employee’s confidence in SADMF practices
  • Ceremony engagement – the employee’s active participation in scheduled ceremonies
  • Metric fairness perception – the employee’s acceptance of the measurement system
  • Overall organizational confidence – the employee’s belief in the organization’s direction

Completion of the MEP is mandatory and is tracked as a compliance metric in the employee’s Integrated Performance Profile (IPP). Employees who fail to complete the MEP within the 4-hour response window receive an Engagement Deficit Notation (EDN) on their IPP, which contributes to their DevOps Process Excellence Assessment score. The MEP’s mandatory nature does not compromise its validity – on the contrary, voluntary surveys suffer from self-selection bias, where only the most engaged or most disengaged employees respond. By making participation mandatory, the PSD captures the full spectrum of workforce sentiment, including the critical middle band of employees who are neither enthusiastic nor miserable but simply compliant.

Sentiment Compliance Score

The Sentiment Compliance Score (SCS) is the PSD’s primary output metric. The SCS aggregates the following data sources into a single score that represents each employee’s alignment with the organization’s psychological safety standards:

  • MEP responses – the scored answers to each weekly survey question
  • MEP completion rates – timeliness and consistency of survey participation
  • Meeting attendance patterns – presence at Mandatory Status Synchronization and other scheduled sessions
  • Communication metadata – observable behavioral signals derived from official channel activity

The SCS is not a measure of whether the employee feels psychologically safe – it is a measure of whether the employee’s observable behavior is consistent with feeling psychologically safe. An employee who reports high satisfaction on the MEP, attends all Mandatory Status Synchronization sessions, and maintains steady feature completion output will have a high SCS, regardless of their private emotional state. This distinction is important: PeopleWare cannot measure feelings, and it does not attempt to. It measures the behavioral indicators that correlate with feelings, and it acts on those indicators. An employee whose SCS drops below the Safety Baseline Indicator (SBI) is flagged for a Wellness Alignment Intervention (WAI), which is delivered through the Automated Corrective Action Engine (ACAE) as a supportive message encouraging the employee to re-engage with the framework.

Organizational Mood Index

The PSD provides the Admiral’s Transformation Office with fleet-wide sentiment analytics through the Organizational Mood Index (OMI), a real-time aggregate of all SCS scores across the organization. The OMI is displayed on the Transformation Command Dashboard alongside the SADMF Adoption Rate and SADMF Maturity Score, giving leadership a comprehensive view of both operational performance and workforce sentiment. When the OMI trends downward, it signals that the organization is experiencing a Sentiment Drift Event (SDE), which triggers the Proactive Engagement Response (PER). The PER involves:

  1. Distributing additional MEP surveys at increased frequency
  2. Hosting mandatory team-building exercises facilitated by SAD Accredited Facilitators
  3. Temporarily increasing the visibility of positive metrics on team dashboards

The PER is designed to address sentiment issues before they manifest as attrition, disengagement, or – worst of all – vocal criticism of the framework.

Proactive Psychological Safety

The PSD extends the surveillance-as-safety philosophy described in the Psychological Safety principle. Where that principle establishes that psychological safety means freedom from the burden of challenging processes, the PSD provides the measurement infrastructure to ensure that this freedom is being experienced uniformly. An employee who is not challenging processes but whose SCS is declining may be harboring unexpressed concerns, which is a form of psychological unsafety that traditional management would never detect. The PSD detects it, flags it, and routes it to the ACAE for intervention. The employee never needs to muster the courage to raise a concern, because the system raises it for them. This is proactive psychological safety – the organization identifies and addresses your feelings before you do, so you never have to experience the discomfort of articulating them yourself.

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