We took away psychological safety and then told everyone to be more productive | by Liz Dugan | Bootcamp | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

Medium Logo

Get app<br>Write

Search

Sign up<br>Sign in

Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

Featured

We took away psychological safety and then told everyone to be more productive

Liz Dugan

9 min read·<br>May 4, 2026

Listen

Share

How the modern economy destroyed the one thing that actually makes people do good work — and then had the audacity to expect more.<br>There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show up in any productivity metric.<br>It’s the exhaustion of waking up every morning and going to a job you’re grateful to have while quietly dreading everything about it. Not because the work itself is bad. But because the conditions around you have shifted so fundamentally that the version of you who loved this job — who stayed late because you wanted to, who raised your hand in meetings, who took creative risks and called it fun — doesn’t really exist anymore.<br>This is what the current economy has done to the workforce. And the most infuriating part is that the people who created these conditions are now scratching their heads wondering why output is declining.<br>The thing they stripped away has a name<br>Psychological safety is a concept popularized by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, and it refers to something deceptively simple: a workplace where people feel safe to speak up, take risks, make mistakes, ask questions, and challenge assumptions without fear of humiliation, retaliation, or being managed out.<br>It sounds soft. It isn’t. The APA’s 2024 Work in America survey found that workers who experience psychological safety report better outcomes across every major measure — job satisfaction, colleague relationships, lower emotional exhaustion, lower burnout. And for the companies who don’t respond to anything that isn’t a number: psychological safety has a direct, documented connection to performance and productivity. Creating a culture where people can be themselves, speak up, and take risks impacts the bottom line.<br>Psychological safety isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure. And right now, it’s being demolished at scale.<br>What the numbers say<br>The scale of this is not subtle. Eighty-two percent of employees are currently at risk of burnout — a significant escalation from previous years. Global employee engagement dropped two percentage points to 21% in 2024, and the cost of lost productivity reached $438 billion worldwide. More than half of U.S. workers say job insecurity significantly impacts their stress levels. Nearly half have left a job for reasons tied to their mental health, and two-thirds of those departures were voluntary. A third of employees say their productivity suffered in 2024 specifically because of their mental health.<br>These aren’t fringe statistics. They describe the mainstream American work experience right now. And they aren’t happening in isolation — they’re happening in the direct aftermath of years of rolling-mass layoffs, return-to-office mandates, economic uncertainty and instability, and a job market that has made people feel disposable in ways many of them have never experienced before.<br>The layoff effect nobody talks about<br>When companies do layoffs, there is a persistent mythology that the people who remain should and will be grateful. That fear will sharpen them. That watching their colleagues get walked out by security will make them work harder, stay quieter, perform better.<br>The data says something else entirely.<br>Research by Leadership IQ, compiled from 4,172 workers at 318 companies following layoffs, found that 74% of employees who kept their jobs said their own productivity declined after the layoff. Sixty-nine percent said the quality of their company’s product or service declined. Seventy-seven percent reported seeing more errors and mistakes. The three most common emotions reported by layoff survivors were anger, anxiety, and guilt — so reliably present that researchers have given it a name: workplace survivor syndrome .<br>There’s an unspoken pressure to be extra positive, extra productive, and extra loyal in the aftermath. But expressing the reality of these feelings becomes impossible. How do you complain about being overwhelmed when other people just lost their jobs entirely? How do you process grief for a changed workplace when you’re supposed to feel grateful? The emotional suppression only makes the survivor’s guilt worse.<br>This is the trap. The company reduces headcount. The remaining employees absorb their missing colleagues’ work without a corresponding reduction in expectations. They feel guilty complaining. They feel afraid to raise concerns. They feel surveilled and expendable. And into that poisoned environment, leadership announces: we need everyone to do more.<br>The productivity doesn’t come. It can’t. Not from...