Change the Race Ratio held its second Culture and Inclusion Leaders’ summit of the year on 20 November. It featured a highly engaging and interactive workshop led by the team at Brands with Values. To set the scene for the table discussions, Adrian Walcott and Martin Roach from Brands with Values shared some key insights from their UK Culture Study 2025.
The study highlighted a continued challenge in creating psychologically safe workplaces. The UK’s psychological safety score has declined from 43% in 2024 to 41% in 2025, showing signs that inclusive workplaces are heading in the wrong direction. The metric reflects employees’ perceptions across four pillars: open communication, healthy challenge, trust, and conflict empathy. The drop suggests employees feel less confident raising concerns, questioning decisions, or sharing ideas, which can inhibit innovation and reduce engagement.
Other cultural indicators help contextualise this decline. While creativity and innovation rose slightly to 28%, they remain low overall, and senior leaders significantly overestimate creativity levels compared with the wider workforce. Cultural health remains static at 18%, with workplaces becoming more demanding, signalling persistent limiting patterns and pressure. Overall, the study suggests that improving psychological safety, especially trust and open challenge, will be essential for strengthening UK workplace performance and wellbeing.
Workshop summary: Creating an environment for safe and constructive challenge
To explore how organisations can foster an environment where people feel safe to speak up and challenge constructively, members worked together in small groups to discuss these three core questions.
1. Is healthy challenge evident in your workplace?
Participants agreed that healthy challenge does exist but is not consistently experienced across teams or contexts. Several conditions were identified as essential for enabling constructive challenge:
- Leadership that is genuinely open to being challenged
- The dynamics of “who is in the room” and the impact of office politics
- The strength of relationships with line managers
- Tenure and familiarity with the organisation, which influence confidence to speak up
Structural factors also shape the visibility of healthy challenge, including:
- Manager accountability for inclusive leadership within performance reviews
- There is a correlation between higher response rates to surveys and higher levels of healthy challenge
2. What are the key barriers to healthy challenge?
Barriers were found in both organisational systems and interpersonal dynamics. Key obstacles included:
- Hierarchy and power imbalance, making it harder to challenge senior voices
- Microcultures within large or matrixed organisations which complicate navigation
- Lack of visible action on past feedback, reducing willingness to speak up
- The role of middle management, especially where dissenting views are not supported
- Tenure: new comers to an organisation will take a while to find their feet and speak up
- Specific industries will have issues depending on the make up of the workforce
- The pace of work and hybrid working, which limit time and space for dialogue
- Personal fears, including retaliation and navigating a multigenerational workforce
3. How can these barriers be overcome?
Participants proposed actions across leadership, colleague support, and organisational processes:
- Leaders actively role-modelling openness, vulnerability, and desired cultural behaviours
- Clear accountability for leaders, with better follow-through, communication, and transparency
- Greater mentoring and sponsorship to open pathways to influence
- Training to build cultural awareness and improve understanding of healthy challenge
- Building trust in confidential feedback mechanisms
- Celebrating and sharing success in equal measure to evaluating failure
To close the workshop, members were asked to write down one key action they will take to take a step towards creating a more psychologically safe workplace. Here is a selection of the ideas and commitments made.
