Research-informed Design

The Team Work Dashboard is informed by established research into psychological safety and effective team collaboration.

The purpose of this system is not to teach theory, but to apply well-established research in practical, repeatable ways that teams can use together.

Did you know? Harvard Professor Dr. Amy Edmondson has dedicated her life to studying Psychological Safety in teams

Educational prompts appear during team sessions

Established research foundations

Decades of academic and applied research show that teams perform better when people feel safe to:

Speak up
Ask questions
Admit uncertainty
Learn together

This body of work is widely referred to as psychological safety research. The Team Work Dashboard draws on this research to shape how signals are surfaced and how teams are supported to act together.

Key research contributors

The research informing this system comes from leading academics and major organisations.

Professor Amy Edmondson

Psychological safety has been studied extensively by Professor Amy Edmondson, whose work explores how teams learn, adapt, and perform when interpersonal risk is present.

Her research — including work described in The Fearless Organization and Teaming — has shaped how organisations understand speaking up, learning, and collaboration in teams.

Google's Project Aristotle

Large-scale applied research, such as Google's Project Aristotle, has also identified psychological safety as a critical factor in high-performing teams.

The Team Work Dashboard does not reinterpret this research. It applies it operationally at the team level.

Research-informed questions

Teams answer a small set of thoughtfully designed questions as part of their Team Work sessions (or separately when needed).

These questions are:

  • Informed by established research
  • Designed to be easy to answer
  • Focused on surfacing meaningful collaboration signals

The goal is to reveal patterns teams can work with, not to generate academic measurement.

Signals teams work with

The system captures signals related to how teams work together.

Understanding of goals and context
Personal wellbeing
Social connection within the team
Feeling safe to not know everything
Learning and adaptability
Openness and resilience

These signals help teams decide where to focus next, together.

From research to practice

Rather than presenting research as content, the Team Work Dashboard focuses on application.

Teams see shared signals
Teams choose a next action together
Teams take practical action
Teams measure the effect over time

This keeps the purpose practical: help teams improve how they work in small, repeatable steps.

Explore the research

For those who want to explore the research itself — including articles, explanations, and videos — the canonical research archive lives outside this site.

These resources explain the research and thinking in depth. The Team Work Dashboard focuses on putting that thinking into practice with teams.

Putting research into practice

If you're interested in how teams use signals and actions together.