A year ago, my son and I spent 3 1⁄2 weeks on a mother-and-son road trip across the USA with my 13 year old.
A year on, I couldn’t tell you what I paid for those flights. But I could tell you, in detail, how the cabin crew made me feel. The story is that on a random, when looking for cheap flights, I stumbled into one of the clearest real-life examples I’ve come across of something I talk about in my work: psychological safety. And I want to tell you this story.
A Cheap Ticket, Zero Expectations
The trip itself was a big one: a mother-and-son road trip across the US. Because the trip was expensive, I needed the flights to be cheap. So we flew with Play, a low-cost Icelandic airline I knew nothing about. I had zero expectations.
But even before we boarded, something felt different. From the moment I visited their website, I could tell this wasn’t a company trying to be like every other airline. “Play” wasn’t just a name. It was a personality.
Then We Boarded the Plane
The cabin crew wore comfortable white tracksuits and white trainers, all branded with the Play logo. The service itself was simple, exactly what you’d expect from a low-cost carrier. But the atmosphere was unlike anything I’d experienced on much bigger, more established airlines.
Before anything else, I felt welcomed. Not processed. Not handled. Welcomed. I could tell these people genuinely wanted us to have a good flight. They joked with passengers, chatted with kids, and even the safety demonstration, usually the most robotic three minutes of any flight, felt relaxed and almost fun. None of it felt performed. It felt real.
Do You Actually Enjoy Working Here?
Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not shy about striking up a conversation. And given that workplace wellbeing is literally my job, I couldn’t resist asking several crew members the same question: Do you actually enjoy working here? Would you recommend this job to others?
Every single one smiled and said yes.
They talked about supportive managers, a positive culture, and feeling free to be themselves at work. They admitted they could probably earn more, or work for a more “prestigious” airline. But they genuinely liked coming to work, and it showed. Not because they told me so, but because I felt it before I’d even asked the question. That’s the thing about this kind of energy: you can’t fake it. We felt it in every interaction, from the ground staff to the cabin crew, on both the outbound and the return flight.
What Is Psychological Safety at Work?
If the term is new to you, here’s the short version: psychological safety is a shared belief within a team that it’s safe to speak up, to ask a question, admit a mistake, share an idea, or simply be yourself, without fear of being punished, mocked, or quietly held it against you later.
It’s when people feel listened to, and that their opinion is being considered (even if not always taken).
It’s not about being “nice” all the time, and it’s not about lowering standards. It’s about trust. When people trust that they won’t be humiliated for being honest, something shifts. They stop performing a role and start actually showing up.
That shift is exactly what I saw on that flight. Nobody handed those crew members a script for warmth. You can train someone to say “thank you for flying with us.” You can’t train the version of that phrase that actually sounds like they mean it.
Why Is Psychological Safety Important in the Workplace?
This is where it stops being a “nice to have” and becomes a business decision. When people feel psychologically safe, a few very concrete things happen.
They speak up sooner. Problems, risks, and bad ideas get caught early, in a meeting, instead of late, in front of a customer.
They go the extra mile. They choose to give beyond the bare minimum of their job description: the joke with a nervous flyer, the extra patience with a toddler, the genuine smile at the end of a long shift. You can’t put that in a job description. You can only create the conditions for it.
They become the values of the company.
They stay longer. Replacing someone is expensive, between recruiting, onboarding, and lost knowledge. Teams with higher psychological safety consistently report lower turnover, simply because people don’t leave environments where they feel trusted and valued.
They solve problems together instead of protecting themselves. In a safe team, a mistake becomes a conversation. In an unsafe one, it becomes a cover-up.
Put simply, psychologically safe teams are more resilient, more innovative, and, as I experienced firsthand, far better at delivering the kind of experience customers actually remember.
How Does Employee Experience Affect Customer Experience?
Here’s the pattern I keep seeing in organisations I work with: customers experience your values through the lens of how your people feel.
When employees feel trusted, comfortable, and valued, they don’t just provide a service. They give their best. They become your brand, whether that’s written into any marketing plan or not. That care travels. It reaches the customer, the passenger, the client, before a single word is spoken. That’s the kind of experience people remember, long after they’ve forgotten what they paid for it.
How Do You Build Psychological Safety at Work?
This is the part most companies skip. They want the outcome, the loyal customers, the engaged team, without doing the unglamorous work that creates it. A few things actually move the needle.
Leaders go first. If you want people to admit mistakes, you have to admit yours first. Safety is modelled, not announced.
Curiosity beats blame. When something goes wrong, the questions “Let’s see together: what happened? What can we do about it? What can we learn here?” build trust. The question “whose fault is this?” destroys it, one incident at a time.
Input gets invited, not just allowed. There’s a difference between “my door is always open” and actually asking someone directly what they think, in the moment, and then visibly using it.
Speaking up has to be consequence-free in practice, not just in theory. One person getting quietly punished for raising a concern will undo months of “open door policy” messaging.
None of this happens overnight, and it can’t simply be copied. You can copy a uniform. You can copy a script. You can’t copy a culture where people genuinely want to be there. But it compounds, and eventually, it’s felt by a stranger boarding a plane, the way I felt it.
A Bittersweet Postscript
Sadly, Play no longer operates. Whatever the business reasons behind that were, one thing I felt they got right was how they treated their people. And whenever I think about exceptional customer experience, they’re still one of the first companies that comes to mind.
Which Company Comes to Mind for You?
Which company immediately comes to mind when you think of people who genuinely loved what they did? Hold onto that answer for a second, and then ask a harder question: if a stranger spent twenty minutes with your team tomorrow, would they be able to tell?
Psychological safety isn’t a poster on the wall. It’s the thing people can feel before anyone says a word, and it’s built, deliberately, one honest moment at a time.
