Mid-Season Check-In: What’s Your Safety Stance?
Let’s take a momentary pause for all of us humans behind the show.
We are officially in the thick of the season. The trucks are rolling, load-ins are early, days are long, meals are on a timer, and there are a thousand micro-decisions being made before the first break. Our industry moves fast, and we are very good at moving with it.
But here’s something worth checking in on mid-season: How safe does it feel to be a human while you’re doing all of this? Not just physically safe. Psychologically and socially safe. Safe enough to ask a question. Say, “I don’t know.” Raise a concern. Admit you’re at your limit. Make a mistake, repair it, learn from it, and keep moving forward.
I recently had some great conversations with Phil van Hest, Senior Director of National Safety at RockForce. He leads safety strategy across the RockForce ecosystem, building training, certification, and field programs for a national live-event workforce. With hands-on expertise in rigging, fall protection, and operational safety, his work helps create safer environments across crews, calls, and gigs...sometimes supporting events of 40,000+ people. Safety is at the heart of what he does, no matter the gig, crew, or chaos
Talking with Phil got us both thinking about the overlap between physical safety and psychosocial safety in live events, and about how many of the most important safety practices are actually incredibly human ones. Sometimes safety looks like a harness and a hard hat. And other times it looks like taking a beat to say: “Can you walk me through that?” “I don’t know.” “Something feels off.” “I need a minute.” or “I’ve got your back.”
So, what exactly is psychological safety?
At its simplest, psychological safety means people feel safe enough to speak up. To ask a question. Offer an idea. Admit a mistake. Raise a concern. Ask for help. Disagree.
Before you roll your eyes…yes, we know! That can sound like a pretty ambitious concept when you’re standing on a gig site, under pressure, with a million moving pieces and a timeline that started yesterday. But that’s exactly why it matters.
Psychologically safe teams can disagree, challenge one another, give feedback, and hold each other accountable, and still get the job done. Psychological safety simply means you can do those things without fear of being humiliated, punished, or made smaller for speaking up. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who has spent decades researching psychological safety and its connection to learning, collaboration, and effective teams, is clear about what it doesn’t mean: everyone being comfortable all the time or avoiding hard conversations. In fact, psychological safety makes those conversations possible.
And then there’s psychosocial safety, which zooms the lens out. Psychological safety looks at how we interact with each other. It asks us to look at the environment we’ve created around the work:
Are workloads manageable?
Are expectations clear?
Can people raise concerns?
Is asking for help acceptable?
Do the conditions of the job support people staying well, or quietly push them toward chronic stress and burnout?
Are bullying and harassment ignored or rewarded?
This matters in live events because we have a particular love-hate relationship with speed, right?!! The artist is arriving. The truck is late. Weather is changing. Someone called out. Something broke. Someone needs to move right now. The show must go on....and most of the time, it does.
But when the pressure goes up, our “humaning” skills can become harder to access. We reach for what we’ve practiced. If we’ve practiced asking for help, we’re more likely to ask for help. If we’ve practiced saying, “Something feels off here,” it becomes easier to say it when something really is off. If we’ve practiced listening without immediately getting defensive, we have a better chance of actually hearing the person standing in front of us. That is where psychological safety becomes a practice.
Many of us have encountered the “it was hard for me, so it should be hard for you” mentality of on-boarding in this industry. The “this is the way we’ve always done it” mindset. Sometimes there’s a fear that if we give people permission to speak up, ask questions, or say they need support, suddenly nobody will get anything done. But what if the opposite is true?
Psychological safety isn't about stopping the work to “cry and hug.” It’s about creating enough trust for someone to say:
“I don’t know how to do this safely.”
“I need clarification.”
“I think we’re missing something.”
“I’m at my limit.”
“Something feels off.”
Before the small problem becomes a big one.
For an industry built on creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, and, let's be honest, a little rebellion, maybe it's time to challenge some of the systems we've inherited.
One simple place to start is with something most crews already know: the daily safety talk. It may be one of the only moments in a day when everyone gathers around a shared message. What if that moment became an opportunity to talk about more than physical safety? Over time, those words become practice. Practice becomes permission. And permission becomes culture.
Psychological safety isn't a switch we flip when something goes sideways. It's something we build in the ordinary moments so it's there for us in the extraordinary ones.
So what does your Safety Stance look like?
Can people speak up at your gig?
Can someone ask the “dumb” question?
Can someone say they’re at their limit before they hit it?
Can you disagree without making someone smaller?
Can you give and receive feedback?
Can the people around you do those things with you?
These aren't soft questions. They are part of how we build crews that communicate better, adapt faster, stay safer, and hopefully stay in this industry for the long haul. The people behind the show deserve to feel like they can be human while they're making it happen.
At your next gig check in. Not just on the work, but on the humans doing it.
Want to dive deeper? Start here.
We’ve culled together a few resources that can help us understand psychosocial safety, and the psychological safety, belonging, communication, and workplace culture that help create it, from different angles. We’d love for you to explore them and add them to your toolbox.
1. Amy Edmondson — Psychological Safety
The foundational place to start. Edmondson’s research helped coin the phrase and is at the heart of the psychological safety conversations, with resources, articles, videos, and her book The Fearless Organization. Here’s one of her (many) articles on the subject.
2. PsychSafe UK — Psychological Safety vs. Psychosocial Safety
Drawing from PsychSafe UK’s work helping organizations around the world build stronger cultures of psychological safety, we’re taking a closer look at psychosocial safety: what it actually means, how it differs from psychological safety, and why the distinction matters in live events. Here’s a side-by-side to help make sense of the two.
3. The Roadie Clinic — Wellness on the Road
A resource grounded specifically in touring life. The Roadie Clinic addresses the realities of isolation, exhaustion, mental health, recovery, relationships, and the challenge of maintaining wellbeing while living by the day sheet.
4. Phil van Hest / RockForce — Safety as a Practice
Phil’s recent conversation on the Event Safety Podcast gets directly into what safety culture looks like in a national live-event workforce…and the importance of creating environments where the strongest thing a new crew member can say is, “I don’t know.”
5. Mig Burgess Walsh — Psychological Safety as a Practice
A powerful reminder that a healthy workplace has to make room for both the people doing the helping and the people who need help. His story speaks directly to psychological safety: creating an industry culture where asking for support is not a weakness, and where we recognize that even the people holding everyone else up sometimes need someone to throw them back into the water.
6. Want Support?
If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or thoughts of self-harm, please know you are not alone. Help is available. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or text HOME to 741741 for 24/7, confidential support from trained counselors.
Though ECCHO Live is not a clinical provider, we connect professionals to free counseling and coaching services through our All Access program. If you're a live event professional looking to schedule a session and learn more about what can help sustain you in this career, please visit www.eccholive.com/apply .
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