Psychological Safety in Transit
by The MotherMind Doctor
I was shocked when I heard of a group of tween boys verbally harassing a professional woman on a crowded public train, for what felt to her like an eternity.
It happened on the way to work. An ordinary commute, the kind many of us make without thinking, until we can't. The details aren't mine to share, but the shape of the story is: targeted, prolonged, witnessed by a carriage full of people, and met with silence.
The aftermath wasn't just a bad morning. It was a new calculation, performed each day, about what it takes to feel safe enough to show up. She stopped taking the train. She changed how she moved through the world. She changed her route, her routine, and quietly, her sense of herself as someone who can be in public without being targeted.
That conversation impacted how I think about psychological safety.
What we mean when we say "psychological safety"
We talk about psychological safety constantly in workplaces now: in teams, in meetings, in feedback loops, in performance reviews. It's a noun we've turned into a metric, a score on an engagement survey, a box a leader ticks.
But we rarely talk about the threshold to psychological safety. The commute. The car park. The walk from the station to the front door. The bus stop where you wait alone in the dark. The elevator that sticks. The world people move through before they become "at work."
If someone arrives at work feeling unsafe, it doesn't matter how psychologically safe the team is. The damage is already done. The nervous system has already spent its resources. The window for vulnerability, curiosity, and connection has already narrowed.
And then other stories came to light
A young woman walking to work, called out to insistently until she turned around, to witness a delivery bike rider making lewd sexual gestures.
A mother and her son travelling home together, bailed up by a group of kids on the platform, who told her afterwards: "I was going to bash you, but you were so nice." A friend, asked by another, how to handle it. "You need to keep snacks in your bag," she was told.
These are stories of women moving through public space, minding their own business, and strangers forcing their obscenities, their violence, and their threats onto them. They happen on trains, on footpaths, on escalators, in lifts. They happen in daylight. They happen with an audience. They happen, and then they are not reported, and then they happen again.
Data suggests this kind of incidence is on the rise. It could be because of increased willingness to notify, or because of social media footage, or because of something more disturbing about what is shifting in our public life. Most still go unreported to authorities. Most still don't have CCTV evidence. Most still don't have a witness willing to come forward.
What leaders can do
If you lead people, consider asking something different in your next one-on-one.
Not just "how is work?" but "how is getting to work?"
Not just "are you safe here?" but "are you safe on the way here?"
Not just "how are the team?" but "how are the spaces between the team and the world?"
We cannot control what happens on the train. We cannot make the platforms safer, or the teenagers kinder, or the bystanders braver. But we can acknowledge that the commute is part of work, that it shapes the person who arrives at work, and that ignoring it is its own kind of failure.
Psychological safety doesn't begin when someone swipes in. It begins the moment they leave home. It continues through the doorway, through the car park, through the platform, through the elevator. If we want teams that can do brave work, we need people who feel safe enough to arrive.
An ordinary day
The train story isn't extraordinary. That's what makes it hard. It's a story that could be any of ours, any morning, any route. The woman who lived it is a professional, someone who shows up every day to do her job. She is, by every external measure, successful. And she spent three weeks afraid to take the train.
When we say ‘psychological safety’, we usually mean the things leaders can engineer in the workplace. We mean the meeting norms, the feedback cultures, the permission to make mistakes. But underneath all of that is something more ordinary and more important: the basic expectation that a person can move through public space without being targeted.
When that expectation breaks, no amount of team norms will rebuild it on its own.
So ask the question. Ask "how did you get here today?" Ask it with genuine curiosity. Ask it because the answer might be the most important thing someone tells you all week.
#PsychologicalSafety #MentalHealthAtWork #TraumaInformed #WorkplaceWellbeing #SafetyAtWork #PublicTransport #Commute #WomenInWork*
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