Despite the pervasiveness of hybrid work arrangements, little is known about how daily work locations predict employees’ feelings of psychological safety. To address this question, we develop a measure of state psychological safety that captures hour-to-hour changes in psychological safety (Study 1; N=404, Obs=5433). Using this novel measure, we intensively survey hybrid employees for seven consecutive workdays and study how and why daily work location explains changes psychological safety (Study 2: N=324, Obs=4785). We show that hybrid workers experience higher momentary feelings of psychological safety on days when they are collocated with their primary team at the office. We identify a critical mechanism that explains why psychological safety is higher at the office: employees have a greater number of informal sensemaking interactions (unstructured and unplanned work-related interactions) when they work at the office versus remotely. This research challenges the traditional static conceptualization of psychological safety by providing evidence that psychological safety exhibits meaningful changes—not only over extended periods—but also within shorter timeframes. These findings offer guidance for evidence-based decision-making about hybrid work arrangements and open new avenues for temporally granular research about the dynamics of psychological safety.
