Most countries and regions seem to have a sport of cultural significance. Australia has several, but all professional sports are played in workplaces, the players are employees, and the sporting clubs are employers. Most have a supervisory and administrative body. Recently, an Australian Rules Football player, Elijah Hollands, displayed signs of a mental health condition …
In 2000, Graeme Cowan‘s world collapsed after the “dot-com crash“, leading to an attempt to end his own life. His new book, “Great Leaders Care: Developing Safe, Resilient and Successful Teams“, is an analysis of the consequences of those times and the tools he discovered to stabilise his mental health. There are two clues to …
One of the best summaries of burnout was an article in The Guardian on February 15 2026, written by Zing Tsjeng, titled “Facing meltdown? Over 75% of people suffer from burnout – here’s what you need to know” (paywalled). It has its flaws, but the selection of sources, including Christina Maslach, is impressive....
You should have heard by now that Safe Work Australia (SWA) has come through with guidance on having work-related suicides included in each jurisdiction’s occupational health and safety (OHS) legislation as incidents that will require notification to the local OHS regulator. If you haven’t, get a new OHS or Human Resources (HR) adviser because the …
In the landscape of occupational health and safety (OHS), executive leadership is often framed through the lens of compliance. However, as I and others have long argued, the law is the minimum; leadership must aim higher. Across hundreds of SafetyAtWorkBlog articles, a consistent theme emerges – safety leadership must evolve from bureaucratic oversight to moral … Continue reading “What changes does Leadership Require”
A recent edition of the Professional Safety Journal from the United States included a cover story about pre-work stretching. This common activity on some construction and manufacturing sites is promoted as a means of preventing injury or reducing the severity of, especially, musculoskeletal injuries, but I don’t think there ever was evidence to support either …
Mental health in the construction industry is a perennial occupational health and safety (OHS) concern – high levels of suicide, suicide ideation, depression, anxiety, etc, – the usual suspects. Research into this has been robust in Australia, with the work of Professor Helen Lingard and the Construction Industry Culture Taskforce, among others. Recently, I heard …
