Category: health

Think Big About Psychosocial Hazards

Occupational health and safety (OHS) has a habit of discovering a useful idea and then asking it to explain everything. (We are desperate for silver bullets.) Systems thinking seems to be the latest candidate. It offers a valuable way to examine how work is organised and how psychosocial harm emerges, but enthusiasm is beginning to blur an important boundary. Systems thinking is a method of seeing how workplaces operate, but Sociology helps explain what is being seen, who shaped it and why it persists.

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What Cobb’s New Book Reveals About Leadership, Culture and Psychosocial Risk

Every book by Ellen Pinkos Cobb deserves close attention, as her perspective and approach to examining sexual harassment and psychosocial hazards in the workplace are unique and valuable. Her new book, “The Global Evolution of Bullying, Harassment, and Discrimination Laws” is a great addition to one’s library.

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Socioeconomic Determinants of Organisational Behaviour

The Systemic and Socioeconomic Drivers of Bullying that Employers Keep Ignoring

Workplace bullying and harassment are often described as interpersonal problems, such as a clash of personalities, a difficult manager, or a “bad apple” who spoils the barrel. This framing is convenient, familiar, and wrong. Bullying is not an individual defect. It is a systemic outcome produced by organisational structures, cultural norms, and socioeconomic pressures that make harmful conduct predictable. If employers continue to treat bullying as a behavioural characteristic rather than a structural hazard, they will keep missing the causes and potential controls, and fail to meet their legislative duty of care.

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Wellness Is Not Safety and Employers Can No Longer Avoid Their Duty

For a country with clear health and safety obligations for almost half a century, it’s remarkable how often Australia still hears employers say they’re “unsure” what psychological health and safety requires.  The duty has never been ambiguous.  Employers must provide work that is safe and healthy and free from risks so far as is reasonably practicable.  That obligation to prevent psychosocial hazards, the precursors to psychological ill-health, has been sitting in legislation since the 1970s and 1980s.  It didn’t suddenly appear.  It didn’t evolve spontaneously out of the primordial ooze.  For those of us under the age of 70, it has always been there.

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Why the Intergenerational Report Matters More to OHS Than Treasury Realises

This week the Australian Government released its latest Intergenerational Report (IGR). It does not discuss occupational health and safety (OHS) directly, but it does cover some of the socioeconomic factors within which OHS must be managed.

The report’s projections on ageing, labour supply, climate, care demand, migration and fiscal pressure shift safety from a narrow focus on acute hazards to a long‑term, systemic challenge centred on chronic exposure, job design, psychosocial harm and workforce vulnerability. The IGR is important for our consideration of work-related harm.

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Understanding How Work-From-Home Reshapes Psychosocial and Safety Obligations

Yesterday I posed the following questions for Victoria’s upcoming Parliamentary Committee inquiry into proposed work-from-home (WFH) laws.

  • Does WFH increase or reduce psychosocial harm?
  • Does WFH improve or worsen fatigue, workload, or burnout?
  • Does WFH reduce commuting‑related risks (not just monetary costs)?
  • Does remote work affect hazard reporting or supervision?
  • Does WFH change the risk profile for vulnerable workers?

Below I offer some answers.

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Psychosocial Safety Gets Serious When the Wellbeing Fluff Is Stripped Away

Day Two of PHSCon was likely to be uncomfortable. Day One covered context, community and curiosity. Day Two asked a more difficult question. Now that employers know more about psychosocial hazards, are they prepared to change how work is designed, managed and measured? The broad answer from the speakers and case studies was “not really”. Genuinely managing psychosocial hazards and psychological safety is not a wellbeing campaign, a mindfulness app, a webinar series or another glossy page on the intranet. It is occupational health and safety (OHS), and it requires the same attention to hazards, controls, governance, and review that employers claim to routinely apply to physical risks.

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