Harvard Business Review (HBR) is an active publisher of articles on business management. In 2024, it released a collection of essays on psychological safety as part of its Emotional Intelligence series. HBR’s psychological safety advice is written for a U.S. corporate audience. It largely ignores the legislative duties that shape psychosocial risk management in Australia, so the advice should be considered with great caution.
Citizen and worker well-being will not be a major focus of the Australian government’s budgets, but it will still influence them. Recently, Professor Paul Read assessed the Wellbeing Budget concept in The Australian Fabians Review (issue 8). His optimism is notable and helps us understand well-being in an occupational and psychological context.
Safe Work Australia states that :
“A psychosocial hazard is anything that could cause psychological harm (e.g. harm someone’s mental health).”
Preventing these hazards is most effective and sustainable through redesigning work, but this approach should not deny that personal decisions can also be hazardous. In the broader social and occupational contexts, it is worth considering workism as a psychosocial hazard.
A recent radio/podcast discussion about burnout was instructional and frustrating. The November 7, 2025, episode of This Working Life was based on interviews with organisational psychologist Ben Searle and clinical psychologist Luke Martin about workplace burnout.
In New South Wales, reduced workers’ compensation for those workers suffering from a mental injury remains a politically hot topic. Independent Member of Parliament, Alex Greenwich, asked the Minister for Work Health and Safety, Sophie Cotsis, about maintaining “the sustainability of premiums”. This opened the door for Cotsis to inform the House and to attack the (Conservative) opposition. The debate highlighted the continuing misdirection from much more important and key occupational health and safety (OHS) reforms.
WorkSafe Victoria has just concluded a Safe Work Month webinar on psychosocial hazards and psychological risks, attended by around 14,000. The content was familiar to anyone who has been following the development of Victoria’s new occupational health and safety (OHS) over the last four years, but it was an important communications opportunity for WorkSafe with useful insight into employers’ perspectives on mental health at work.
One of my previous employers was highly committed to occupational health and safety (OHS), but always gave the program, the schedule or utilisation a higher priority. Whether that was a justifiable compliance level was of little concern, as long as the auditors recertified the OHS management systems. The company realised their approach to OHS was not working, so it turned its focus on “critical risks”, which were, bluntly, anything that would kill you. But such was the strength of the culture that even this focus on critical risks failed to cut through and give OHS the respect that it legislatively deserves.
Matthew Hallowell‘s latest book, “Energy-Based Safety – A Scientific Approach to Preventing Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIFs)“, discusses this focus on critical risks.
