Organisational psychologist John Chan recently launched his company’s 2026 State of Workplace Burnout Report, presenting burnout as a consequence of work design rather than individual resilience. While many of the findings of this grey literature will be familiar to OHS professionals, the audience questions offered interesting insight into how burnout is understood outside the safety profession.
Three recent legal commentaries reveal something important about the evolution of workplace health and safety. They address different issues, from board governance to sexual harassment investigations and cumulative psychosocial hazards, but they all point to the same conclusion: employers are running out of opportunities to treat psychological health as an individual problem. We may be at the start of a work revolution.
Back pain is a serious, ongoing occupational health and safety (OHS) challenge. A recent survey by the Australian Chiropractors Association (ACA) provides some indication of the scale of the problem, but it could have been so much more.
The release of Safe Work Australia’s Best Practice review left me wondering whether Australian work health and safety policy has reached regulatory overreach, or whether it is finally catching up with the realities of contemporary work.
Much of the discussion has focused on the report’s individual recommendations. What interests me more is an assumption that seems to underlie almost every recommendation: that occupational health and safety (OHS) should become the nation’s principal framework for preventing workplace harm in all its forms, not merely physical and psychological injury.
The culture standard for the construction industry has been discussed for several years. Trials have been conducted, and the results were positive, but the value of this standard has always depended on someone powerful implementing it in practice. Last year the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government embedded it into public-project procurement, arguing that government purchasing power can drive improvements in wellbeing, diversity and psychological safety across the construction sector.
The “Best Practice Review of the Model Work Health and Safety Laws” report released by Safe Work Australia (SWA) is a lot to digest. Summaries and initial analyses are already appearing on some LinkedIn and law firm posts, but the report needs careful consideration. The recommendations seem sound, but such things almost always trigger a knee-jerk reaction from business groups, driven by ideological objections and concerns about increased business costs. I suspect we will see some of this objection in the media over the next few days.
Recent Nordic research has dropped a number that should unsettle Australia’s safety regulators: fatal workplace incidents make up only 1% of work‑related deaths. If similar proportions apply here, our entire inspection and prevention model is pointed at the wrong end of the problem.
