wellbeing – SafetyAtWorkBlog

New psychosocial podcast series

Australian employers continue to struggle to understand #psychosocial hazards and psychological harm. A lot of advice competes, conflicts and confuses. So, Michael Plowright and I are joining the effort to make sense of this #mentalhealthatwork challenge in a lively, plain-English way.

You may already follow me through this blog’s SoundCloud account, but this new four-episode podcast series – Safe Work, Real Talk – offers new plain-English perspectives and, we hope,m solutions, or at least pathways.

We’ll talk about #Leadership, what went wrong, what went right, the unhelpful conflict between #HR and #OHS, and return-to-work.

The first episode will be out shortly, with the remaining three episodes rolled out in support of National Safe Work Month.

If you have any questions about work-related psychosocial and psychological issues, email them to this link, and we will try to answer them “on-air”.

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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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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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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Rediscovering the “Radical” Power of Ordinary Conversation

Day one of PHSCon felt less like the unveiling of a new paradigm and more like a reminder that the fundamentals of good work have been obvious for a long time. The opening session positioned the conference as part of a broader push to move beyond bare compliance and towards more humane, evidence‑based ways of organising work. Conference chair and author Dr Kat Page set the tone by describing how her book Good Work emerged from watching COVID‑era decisions about job design, workload and leadership either amplify or buffer psychological harm. She framed both the book and the conference as an attempt to offer collective agency and hope, a space where practitioners, leaders and academics could connect stories, research and practice in ways that make better work design feel possible rather than theoretical. Conference delegates received a free copy of the book.

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WorkSafe Victoria’s Evolving Regulatory Message on Mental Health

Across her 2024 and 2026 appearances at the Psych Health and Safety Conference, WorkSafe Victoria’s Amy Salmon’s message about psychosocial regulation in Victoria has shifted from explaining that psychosocial and psychological obligations exist to showing how compliance works in real life. The shift is subtle but important. In 2024, she was still fighting the battle of psychosocial legitimacy, pushing back against employers waiting for “the regs,” while by 2026 she was focused on operational detail, inspector capability and what reasonable compliance looks like in real workplaces.

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