Media
Australian workers are using artificial intelligence at work faster than their employers can write policy for it, resulting in the rise of shadow AI in the workplace, according to new research.
Employment Hero's AI Paradox at Work report, based on a commissioned survey with Focaldata of 1,634 Australian workers and 1,008 business leaders, found that one in three Australian workers are now using AI without their employer's knowledge.
This came as 75% of AI users said the technology had improved their productivity, and 74% said it had improved the quality of their work.
Software provider Employment Hero released the findings on Tuesday from a study of more than 2,600 employees and employers, which also found many workers were training themselves to use AI tools with material found online.
The results come after the National AI Centre reported almost half of Australian organisations were adopting the technology, but 19% said they were still unsure how to use it.
The report, called AI Paradox at Work, surveyed more than 1,000 Australian business leaders and 1,600 workers about their use and experiences with artificial intelligence tools.
Workplace AI use has created a paradox in which employee experience and employer perception differ enormously, but leaders hold the key to addressing this disconnect.
Australian workers don’t want to admit their reliance on AI, despite topping global rates of resulting productivity, quality and skill acquisition – and they’re hiding it from employers.
According to Employment Hero’s Paradox at Work report, employees are feeling shameful or guilty about their professional use of AI, with more than 40 per cent of those surveyed agreeing that AI feels like “cheating”, and one in three using AI without employer knowledge.
The 2026 Pub Leaders Summit took place on Monday 13 July, with more than 300 senior pub and hospitality operators in attendance to hear from leading figures in the industry on the state of the sector.
The day was also bookended with a key message from Dr Anna Kiaos, an organisational ethnographer who has worked across multiple industries, about the importance of pubs within Australia’s social fabric.
“Pubs reflect Australia’s national culture, not in some abstract way, I mean that quite literally. If you want to understand who we are as a country, you don’t go to a museum, you go to a pub – you’ll find every part of us in there.”
The Pub Leaders Summit, brought to you by Australian Hotelier and Coca-Cola, is being held held on Monday 13 July. The conference program features many esteemed publicans, including Arthur Laundy and Danielle Richardson; Solotel CEO Elliot Solomon; Sand Hill Road’s Andy Mullins; Anna Hurley of Hurley Hotel Group and many more.
These pub operators will bring their experience and insights to the conference, but thought leaders in other sectors will share their own areas of expertise with Summit attendees, brining external knowledge that can help venue operators grow and improve their businesses.
Most CEOs see a polished version of their organization’s culture, while the real risks build in unseen microcultures below the surface. Here’s how to spot the hidden signals early, before disengagement takes hold.
Every CEO believes they understand the culture of their organization. Most are wrong. Psychological injury has become one of the most expensive and reputationally damaging risks on the corporate landscape and it is no longer just an HR issue. It is a board-level exposure with direct implications for retention, performance, litigation and brand. Yet most chief executives are flying blind. The real picture of how work is being experienced inside their organizations is hidden from them, and it stays hidden until the damage is already done.
Excessive micromanagement, overabundant bureaucracy, and customer abuse are leaving Service NSW staff burnt out.
It’s drilled into frontline recruits at the government agency that “the customer is at the heart of everything”. Staff who had “drunk the Kool-Aid” felt burnout most strongly, a study from the University of NSW Sydney reveals. Disengaged workers were less affected.
“Frontline employees who most deeply embraced the ‘customer at the heart of everything we do’ ideology were least able to separate their private self from the organisational demands placed on them,” researcher Anna Kiaos tells GN. “When burnout symptoms emerged – exhaustion, irritability, emotional withdrawal – they suppressed them to maintain front-stage performance.”
OHS Alert
Is your company philosophy increasing burnout risks?
The "true believers" of an organisation's mission and values can burn out more severely than cynical or disengaged workers, a study of a major Australian government agency has suggested. Its author explains how employers can tackle this dilemma.
The study, published in the US's Journal of Workplace Behavioural Health, examined the impact of the way Service NSW reinforces its mission – of "putting customers at the heart of everything we do" – on its frontline workers, through more than 70 interviews...
Every pub operator knows the pain of turnover. The kitchen hand who stops showing up. The bar manager who was steady for eighteen months and then suddenly hands in their notice. The steady drain of experienced staff from one venue while the pub down the road somehow holds its people.
It is easy to attribute this to the nature of hospitality – a young workforce, irregular hours, a stronger offer elsewhere. After years investigating psychological injury inside organisations, I can say this with confidence: the issue is often not the industry. It is what is happening inside the team.
Your compliance framework can’t hear what your frontline teams aren’t saying, writes Dr Anna Kiaos.
There is a pattern I encounter repeatedly in my work investigating psychological injury in organisations. A worker lodges a compensation claim. The organisation is surprised. They point to their policies, their training, their employee assistance program. Everything was in place. And yet someone experiences an injury.
When I go into the team that produced the claim – the specific shift, the specific cluster of people who work alongside each other every day – the warning signs are everywhere. They are just not where anyone has been looking.
Psychological injury is now one of the most expensive categories of workers compensation claims in Australia, with Safe Work Australia reporting that mental health conditions account for the longest time off work and the highest compensation costs of any serious injury type.[i]
Yet organisational culture and mental health expert Dr Anna Kiaos, founder of Mind Culture Life Australia, says most organisations are still missing the earliest warning signs.
Psychological injury is now one of the most expensive categories of workers compensation claims in Australia, with Safe Work Australia reporting that mental health conditions account for the longest time off work and the highest compensation costs of any serious injury type.
Yet organisational culture and mental health expert Dr Anna Kiaos, founder of Mind Culture Life Australia, says most organisations are still missing the earliest warning signs.
Despite being one of the most expensive, serious and increasingly common workers’ compensation claims, organisations are missing the warning signs of psychosocial injury.
According to Dr Anna Kiaos, founder of Mind Culture Life Australia, “most leaders are not seeing the real picture of how work is being experienced until it’s too late”.
An organisational culture and mental health expert is warning employers of "microcultures" in the workplace, which can be a breeding ground for psychosocial injuries among employees.
Anna Kiaos, founder of Mind Culture Life Australia, defined microcrultures as small teams and subgroups in the workplace where language and behaviour shift in ways senior leaders and HR are not privy to.
Psychosocial injuries and mental health conditions are now among the most expensive workers’ compensation claims in the country, according to Safe Work Australia.
Yet new studies suggest many organisations are still failing to recognise the early warning signs that lead to these consequences.
In this episode of Better Thinking, Nesh Nikolic speaks with Dr Anna Kiaos about qualitative research methods and practices, offering valuable insights into understanding mental health within organisations.
Dr Anna Kiaos, Discipline Manager for Psychiatry and Mental Health at the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of New South Wales, adds that it's all a matter of perception.
"Social isolation is an objective measure, whereas loneliness is subjective. In other words, how we tend to feel if we perceive ourselves to be socially isolated. And I don't mean a lack of people around you physically, I mean a lack of meaningful, interpersonal connections where you can talk to people openly, be yourself and have those connections that make you feel supported, valued or loved."
Dr Kiaos, who specialises in ethnography, psychiatry and mental health, argues in a paper published in the current issue of the Australian Journal of Public Administration that the practise of creating and abolishing departments, or moving functions between agencies, often results in a ‘cultural misalignment’ that impacts not only business operations and customer service, but staff well-being.
I asked Dr Anna Kiaos from the Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of NSW what might explain this outburst. Her research explores the boundary between psychology and sociology. She told me that such situations are “all too common” in workplaces and because they’re hazardous to mental health, should be avoided if possible.
“There is much to be said about the context concerning interpersonal exchanges of this nature, and as puzzling as they might seem at the time, if we take a step back and ask ourselves, ‘What is really going on here?’, useful, accurate and illuminating interpretations often come to mind.
Dr Kiaos believes that moves to overcome unconscious bias should be set within a large self-development picture.
She says, “You can teach people conceptualisations of biases but it isn’t very useful until people connect with insight and personal feelings associated with biases in their own life. Overcoming biases comes about through identifying how these biases play out.
Indeed, Kiaos says employers should better consider segments of the population that may have experienced bigger challenges in life, and to consider the skills and learning they’ve acquired in getting through them.
“These are the people that need to be put forward more often for jobs, the ones who have proved their struggle, survived and thrived,” she says.
Dr Kiaos, a consultant that provides diversity and inclusion solutions to workplaces says, 'The colour bar remains in force in many Australian workforces'.
Homogeneity is prevalent everywhere from our media to our corporate boards, fuelled by a management culture that regards potential or existing staff “through the lens of superficiality, be it because of their gender, or nationality, or religion.”
Dr Kiaos said her research found that while some organisations had been successful in achieving results across all layers of management, many others fell short.
“I think what needs to happen is a much broader approach to diversity and inclusion, it can’t just be a tick the box approach,” Dr Kiaos said.