Safe Work Australia’s Horizon Scan Named the Gap the Culture Pressure Map™ Was Built to Fill

Dr Anna Kiaos • Founder & Director, Mind Culture Life Australia

In April 2026, Safe Work Australia published a scoping review and horizon scan of Australia’s work health and safety research on psychosocial harm prevention and recovery. The report, prepared by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, examined 7,027 publications across the sector and identified where the evidence base is strong, where it is thin, and where it is missing altogether.

The findings deserve serious attention from anyone working in psychosocial risk in this country. For those of us who have been arguing for organisational-systemic diagnostics for years, the report reads as a mandate.

What the report found

The headline finding sits in the executive summary and is worth quoting in full:

“The Australian evidence base is well developed in documenting psychosocial harm and psychological injury outcomes. However, comparatively less emphasis is placed on organisational processes, system-level mechanisms, and structured RTW pathways.”

In plainer language: Australia is exceptionally good at measuring psychological injury after it has happened. Australia is not nearly as good at understanding, diagnosing, or intervening in the organisational conditions that produce it in the first place.

The report identifies a set of taxonomy terms that returned no records against those specific labels in the scoping search — twelve in total — alongside a wider set of terms that appear only sparsely. These counts describe how the field has engaged with the specific labels used in the scan, not a comprehensive statement about the underlying phenomena.

These are areas of the psychosocial-risk landscape where Australian WHS research has produced essentially nothing. They include:

·       Poor organisational justice

·       Limited decision latitude

·       Work rosters (as a psychosocial hazard)

·       Remote and isolated work (as a psychosocial hazard)

A further set of terms appear only sparsely across the dataset. They include moral injury, organisational change, job demands, and vicarious trauma. These are precisely the concepts that surface in real workplace investigations, in real claims files, and in real cultural failures. Australian research is, by SWA’s own analysis, barely touching them.

Why this matters

Psychological injury claims in Australia have grown 161% over the past decade. In 2023–24 alone there were 17,600 mental health claims, accounting for 12% of all serious workers’ compensation matters, with a median 35.7 weeks off work per claim. On current growth of 14.7% a year, the trajectory points to more than 23,000 claims annually and direct compensation costs above $1.55 billion within the next reporting period.

Against that scale of harm, the report’s finding is stark. The evidence base is telling us what psychological injury looks like when it arrives at a claim. It is not telling us where it forms, how it forms, or how to prevent it forming at the organisational level in the first place.

That is not a criticism of the researchers. It is a description of a research culture that has been trained — through funding priorities, journal preferences, and disciplinary boundaries — to study outcomes rather than mechanisms. It means that most Australian workplaces are, in effect, operating in an evidence vacuum on the question that matters most: what should we actually do?

Where the Culture Pressure Map™ sits

The Culture Pressure Map™ (CPM) was developed to sit precisely in the space the Horizon Scan identifies as empty. It is a diagnostic framework grounded in peer-reviewed ethnographic research on organisational culture and psychosocial hazard formation. It maps cultural pressure across three layers of organisational life — the shared ethos, subcultures, and microcultures — and traces every finding back to a specific, defensible control.

The taxonomy terms the Horizon Scan identifies as sparse or absent sit downstream — they are the operational labels used to classify a hazard once it has already been named. The Culture Pressure Map™ sits upstream of those categories, on the cultural mechanisms that produce the hazards in the first place. It was built from peer-reviewed ethnographic research - the same body of upstream research the Horizon Scan describes Australia as needing more of. The CPM operationalises that research into a diagnostic that also maps directly onto the downstream taxonomy areas the scan flagged as sparse or absent.

They are the CPM.

·       Poor organisational justice — mapped in the CPM Justice and Change hazard group.

·       Limited decision latitude — mapped in the CPM Work Design hazard group.

·       Moral injury — surfaces in the CPM ethos layer as the tension between espoused and enacted values.

·       Organisational change — the CPM was developed in part through published research on mergers and their psychosocial consequences.

·       Job demands — mapped in the CPM Work Design hazard group and cross-referenced against the SafeWork NSW Code of Practice.

What the report calls for — and what practice can do about it

The report is explicit that future WHS research development, policy, and regulatory decisions should be evidence-informed. It also flags that "over the last fifteen years Australian WHS research has been focused on outcomes... with less focus on system design and intervention."

Two things follow from that.

First, Australia’s research community needs to shift its attention toward organisational-systemic intervention design. That is a long-cycle project involving funders, universities, journals, and regulators.

Second — and more urgently — organisations cannot wait for that research to catch up before making decisions. Employers are already legally responsible for identifying and controlling psychosocial hazards. Codes of Practice already require organisations to demonstrate what they are doing to reduce psychosocial harm. Boards, WHS committees, and P&C leaders need frameworks that operationalise the system-level, organisational-process work the Horizon Scan says is missing from the research base.

The CPM was built for exactly that pragmatic present. It gives organisations a defensible, auditable, research-grounded way to see cultural pressure inside their workplace, identify the psychosocial hazards it is generating, and act on them before they surface as claims.

An invitation

If your organisation is asking how to move from measuring psychological harm after it happens to preventing it before it forms, we would welcome a conversation. Fifteen-minute walkthroughs are open to P&C leads over the coming months, and the CPM software is live at www.culturepressuremap.com.

The Horizon Scan report is available in full through Safe Work Australia’s website. Its findings deserve to reshape how we talk about psychosocial risk in Australia. In the meantime, the work of filling the gap continues — in our practice, in our research, and in the organisations willing to move first.

About the author

Dr Anna Kiaos is an organisational ethnographer, psychosocial-risk researcher, and workplace investigator with over twenty years of leadership experience across research, clinical, academic, and commercial settings.

She is the Founder and Director of Mind Culture Life Australia Pty Ltd, a specialist consultancy in organisational culture, psychosocial risk, mental health, and psychological workplace investigations operating from International Towers, Barangaroo, Sydney NSW 2000. She is also affiliated with UNSW's Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health, School of Clinical Medicine.

She is the creator of the Culture Pressure Map™, a proprietary diagnostic framework developed from her peer-reviewed research that maps cultural pressure across three organisational layers to identify psychosocial hazards that conventional survey instruments miss. Her articles appear in the Journal of Organizational Ethnography, and the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health along with others.

She has been cited in SmartCompany, HRD, HR Leader, CEO Magazine, SBS, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

✉ info@mindculturelife.com.au · 🌐 mindculturelife.com.au · culturepressuremap.com

References

Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. (2026). Work health and safety research horizon scan, scoping review and evidence gap mapping project. Scoping review and case study findings: Psychosocial harm prevention and recovery. Prepared for Safe Work Australia. https://doi.org/10.60651/R642-8P65

Safe Work Australia. Psychological health and safety in the workplace report. https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/insights/hazards-and-injuries/psychological-health-and-safety-workplace