Thought Leadership

Australia now has two significant regulatory instruments governing how workplaces must manage psychosocial hazards: the SafeWork NSW Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work, first issued in May 2021 and updated in light of the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025, 1 and WorkSafe Victoria's Compliance Code: Psychological Health (Edition 1, September 2025), which took effect on 1 December 2025. 2  Together, these documents represent the most substantial regul

Author: Dr Anna Kiaos  |  Published: 23 February 2026 Every year, thousands of Australian organisations run an engagement survey, receive a score, and assume they understand their culture. A 72% engagement rate. A 4.1 out of 5 on “I feel valued at work.” A slight uptick on psychological safety questions compared to last year. Leadership looks at the dashboard, notes the improvement, and moves on. Meanwhile, a team on a remote site hasn’t had a psychologically safe conversatio

Dr Anna Kiaos   |  Organisational Ethnographer & Founder, Mind Culture Life Australia February 2026 The Australian mining industry has invested more heavily in workforce mental health than almost any other sector. Employee Assistance Programs, mental health first aid training, R U OK campaigns, peer support networks, wellbeing apps, and resilience workshops have become standard features of the operational landscape. By any measure of effort and expenditure, the industry is ta

Dr Anna Kiaos  |  Mind Culture Life Australia  |  February 2026 Every leader I work with faces the same tension. They need their people to perform. They need results, accountability, targets met, standards maintained. At the same time, they’re being told — by regulators, by their own People and Culture teams, by the growing pile of workers’ compensation claims on their desk — that they need to manage psychosocial risk. So they try to do both. Push hard, but also be supportive

Rehabilitation counsellors who work with psychological injury claims occupy one of the most challenging positions in the workplace wellbeing ecosystem. They sit at the intersection of individual trauma, organisational dysfunction, insurance imperatives, and legislative frameworks—tasked with helping injured workers return to the very environments that allegedly harmed them. I've spent years researching organisational culture and its psychological costs. What rehabilitation co

By Dr Anna Kiaos, Researcher & Founder, Mind Culture Life Australia As a researcher in workplace mental health, I have spent years examining why well-intentioned organisations continue to struggle with burnout, stress, anxiety, and psychological injury — even when they invest heavily in wellbeing initiatives. What the research consistently shows is this: mental health at work does not break because people are weak. It breaks because pressure is unmanaged. Policies exist. EAPs

When a worker is injured, the focus is usually clear: treat the body, manage the claim, and support a return to work plan. But growing Australian research shows that for many workers, the most damaging injury doesn’t come from the original incident — it develops quietly after  the claim begins. This is known as secondary psychological injury , and it is now recognised as a major driver of prolonged recovery, delayed return to work, and escalating compensation costs. At Mind

As a researcher working at the intersection of organisational culture and mental health, I am often brought into organisations at moments of concern — when stress is rising, when change has unsettled people, or when something feels “off” but cannot be easily named. What I have learned through ethnographic research is that psychosocial hazards rarely sit neatly within policies, procedures, or survey results. They are lived, relational, and often hidden — not because organisati

Australian employees are increasingly lodging workers' compensation claims for psychological injury Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) appear to be the first line of defense for Human Resource departments when employees are observed to be experiencing stress and ill-mental health at work, yet are Human Resource personnel and EAP service providers as effective as they need to be? With poor mental health costing the Australian economy from $12.2 to $22.5 billion each year [1]

Author Details: Dr Anna Kiaos is the Director of Mind Culture Life Australia and a researcher at the University of New South Wales within the Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health. According to the State Insurance Regulatory Authority  (SIRA) in the last financial year, there were more than 9,000 new workers’ compensation claims for psychological injuries. This figure reflects twice as many claims recorded in 2015 [1] . The problem of rising psychological injury claims c