Thought Leadership

As a researcher, I spend a great deal of time watching what people do at work — but even more time listening to what they cannot easily say . Over years of ethnographic and qualitative research, I have repeatedly encountered the same pattern across organisations, industries, and roles: employees speak one way in formal settings and another way everywhere else. They perform confidence, alignment, and commitment on the surface, while privately negotiating doubt, ambivalence, fr

I have spent much of my research career immersed in organisations — listening to how people speak, watching how they behave, and paying close attention to what often goes unsaid. Again and again, I have been struck by the same realisation: organisations do far more than coordinate work. They shape how employees experience themselves. Culture in organisations is rarely neutral. It is lived, felt, negotiated, and often internalised in ways that influence how people think, feel,

I wrote this piece after spending extended time inside a large public-sector organisation navigating a major restructure. What struck me wasn’t open resistance or cultural clash—but how much important work was happening quietly, off the organisational radar. This article is an invitation to Human Resources, People and Culture leaders, and executives to look beyond formal culture programs and ask a harder question: how is work really getting done during change, and what cultur

Author Details: Dr Anna Kiaos is the Founder of Mind Culture Life Australia and a researcher at the University of New South Wales within the Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health. The Australian Government’s Department of Health released its National Men’s Health Strategy 2020-2030, yet little evidence supports the strategy is effective in reducing men’s experience of stigma due to widespread hegemonic masculinity, writes Dr Anna Kiaos.   The Australian Government has re

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]

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. Australia’s cost-of-living crisis has promulgated a need for a proportion of employees to engage in generating multiple sources of income, typically by holding concurrent employment [1] . According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), in September 2024 there were 986,400 multiple job-holders (6.6% of

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