Psychosocial safety is now embedded in Australian Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation
Employers are legally required to identify and manage psychosocial hazards with the same rigour applied to physical risk, such as excessive workload, poor role clarity, bullying and the erosion of psychological safety. Boards understand that foreseeable risk is their liability. Regulators are watching.
Most large organisations have responded responsibly. Policies have been updated. Hazard registers reviewed. Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) are funded and promoted. The compliance infrastructure is largely in place.
And yet Safe Work Australia estimates that mental ill-health costs Australian businesses up to $39 billion each year in lost productivity, absenteeism, and disengagement. That figure has not meaningfully declined. If anything, the post-pandemic period has seen psychological injury claims rise, not fall, across sectors.
The gap between what organisations have put on paper and what is happening in practice is not a policy gap. It is a behaviour gap. And it sits in plain sight.
The 95 per cent problem
Here is a number worth sitting with: in a typical Australian organisation, approximately five per cent of employees access their EAP in any given year.
That means 95 per cent of your workforce has not engaged with any formal psychosocial support service this year. Not because they are all well, in fact the data suggests otherwise, but because formal channels are rarely where people go first. They go first to a colleague, a manager, or nowhere at all.
This is not a criticism of EAPs. They are genuinely valuable and, at their best, life-changing. The point is structural: a system built around reactive individual support will always struggle to catch a problem that lives in teams, relationships, and culture. The architecture of most workplace mental health programs is oriented toward the 5 per cent. The risk lives in the 95.
The space between noticing and acting
The real cost of psychological harm in the workplace doesn’t accumulate in a single incident. It accumulates in hundreds of small moments where a concern was noticed and not acted on. A manager who saw the signs but felt unequipped to open the conversation. A colleague who wanted to check in but didn’t know what to say, or how to say it without overstepping.
Picture the last time you noticed a colleague wasn’t quite themselves. A colleague who used to contribute stops speaking up. Someone who was steady and reliable starts missing small details. A manager becomes shorter, more abrupt.
The signs are there but what did you do? We all hesitate. We assume someone else will manage it. That silence is where psychological harm begins.
What shifts outcomes, and prompts action is capability. The willingness to ask a direct question and sometimes ask it again. The courage and confidence to stay in the conversation. The judgement to know when to escalate.
At I Am Here we call this gap between information and capability the ‘Behaviour Gap’: the space between noticing something might be wrong and deciding to step in.
That gap is where psychological harm grows. Not because people don’t care, but because they don’t feel equipped to act.
What separates high-performing cultures from compliant ones
The workplaces that are getting this right are not those running more campaigns. They are those building capability into the way work happens. Leaders are supported to recognise early signs and respond constructively. Help-seeking and help-offering are treated as part of professional responsibility, not a last resort.
When early action becomes routine, psychosocial safety shifts from being a box to tick to influencing performance. Issues surface earlier. Expectations are clearer. Accountability improves.
Risk is reduced because problems are addressed before they escalate. This is where compliance turns into competitive advantage. Not through policy, but through behaviour.
A different question for leaders
The question most boards and executive teams are currently asking is: “Are we compliant?” It is the right question to ask. But on its own, it is not sufficient.
The more important question is: “In our organisation, when someone notices a colleague is struggling, do they have the confidence and the capability to act? And do they believe it is their responsibility to do so?”
If the answer is uncertain, the gap between your policy and your culture is where your risk lives. Not in what has been documented, but in what happens in the moments that matter.
You don’t need to replace or overhaul your EAP or existing safety systems. You need to strengthen them with workforce capability.
Australian psychosocial legislation has raised the floor for employer accountability. The organisations that use compliance as a starting point, rather than end point, and who build genuine capability beyond it, are the ones that will see the difference.
The behaviour gap is closable. It requires deliberate, practical investment in the skills that turn awareness into action. That investment is not complex. But it does have to be made.
Maeve Curtin works with I Am Here, the mental health and wellbeing program for the workplace, which builds skills in teams to connect people with help and support
