For years, organisations have framed psychosocial harm as a leadership failure problem. If a team is burnt out, disengaged or psychologically unsafe, the assumption is often that a “bad manager” sits at the centre of it. But that narrative is increasingly both inaccurate and dangerous.
Most psychosocial harm at work isn’t caused by toxic personalities. It’s created when capable, well-meaning managers are asked to lead inside unclear, high-pressure systems. As regulators now treat psychosocial hazards as enforceable WHS risks, organisations can no longer afford to individualise what is fundamentally a systems issue.
The real risk vector isn’t bad managers. It’s unsupported ones.
The compliance shift HR can’t ignore
Across Australia, regulators are making it clear that psychosocial hazards must be identified, controlled and reviewed like any other workplace risk. “Reasonably practicable” no longer means reacting to complaints. It means anticipating foreseeable harm.
And right now, the harm is foreseeable.
Sonder’s data shows 92% of Australian employees report feeling fatigued or low on energy. Seventy-one per cent report poor mental health symptoms in the past year, driven by stress (45%), anxiety (32%) and depression (19%). This isn’t a marginal issue affecting a small cohort. It is a systemic strain.
When nearly every employee reports exhaustion, the conversation has to move beyond individual resilience. Fatigue at that scale is a risk indicator. It tells us that workload design, decision velocity, resource allocation and role clarity are misaligned.
Managers are sitting at the centre of that misalignment.
They are translating shifting executive priorities into team deliverables. They are absorbing commercial pressure. They are managing performance in environments where capacity rarely matches expectations. And often, they are doing so without the tools, training or clarity required to reduce harm.
Ambiguity is the new overload
Historically, psychosocial risk discussions focused on workload. But ambiguity is now just as harmful.
When priorities change weekly but KPIs don’t, managers are forced into constant renegotiation. When accountability is shared but not defined, conflict escalates. When hybrid work expectations are implied rather than explicit, perceived inequity grows.
Ambiguity creates cognitive load. Cognitive load creates stress. Sustained stress, left unmitigated, becomes psychosocial harm.
Yet many organisations still expect managers to “figure it out” to rely on heroics, goodwill and discretionary effort. That is not a risk control. It is a vulnerability.
If HR leaders want to reduce foreseeable harm, the starting point is not replacing managers. It’s redesigning the system around them.
Three practical shifts organisations can make now
1. Design for clarity, not heroics
Reset priorities monthly. Make expectations explicit. Define what “good” looks like in measurable terms.
Clarity is a control measure. When managers know which objectives matter most, and which can flex, they make safer decisions. When teams understand trade-offs, resentment decreases.
The discipline of clarity prevents overcommitment. It reduces unnecessary urgency. It signals psychological safety by making decision logic visible.
Ambiguity is now more harmful than workload. Reducing it is both a cultural intervention and a compliance strategy.
2. Train managers in micro-skills, not just policy
Most organisations train managers in policies, processes and performance frameworks. Few train them in the behavioural micro-skills that actually mitigate psychosocial risk.
Emotional regulation under pressure. Expectation contracting at the start of projects. Transparent decision-making when priorities shift.
These are not “soft skills.” They are risk controls.
A manager who can regulate their own stress is less likely to transmit it to their team. A manager who clearly contracts expectations reduces role conflict. A manager who explains the rationale behind difficult decisions reduces uncertainty and perceived injustice.
These micro-skills are scalable. They can be embedded into leadership rhythms, reinforced in monthly check-ins, and supported through digital coaching. And critically, they shift prevention upstream, before harm escalates to grievance or injury.
3. Make early support visible and normal
Low utilisation of support services is often reported as a success metric. It shouldn’t be.
When employees are fatigued at scale, and when 38% of mental health support interactions occur outside standard business hours, accessibility matters. Early intervention must be visible, normal and frictionless.
That means promoting 24/7 care pathways before issues escalate. It means positioning digital care models as everyday tools, not crisis services. It means managers confidently signposting support as part of routine performance conversations, not as a last resort.
Early access reduces severity. Reduced severity lowers injury risk. Lower injury risk strengthens compliance posture and productivity.
From blame to prevention
It is easy and emotionally satisfying to label individual managers as the problem. But in most cases, they are operating exactly as the system allows.
Psychosocial risk is rarely about intent. It is about design.
HR leaders now have a strategic opportunity. By reframing psychosocial safety as a systems challenge, not a personality issue, they can move beyond compliance theatre and into measurable prevention.
Equipping managers with clarity, capability and early intervention pathways isn’t a cultural “nice to have.” It is a foreseeable risk mitigation strategy.
Even good managers can create harm when the system sets them up to fail.
The responsibility, and the opportunity, is to fix the system around them.
By Ingrid Jenkins, Sonder CPO
