Safety Isn't a Department. It's Everyone's Business. Reflections from the Workplace Health and Safety Show 2026

This week, I attended the two-day Workplace Health & Safety Show in Sydney. As someone who works in investigations, particularly workplace misconduct, psychological injury and workers compensation matters, I was interested in hearing how the broader WHS industry is approaching workplace safety, psychosocial risks and the evolving expectations placed on employers.

What struck me almost immediately was the diversity of professionals in the room.

On one hand, there were traditional WHS practitioners focused on physical hazards, operational safety, regulatory compliance and risk management. On the other, there was a growing presence of P&C professionals, psychologists, wellbeing specialists, technology providers and consultancies, all offering solutions to help organisations navigate psychosocial risks.

What I found interesting was the underlying perception that psychosocial safety was an entirely new challenge for organisations, requiring new technologies, specialist consultants and additional frameworks to manage it.

But is it really that new?

While recent legislative reforms have brought greater clarity and more explicit obligations around psychosocial hazards, the fundamental duty to protect workers from risks to their psychological health is not new. Psychological health has long formed part of an employer's broader duty to provide a safe working environment.

In many respects, psychosocial risk management is an extension of the WHS principles and frameworks organisations should already be applying identifying hazards, assessing risks, implementing appropriate controls and reviewing their effectiveness.

Of course, specialist expertise and new technologies have their place. But I wonder whether, in treating psychosocial safety as an entirely separate discipline, we risk overcomplicating something that should already be embedded in how organisations operate.

Safety is an outcome, not a team

One of the most valuable sessions I attended was delivered by Dr Caroline Howe from the Psychosocial Safety and Leadership Institute.

What I particularly appreciated was how clearly she broke down the legislative obligations and practical expectations placed on organisations, their officers and workers. Her presentation echoed my earlier reflections about the growing specialisation of psychosocial safety and reinforced the importance of keeping responsibility for safety with those who actually make decisions and perform the work.

While specialist WHS, HR and wellbeing teams play an important role in providing expertise, guidance and support, we need to be mindful that we do not inadvertently outsource accountability for workplace safety to these functions.

Ultimately, it is the business, its officers, managers and workers who must understand and discharge their respective safety obligations through the decisions they make and the work they perform.

I later reflected on this with a mentor of mine, a retired Fortune 500 company executive, whose experience managing safety in complex, high-risk operational environments offered an interesting perspective.

Their philosophy was simple: safety is an outcome, not a process or a team.

In their experience, safety was fundamentally a line management responsibility. Relevant specialists may have provided additional technical expertise, systems and support, but it was the operational managers who were responsible for ensuring that work was planned, managed and executed safely.

That distinction really resonated with me.

A manager's decisions, the way a supervisor responds to concerns, how workloads are allocated, whether inappropriate or unsafe behaviour is challenged, and how employees are treated when something goes wrong all contribute to workplace safety.

These are not simply WHS issues. They are everyday leadership and operational decisions.

And perhaps this is where we need to be particularly careful as psychosocial safety continues to evolve as a specialist field. The more functions, frameworks and services we create around it, the more important it becomes to ensure that responsibility remains embedded in the business, rather than being perceived as something managed on its behalf by a separate team.

Policies, processes and specialist teams can support a safe workplace, but they cannot create one in isolation. Safety must be an outcome of how people lead, make decisions and perform their roles every day.

You don't need to know everything. You need to know what you don't know.

Another theme that resonated with me came from Rachel Ford from It Pays To Care and Tanya Pelja from BGIS in the 'Women in Health and Safety' panel session.

The discussion around imposter syndrome, confidence and being comfortable saying, "I don't know, let me get back to you," was particularly refreshing.

We often associate credibility and good leadership with having all the answers. But I think genuine competence is also about recognising the limitations of your knowledge, being transparent about those limitations and knowing where to find the right expertise.

That might mean consulting a technical specialist, reviewing legislation, seeking advice or simply taking the time to properly understand a situation before forming a view.

With AI making technical information increasingly accessible, the value of professional expertise is not necessarily in knowing every answer. It is in asking the right questions, interpreting information appropriately and exercising sound judgement.

This connected with another recurring theme throughout the Expo: the importance of identifying hazards that might otherwise go unreported.

There was considerable emphasis on creating reporting mechanisms, encouraging open conversations about risks and ensuring that information flows from workers on the ground through to those responsible for making decisions.

While reporting tools and systems are important, their effectiveness ultimately depends on whether people feel comfortable using them.

And this is where I think leadership becomes particularly important.

If leaders feel they must always have the answers, are unwilling to acknowledge uncertainty or respond defensively when challenged, what message does that send to their employees?

If a manager cannot comfortably say, "I don't know, but let me find out," how can they expect their team to feel comfortable saying, "I think something is wrong," or "I'm concerned about how we're doing this"?

The openness we expect from employees needs to be modelled by the people leading them.

Workplace safety cannot operate solely through top-down communication, where policies, procedures and expectations are communicated to employees. There must also be meaningful bottom-up communication, where workers can identify hazards, question practices, raise concerns and have confidence that the information will be heard and acted upon.

Otherwise, organisations risk creating an environment where management believes everything is working well, simply because nobody is telling them otherwise.

There is nothing wrong with not immediately knowing how to respond to a difficult situation. The risk arises when uncertainty is replaced with assumptions, premature conclusions or a reluctance to listen.

Ellen and I started Scout four years ago, and one thing we have learnt is that you don't go into running a business specialising in complex investigations knowing everything. In fact, much of what we have built has been founded on being comfortable saying, "I'm not sure, let me check."

Recognising the limits of our own expertise has led us to develop a trusted network of technical specialists, professional relationships and resources that we can draw upon when we need additional guidance or advice.

We encounter this regularly in investigations. A question might cross into the territory of legal advice, an enquiry might relate to an internal workplace process outside the scope of our investigation, or someone might need support that we are simply not qualified to provide. Recognising these boundaries, being transparent about them and knowing when to seek advice or refer someone to the appropriate professional is, in our view, a strength rather than a limitation.

This approach is central to how we operate Scout. We challenge each other's thinking, openly acknowledge what we don't know and draw on the expertise of others when needed. We don't expect ourselves, or our team, to have all the answers. Instead, we place greater value on asking the right questions, knowing where to find reliable information and recognising when specialist input is needed.

Professional competence isn't about knowing everything. It's about recognising the limits of your expertise, having the confidence to acknowledge them and exercising sound judgement about when to seek advice.

If you are not a tree, you can move

Tanya Pelja from BGIS also offered another memorable perspective.

Her message was simple: if you are in an environment where you feel able to speak up and influence change, do it. But if you feel you cannot, remember that you are not a tree. You can move.

I loved this.

Through our investigations, we regularly encounter workers who describe prolonged unhappiness, conflict, perceived mistreatment or deteriorating working relationships, yet have remained in those environments for extended periods.

We also encounter workplaces that, despite recognising the need for change, are not always in a position to implement the measures necessary to address a particular worker's concerns, or cannot do so within a timeframe that meets that worker's needs.

Of course, these situations are rarely straightforward. People stay in roles for all sorts of reasons: financial security, professional identity, personal circumstances, fear of change or the hope that things will eventually improve.

Most importantly, workers are entitled to a safe working environment and should not be expected to tolerate unsafe conditions. Providing a workplace that is safe, so far as is reasonably practicable, is not simply an expectation of employers; it is a legal obligation.

I appreciate that this creates a delicate balance. On one hand, we should absolutely expect organisations to meet their obligations, address workplace concerns and take meaningful steps to improve working conditions. On the other, I think there are circumstances where we need to recognise and exercise our own personal agency, particularly when we find ourselves in environments that are unwilling or unable to change.

We need to ask ourselves: At what point do we accept that, despite our best efforts, we may not be able to change the environment we are in, but we can make decisions about our own place within it?

Personally, I have always believed in maintaining confidence in your own abilities and being willing to move on when something is no longer right. That doesn't mean walking away at the first sign of difficulty, nor does it mean accepting that an employer's failure to provide a safe workplace is somehow the worker's responsibility. Rather, it is about recognising when an environment is no longer serving you, particularly when attempts to raise concerns or influence change have been unsuccessful.

A question that arises for me is, how do we help people balance their personal agency with the expectation that their workplace should provide a safe and supportive environment? How do we empower individuals to recognise when they have done what they reasonably can to advocate for themselves and influence change, and when it might be time to accept that change is unlikely and make the decision to move on? Even though by law, they should not have to!

Workplaces have a responsibility to provide safe and healthy environments, but there is also something empowering about recognising that, when change isn't forthcoming, we may still have the agency to make a change for ourselves. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.

Making Expertise Accessible: The Value of Clear Communication

Faye Calderone from Hall & Wilcox delivered a session titled Broken to Safe: Reimaging Workplace Safety Through Culture, which stood out for a slightly different reason.

Beyond the subject matter, I was struck by her energy, authenticity and ability to make complex concepts clear and relatable.

It reminded me how important communication is when dealing with workplace issues.

In investigations, legal compliance and risk management, we can become so accustomed to technical language that we forget how confronting or confusing these processes can be for the people experiencing them.

Terms such as procedural fairness, reasonable management action, psychosocial hazards and evidentiary thresholds may be familiar to professionals, but they are not necessarily meaningful to the everyday employee.

Being technically correct is important. Being understood is equally important.

At Scout, this is something we continually try to improve: simplifying processes without compromising their integrity, explaining expectations clearly and ensuring that people understand what is happening and why.

It reminded me of a senior leader I worked with earlier in my career, who had a particularly refreshing approach to navigating complex technical subjects. Their advice was always to ask technical experts to explain things to you as though they were explaining them to a five-year-old.

I remember thinking, "You want me to ask a senior investment banker, sitting at a trading desk in New York, to explain what a derivative or a security is as though I'm five? Are you mad?!"

But when I eventually did, I got exactly what I needed. I understood the concepts, could ask better questions and realised the conversation was nowhere near as intimidating as I had imagined.

That experience has stayed with me. There is real value in creating environments where people feel comfortable asking questions, regardless of their seniority or technical knowledge, and where expertise is measured not just by what someone knows, but by their ability to make that knowledge accessible to others.

Seeing leaders like Faye reinforce this approach is refreshing. 

Making complex information understandable doesn't diminish expertise; it makes that expertise more valuable, accessible and useful to the people who need it.

So, what did I take away?

While I certainly walked away from the WHS Show with some great conference swag (lip gloss, pens and even a Milwaukee Tool bucket hat!), the more meaningful takeaways were the conversations, perspectives and ideas that challenged me to reflect on how we approach our work at Scout.

What stayed with me wasn't necessarily the latest technology, new frameworks or emerging trends, but the reinforcement of some fairly fundamental principles: good leadership, open communication, knowing the limits of our expertise, empowering people to speak up and ensuring that responsibility for safety remains with those making decisions on the ground.

It was also a reminder of the value of stepping outside our own professional discipline and hearing how others approach the same challenges. As investigators, we often see workplaces when things have already gone wrong. Hearing from those working to prevent these issues offered a valuable perspective on the other side of that equation.