Zenergy were proud to host 150 clients at the 2024 Zenergy Leaders forum in Sydney CBD last Thursday. Over breakfast on a wet Thursday morning, the attendees made up of industry leaders and executives, discussed how organisations are identifying, preventing and managing psychological risks, and what best practice looks like in a practical sense.

The panel were excellent and we would like to thank them for their contribution. 

Deloitte Australia's chief human resources officer, Tina McCreery told Zenergy Group's leaders forum in Sydney yesterday that her "big four" accounting firm's new interventions target the risks associated with the way its workers work on both organisational and individual levels, but the strategies for the latter have the greatest impact.

She said Deloitte started identifying the psychosocial "hotspots" in its business two years ago, "getting underneath" the day-to-day issues impacting on workers' psychosocial wellbeing.

The firm is part of an industry that has been under the spotlight for its culture of overwork, including through an independent review that heard many EY Oceania workers were subjected to "insane pressure" and unreasonable project deadlines (see related article).

McCreery told the forum that at the organisational level, Deloitte carried out engagement surveys, trained partners on mental health and engaged the executive board on these issues.

However, the protective measures the company implemented on the ground level, to manage the time workers spend on projects for clients, really made a difference, she said.

Deloitte introduced a range of interventions, including steps to determine at the start of an engagement what the project will look like in terms of flexibility needs, hours of work and contact hours, she explained.

It leveraged technology to solve some of the issues around the risks, including bots that can identify unreasonable hours and alert workers' "coaches" to step in and check in with an overworking individual "and see what is going on".

Other initiatives like "coaching conversations" mean workers are regularly asked how their work is impacting on their wellbeing, and any red flags are "routed to people to step in", McCreery said.

The "big shift" resulting from the intervention is that workers now feel comfortable raising psychosocial issues and are aware of all the escalation paths, so they are "putting their hands up much more" when they are not coping.

Fellow panellist Louisa Hudson, safety, security and wellbeing executive at Telstra, said companies can strike a good balance between individual and organisational level approaches.

She used organisational change as an example of a psychosocial hazard.

Organisational measures for this hazard include risk assessing and designing the change, taking into account all the factors that are likely to cause workers harm if it is not managed well, she said.

This could include the design of the change, the timeframe, and how the company will communicate with workers.

"Then you come down to that individual level and say... How will that change be felt at a local level?" Hudson said.

Companies need to consider how to ensure they understand what the vulnerabilities on the individual worker level will be to the change, in terms of things like workload, introduction of new processes, and introduction of new technology, she said.

They need to consider what to put in place to mitigate those risks.

Further, companies need to ensure they are educating and building the capacity of the workforce to understand the basics of psychosocial risk.



David Burroughs, Director at Australian Psychological Services, told the forum that 95 per cent of workers' psychosocial issues can be managed by with good leaders if they can identify the risks involved in the matter, whether they involve things like role clarity, reward and recognition, or role conflict.

"The space can be overcomplicated," he said.

If companies have leaders who understand what good work looks like, how their behaviour influences people's experience of working, and how to have a conversation around the actual work, they can solve most of the issues at that "localised level", Burroughs said.