Mental Health, Regulation, And Real Fixes

Mental health risk at work isn’t an abstract HR topic anymore—it’s a daily operational reality. We sit down with Keith Govias, Workplace Safety and Risk Principal at EML Group, to demystify psychosocial hazards, decode the latest regulations, and share practical steps any employer can use to protect people and performance. From role clarity and hybrid complexity to customer aggression in frontline settings, we chart what’s changing and what to do next.

Keith breaks down the big stats without the jargon: a decade-long surge in time lost to mental health injury, millions living with anxiety or depression, and why accepted claims only show a fraction of the real burden. We talk about who is most exposed—young workers, women, older workers, and culturally and linguistically diverse teams—and why certain sectors like healthcare, education, public administration, retail, and hospitality face the highest risk. The message is clear: treat mental health as a continuum and design work to reduce predictable stressors before they become claims.

You’ll hear concrete tactics you can deploy this week: tighten role expectations through regular check‑ins, make feedback frequent and low‑friction, encourage early reporting, and connect people to support like EAP. For small businesses with thin staffing, we discuss transparent co‑design—inviting employees to shape workable adjustments within real constraints. We also explore environment and customer‑journey design: volume, lighting, signage, queue systems, and even air conditioning can flip interactions from calm to confrontational. Finally, we map the compliance essentials: identify hazards, assess risks, implement controls, and consult workers, backed by simple documentation and visible follow‑through.

Subscribe for more candid conversations that blend evidence, regulation, and practical playbooks for safer, smarter workplaces. If this episode helped, share it with a manager or owner who needs a clear plan, and leave a review to support the show.

Transcript

Welcome And EML Overview

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello and welcome to the Canberra Business Podcast. I'm Greg Harford, your host from the Canberra Business Chamber, and today I'm joined by Keith Govius, the Workplace Safety and Risk Principal at EML Group, right here in the city. Keith, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Greg. Now, EML is Australia's largest personal injury claims manager. But many people perhaps don't understand the full scope of what you do. So just very quickly for our audience, what is EML?

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Thanks, Greg. EML as a personal injury insurer is involved in helping businesses to manage injuries as well as workers' compensation. Predominantly we work on behalf of the government scheme in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Here in the ACT, we represent uh self-insured employers that are in the ComCare scheme.

Defining Psychosocial Hazards

SPEAKER_00 1:03

All right. So you've done some really interesting work, I know, around managing psychosocial hazards in the workplace, which are kind of quite a topical subject for discussion, and EML's recently produced an exciting report inside the minds of Australia's Workplaces, Evidence, Insight, and Collective Action for Better Mental Health Outcomes. Now, tell me about psychosocial risk. How real is it? What does it mean? And what should employers, or indeed, what does the report say about it? I'm going to ask that whole question again because I fluffed that question up. And that is at 1 minute 30. Now, Keith, EML has done a lot of work around managing psychosocial hazards in the workplace, and you've produced a report inside the minds of Australia's workplaces, evidence, insight, and collective action for better mental health outcomes, which is a really detailed report and a great read. But tell us tell us about psychosocial hazards in the workplace. How significant are they, and what does the report tell us?

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Greg, I think we have known and we've tracked that psychosocial hazards in the workplace have become increasingly more important to not only businesses to get the most out of their workforce, but also for workers' compensation schemes around Australia. Psychosocial hazards are any task, work environment or stressor that can actually cause a person to have negative feelings or to have ill health that arises because of the exposure to that. Depending on which jurisdiction you're in, there's anything between 14 through to about 20 hazards that are nominated. And they can include things like job demands, being overworked, not having enough job clarity or role clarity, and then interpersonal behavior, things like bullying and harassment, sexual harassment, etc., that are exposures, unfortunately, in some of our work environments that cause people to feel anxious, depressed, not be able to adjust to being exposed in that workplace itself. In the last five to ten years, we've seen a growth of about 105% in terms of time lost, working years lost to mental health injury in the workplace, and it's only becoming more and more complex. As a response, probably from about 2022 onwards, regulators around Australia, including here in the ACT, have started to release psychosocial regulations. So this is guidance for businesses on the prevention of hazards in the workplace that cause harm, and providing codes of practice or other guidance material to help businesses understand how to identify, assess, and control that risk. So our document really is a way of contributing to that conversation, talking to businesses around where we see demographic trends and other trends in particular industries, and then to try and offer some guidance for how employers can actually start to respond. How can they look at practical strategies that they can implement that help their people today?

Regulations And Employer Guidance

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Now, some of what we're talking about here is a no-brainer. If you've got someone sitting in the office yelling sexual abuse at you, or someone just yelling at you in the office, that's that's clearly not acceptable and creates a clear psychosocial hazard you to think. But some of the other things you mentioned, you know, feeling overworked, you know, not having clarity about what you're supposed to be doing, um, some people might sort of listen to that and think, oh, that sounds a bit sort of wishy-washy. Um, you know, how how real are those sorts of risks?

Role Clarity And Hybrid Work

SPEAKER_01 5:02

I think definitely in the in the world that we're living in after COVID, where we have a lot more in the way of hybrid work, where as a response to managing business, we've seen a lot of employers collapse teams or ask for workers to merge job roles to help better manage leave or to increase productivity. There has definitely been a rise in workers reporting that they struggle to understand what the boundaries are for both autonomy as well as authority in their job role. I think that a number of other employers, when I've spoken to them, seem to have found that workers, especially those that are coming in from the youngest work bracket, the 14 to 24-year-old bracket, can sometimes go through the entire recruitment process and struggle through the first six months or in that first year of employment. And often when they choose to leave, they're saying, This isn't the job that I signed up for. So I think that where we started, probably maybe 20, 30 years ago, where workers would join a business and potentially join with a vision of staying with that business for a prolonged period of time, becoming technical specialists in each job role until they got promoted up within the ranks, more and more we're seeing people where they believe that work is a stepping stone and it's very transient for them. So they're moving consistently from job role to job role. Um, I think that one of the challenges that we see in today's world is that because we're constantly moving people around or reshaping, we're living in a world of change and disruption. As job roles shape, I don't think that businesses review position descriptions and sit down with workers consistently to talk about how teams interact with each other and where the boundaries of authority lie. And this is sometimes where it gives rise to this question from workers about I feel anxious because I don't know what my job demands are. I feel anxious because I've just had a performance review and I've been told that I'm not meeting my expectations. But no one's ever spoken to me about what those expectations are and whether it's reasonable, because this is what I understand my job to be. So I think the more that managers can spend time in catching up with workers to make sure there's a degree of clarity between the two of them about what the expectations are and a little bit more feedback around how people are progressing to that, that will definitely help.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

So if that's an area of weakness from um from some employers, what's the what's the solution? I mean, do you think employers managers should really just just start having better conversations? Is it that simple?

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yeah, look, I I think over over time, and I'm conscious, I've I've been in an operational line manager role myself, as well as being in safety technical roles supporting managers. One of the best um statements I've ever heard is when it comes to an annual review, nothing should be a surprise to you. You and your manager should have been having consistent dialogue through the course of the year. You should never know, um, sorry, it shouldn't be unexpected what you're hearing in that review. I think the very good managers are the ones that have a very good routine of constantly checking in on their individuals and passing on feedback and tweaking the alignment and expectation of workers or helping them to reprioritize through the course of the year. Um, it doesn't have to be formal. You don't always have to have a high degree of formality. But what's really important is the authenticity of the time that you offer the worker and the frequency of it. And some workers may need less frequency. So actually having a conversation with your worker about how often they like to have a check-in and what they find is meaningful can be really beneficial for both parties.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

So, who's most at risk of psychosocial hazards in the workplace, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

I think so. We we spent some time with Monash University really unpacking the data, um, both from workers' comp perspective as well as the data that we see through the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Some of the really vulnerable groups that stood out for us included young workers. There were nearly 41% of all young workers were saying that they had been living with mental ill health conditions for six months or more. Female workers stood out from a gender perspective. Females were likely to have about 39% more claims lodged than men as an equivalent full-time employee per 10,000. And cumulatively, uh, women were losing more time than men by about 88%. So total time lost. Now, some of that is explainable because women are not in as many full-time equivalent roles. They're quite often in vulnerable positions, in casualized and part-time roles. They're also in industries which tend to be more at risk when you think about health, aged care, education and training, and then the public sector and safety or first responder roles. I think the other group that stood out to us in some of the literature when we were looking at it were aged workers. Um, so these are these are workers that are aged between 45 to 60, seem to be predominantly on mental health claims losing time more than any other age group. And finally, those workers from um migrant culture, culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Now, if you if we sort of unpack um some of the content in the report here, it's sort of saying that um, you know, 3.3 million Aussies are reporting, three point three million Aussies in the workforce are reporting that they're feeling anxious, nervous, or tense, or have some sort of anxiety disorder. Um, 1.2 million nearly have depression, another 1.2 million are feeling depressed. Like those are big numbers, right? Uh yet do we are you hearing from employers that you see that coming through in the workplace every day?

Who Is Most At Risk

SPEAKER_01 11:01

I think to a certain extent we are seeing some of that come through. Um I think there are two sides to the coin here, Greg. One aspect is the anxiety that employers feel around the growing workers' compensation premiums they're experiencing every day, and quite often hearing that part of that growing cost is related to mental ill health. And the other aspect then is the demands that are coming through where workers are looking to be better supported in the workplace. Those that are asking for more flexible work arrangements, those that are seeking support through performance improvement plans, etc. So it is present, it is something that we definitely are seeing on the rise. And I think that employers, for the most part, want to be supportive of their workers. Um, some of them are just trying to find the right balance in actually running a business, trying to make sure it's productive, as well as being supportive for their people to make sure their people can be the best they can be.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

So tell me about cause and effect, because you've got um 2.3 million, 3.3 million Aussies um having some sort of anxiety concerns. But that's not all caused by the workplace, right?

Public Health Scale Versus Claims

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Correct. So one of the reasons why EML chose to produce this white paper and to tell the story and the narrative that we have put it in is to actually indicate that whilst there's a lot of concern about the workers' compensation scheme, in FY22 as an example, there were only 13,000 claims for mental ill health that were approved in that year. That was nationally. In the same period of time, we had 4.1 million workers that were suffering with mental ill health for six months or longer that are out there in the community. So what we know is that we're not just talking to a workers' compensation or a workplace issue, we're talking about a public health issue here and a public health crisis, really, when we think about the demands on the scheme. Um, I think what we were hoping to add in context for employers was one, you need to be mindful that this is greater than just the clock on and clock-off times of your workforce in your workplace. Uh, really, when we think about mental health, we talk about it as being on a continuum. People are in balance, they have good days, they have bad days, they're swinging through that mental health continuum any given day of the week. They bring their mental ill health from outside the workplace into your work, and they may take the conditions and the experiences they have in the workplace back to their homes. So, really, what we're we're encouraging employers to think about is to consider your job roles and your worker in their entirety, the the whole of person. And in particular, to also think about the fact that we're not seeing the claims that we could expect, but these people are still present in our workforces with mental ill health. So, what's really beneficial for you as an employer is if workers are reporting early, reporting when they have symptoms, reporting when they have the first onset of concerns of anxiety, depression, where it's at the lower end of the spectrum, the conditions aren't so severe, and you can actually do things in the workplace like reprioritize work, offer the workers some support in terms of engaging them with maybe some employer-funded schemes like EAP, the employee assistance program. Um, where that goes unreported for a long period of time or unnoticed by managements, there can't be management intervention, that's usually when it then converts to time away from work, you know, absenteeism, or potentially even workers' compensation claims. So employers that are more proactive about having cultures where workers feel safe to report and safe to have constant dialogue with their managers about what's important to them and whether they feel like they're not thriving can actually make really marked improvements in workplace productivity and workforce retention.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Now, one of the challenges, of course, that many employers have is that businesses in Australia typically are very small. Um, often you've got um uh business owners working in the business or a very small team of people. Um, there's not a lot of capacity in some businesses to be reprioritizing work because it means ultimately that you're not delivering for your customers. So what's the what's the advice there for a business that um might have some employees who are who are feeling um uh stressed or in psycho psychosocial difficulty? Um how how do you how do you manage that at a practical level in a small business?

Early Reporting And Support Culture

SPEAKER_01 15:49

I think that I think Greg, for most small business owners where they're suffering from that pressure, the biggest opportunity for them is to actually engage in some transparent conversations with their workers where it's recognizing that the worker is struggling and actually in some cases allowing the worker to co-share or co-design solutions. So you may flip it to the worker and point out the restrictions that you have available. So, for example, I can't do anything for the next two weeks because we've got a third person that's off on leave. We don't really have very much that's available to us. But what can we do within that context? And how do you think you could do it that we could support you? If you get the worker sometimes to come up with those ideas, quite often they can also see that you have restrictions and they're more willing to accept that. But the sheer fact that you're listening to them and not judging them, but actually giving them a sense that they are being listened to with a degree of acknowledgement and trust uh can often win you half the war.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Okay, that's good advice. Um tell me about industries. I mean, we've got um uh you know a wide variety of industries operating in Australia. Are there are there some industries that are more prone to psychosocial hazards than others?

Small Business Constraints And Co‑Design

SPEAKER_01 17:16

There definitely are. The three biggest industries that contribute to mental health claims across Australia are public service administration, so anyone in um service-related roles in that regard, healthcare, aged care, and social assistance, and the last one is education and training. 62% of all mental health claims in Australia arise from those three workplace, industry workplaces. Um beyond that, we see retail, we see manufacturing playing a large part. Um, and transport and logistics is now starting to fall further and further away. I think for a certain um, from a certain perspective, it's really about the efforts that have been made to improve literacy, to improve the supports that are available, and to recognize that you've got um a vulnerable workforce in terms of people that are alone on the road, um, lots of males that don't talk. But the transport sector's put a lot of effort in over a number of years, and they're seeing some of that repaid out. But definitely at the moment we're seeing retail and hospitality as some of the industries that are up and coming in terms of having more risk for mental health issues.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

Um and what drives that, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Well, for one factor, we've got a lot of young workers that are there, um, young workers that are usually less skilled, less experienced in terms of lived experience. And it's one of the few industries where you can have a teenager that's actually in a supervisory role, supervising other teenagers. So that ability to have lived experience in management and good quality skills invested in their development is not always present. I think beyond that, they're also customer service-related roles. So anytime you have customer service-related roles or roles which are exposed to third parties outside of what you control as an employer, you also bring in a high degree of risk. And we see that the public service and safety, safety-related roles, those in healthcare, are experiencing a large degree of occupational violence and aggression, or large degrees of third-party bullying and harassment because it's brought into their environment. Retail and hospitality are no different. In hospitality, you also have the risk that you're introducing environments where there is sometimes alcohol or other drugs that are involved as well, in terms of the customers or patrons that might be involved in those workplaces.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Now, it's obviously um challenging managing customers in some cases because that has a direct um impact on the physical well-being of people in retail and hospitality as well as um their mental health. Um, what's what's your best advice for employers trying to grapple with this? I know there's been some public campaigns encouraging everyone to um you know be kind and and and be pleasant when you're you're out in store and in restaurants and things uh recently. But beyond that, once you're actually trying to manage your employee, how are you advising people to handle those situations?

High‑Risk Industries And Trends

Customer Triggers And Store Design

SPEAKER_01 20:22

You know what? There was a really, really great research project funded back in 2018 between ICA New South Wales and Griffith University. Some of the core findings out of that program were that not every customer wakes up, looks in the mirror, and decides, today I'm gonna find Greg and I'm gonna make Greg's life miserable. So quite often we found yeah, we found in the research that customers came in and it was a series of little triggers between leaving their house and meeting Greg in the workplace that actually resulted in the poor behavior. Um, when you think about some of it, it's it's actually quite apparent. So if you have music that's being played in the environment, but the music is being played too loud and people have to shout in order to be heard, sometimes that can cause them frustration, especially if you have older, older uh customers that may also have hearing aids, and that ambient noise becomes really hurtful for them in their years. Um, if there's poor lighting, if the signage cannot be read, or if the signage is so poor that you can't um pick out a price or you can't read a return statement, sometimes people get frustrated because they're trying to find information easily, they're trying to self-navigate, and they're not able to do that. That works just as similarly for queuing systems. If you've got a queuing system but people cut in just because they didn't know, people that have to wait for longer get frustrated. And by the time they actually get to the register, the only person that's there that they can see that they can direct their frustration out at are frontline workers. So, my encouragement for any employer. Especially those that are in small business settings, is start to think about all of the process steps in your environment. So that the noise, the security levels, lighting, even the cleanliness of your site. You change people's behavior by the way that they experience the retail setting before they come to that front counter. One other area that most people seem to forget is just air conditioning, especially as we transition into really, really warm periods. People come in with a perspective in their head that they're actually going to escape the heat by coming into a cool retail environment. If they come into your environment, your air conditioning's not working. They actually haven't had their expectations met. They're still frustrated and sweating. And again, sometimes they take it out on your workers. So I would say that this month, the month of um, sorry, as we as we lead into the summer period or come out of the summer period, one thing that people should be mindful of is the importance of just getting maintenance requests in and being on top of things like air conditioning. And that plays out just as easily into the winter time when people are looking to come into a warmer environment. And if they don't have warmer um heating or air conditioning, that can actually be painful for them.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

And those environmental factors presumably also affect the health and well-being of employees in your business as well, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:20

That's correct. That that ends up being uh trigger for psychosocial factors, including fatigue, etc. So the more that employers can encourage their workers to report those issues in early and show that they're trying to deal with them in a controlled manner, or if they can't, let's say you can't get parts or the service people aren't available, that you're communicating back and keeping your people informed, that can be really, really helpful as a control.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Excellent. Um, Keith, we're moving into 2026 more rapidly than I would like, as many of us would. Um what's what's overall, what what's your advice for business owners or managers who want to make sure they're doing the right thing by their people and looking out for psychosocial risks?

Environmental Factors And Staff Wellbeing

SPEAKER_01 24:03

Look, I think definitely last year we saw a couple of late changes, both in in New South Wales for workers' compensation as well as in Victoria for psychosocial regulations coming through. Victoria is the last state to actually bring in psychosocial safety regulations, but nothing is changing for regulators around Australia, including here in the ACT. There is a real focus on compliance. And for any employer, compliance for you means have you actually taken steps to identify psychosocial hazards in your workplace? Have you assessed it and have you got controls in place? And this needs to be documented. Now, if that's as simple as a risk register or if it's as simple as a table that's sitting on a whiteboard in a manager's office, that's fine. As long as you've found ways to actually document that you've identified that risk and you are checking in on the controls. The second large compliance requirement for all employers dealing with psychosocial hazards is that you consult with your workforce. So in more complex organizations, in um in larger businesses, they're surveying their staff with um really good tools like the psychosocial safety climate coming out of the University of SA. But in smaller businesses, it might just be as simple as have you incorporated checking in with your workers as part of your your daily briefings? Do you have an instant reporting system as part of Shift Handover that allows people the permissible space to report where they've been abused or they've got concerns so that it can be flagged up, whether it be just for the frontline supervisor or up to the owner of the business? I think this is what unconditionally inspectors around the country and especially here in Canberra will start more and more to focus on. Can you demonstrate how you are checking in with your workers? How do you consult with them, both about their job role as well as any psychosocial safety hazards that are appearing in their work?

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Some some good advice there. So, Keith, if people want more information or indeed to find a copy of this uh fabulous white paper that EML's produced, uh, where do they go?

SPEAKER_01 26:12

If they can go to the EML website, which is www.eml.com.au, and just in the search function put in white paper, they'll come to a landing page, not only with a white paper, with some other resources for employers to start um checking where their exposure is and to give them some tools to try and close those gaps.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Excellent. Keith Govius from EML Group, thank you so much for joining me here on the Canberra Business Podcast today. Um hope uh hope you um uh look, I've just completely fluffed that up, so I'll just uh start that again at 26.30. Keith Govius uh from EML Group, thank you so much for joining me on the Canberra Business Podcast here today. It's been uh really good to have a chat about psychosocial hazards. Uh, really interesting to read your white paper and obviously lots for employers to focus on over the next 12 months.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Thank you for having me.

Compliance: Identify, Assess, Consult

SPEAKER_00 27:02

Um, thanks for joining us, and don't forget to follow us on your favourite podcast platform for future episodes of the Canberra Business Podcast. I'm Greg Harford from the Canberra Business Chamber, and we'll catch you next time.