Martyn Campbell is a globally respected leader in work health and safety and co-founder of HUMN a movement focused on creating psychologically safe, high-performing workplaces. Formerly Chief Executive of SafeWork SA and WHS Regulator for South Australia, he has held key international roles including Secretary-General of the International Association of Labour Inspection. Martyn now consults globally, helping organisations prevent serious harm and embed sustainable safety culture.
When I left SafeWork SA and the role of WHS Regulator, my plan was to semi retire and travel Australia. My grand plan was to hitch my new off-road caravan to my new Ute and head off into the sunset with my wife. My plan involved periodic consulting projects as we travelled, helping to fund our 2-year road trip. Short story, I failed miserably. The van is still at home, with occasional weekend use, until our dream is realised at some future date yet to be determined!
My scuttled semi-retirement plans failed because I was consumed by work, most of which took me into organisational systems reviews, fatality & serious incident investigations, critical risk management, and psychosocial safety. It’s the latter I want to share here and why I co-founded Humn.
In the last 2 years I have spoken with of dozens of Boards, Executive teams and senior leaders to help gain traction into action! Why? Many can’t, won’t, or aren’t listening to their in-house health & safety leadership on the question of psychosocial safety. It’s a shame, as the health & safety leaders are all talented and knowledgeable professionals, yet executives still need external reassurance on the first steps to dealing with psychosocial safety compliance and duties.
I’m very comfortable being used in this way. Few health & safety professionals have 20-years industry experience, in high-risk industries, globally, legally qualified, and a former WHS Regulator, so I’m happy to be used as a lever for change. Traction into action is a mantra I’m happy to tag myself with, as helping to shift the executive dial usually leads to positive outcomes for workers.
One message I pass to Boards and executives is to be aware of watermelons!
These are the monthly reports with a flurry of green traffic lights. If all your reporting is green, I challenge leaders to dig deeply to verify effectiveness to uncover the red inside the data. This requires executives to be comfortable with “bad news”, red data, error, and unwanted events. Not an easy ask when industry has focused on ‘zero’ as targets for decades.
As a WHS Regulator, I never asked any organisation or CEO for a frequency rate or set of green traffic lights. They bear no weight on regulatory interventions. I asked about hazard identification, application of controls, and effectiveness measures to ensure a CEO (and executive team), know the hazards to their business and know the controls work as intended. This is the Board/Executive discussion that should be happening, not flicking past a series of green traffic lights on way to the next agenda item.
But how do you verify effectiveness of psychosocial safety risks? It’s a simple question to start the process really but often with confronting results. Ask your workers.
If you have a psychologically safe workplace, free of blame, and supportive of speaking up, then you will probably already know that answer, especially if your staff trust you to share their feelings about work and behaviours. If they do not feel safe, then the psychosocial hazards will furtively exist until they don’t, usually when a complaint/compensation claim is lodged.
I use Skodel as a platform to ventilate worker sentiment. This is an anonymous means to allow workers to share their feelings, wellbeing, and mental health in a safe manner. The results map to the 17 psychosocial safety hazards in Safe Work Australia’s Code of Practice for Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work and Comcare website.
Consulting with workers allows visibility of which hazards relate to work in that workplace. It allows leaders to prioritise these and consult with workers on meaningful, and sustainable solutions. This data feeds into the risk assessment process, mapping existing controls from the safety, HR and IR disciplines and identifying gaps where no controls exist, or controls are weak. When you look, you will be surprised as to what you already have in place.
Mapping them to psych safety risks, checking them for accuracy, relevancy and legality, is part of the process. Then start to measure the implementation. Keep going back to workers for feedback. Instead of measuring frequency rates, consider attrition rates, engagement rates, presenteeism rates, sick leave data, or even 360 feedback on leaders as a metric for success. Afterall, there is nothing in the law stating you have to measure frequency rates, so try something innovative!
Confronting? 100% it is. These are different measurements to the ‘zero brigade’!
Be prepared for uncomfortable feedback. I recently undertook work into a workplace psychosocial safety event and the results weren’t well received. Why? Well, it seems some leaders didn’t think there was a psychosocial safety issue in the business. Their view of the world was all rainbows and unicorns when the reality was very different. When I presented my findings, they reacted with dismay and rejection, of my report and their staff.
Firstly, if a worker leaves work on sick leave and a psychological injury claim is accepted, then there’s generally underlying circumstances one should look at. Happy, motivated, and engaged workers don’t lodge claims (as a rule of thumb!). But when one does, that’s an indication a leader should inquire deeper into the contributing factors. However, after diving down, leaders need to embrace bad news, or opportunities to improve (as I prefer to call them).
My inquiry found a series of workers too afraid to speak to me and those that did made it very clear I was not to attach their names, positions, or department to the inquiry. The level of fear and distrust was so deep rooted. So, I complied, listened to their accounts, and de-identified their comments. However, the flavour of their testimony was passed into the report. The response from middle managers, “who said that?” and “I want the names of the people you spoke to”.
The truth can hurt.
Being told you are a contributing factor to a psychologically unsafe workplace isn’t nice to hear (it isn’t particularly nice to deliver to be honest!), but it is essential to make progress. Some workers, managers, and leaders are part of the problem. Poor workplace behaviours can lead to psychological injury over time. Addressing behaviour is a fundamental part of controlling psychosocial safety risk.
That said, were organisational vulnerability is demonstrated, the results have been stellar. Humn has seen organisation make huge progress in shifting workplace culture through focusing on trust and psychological safety as part of the journey to psychosocial safety compliance. And it’s all done with workers, not to workers!
