Risky business

Back in 2010, Arthur Papagiannis had just started up his own business, AP Psychology & Consulting Services. With a decade’s experience in the correctional system and some impressive management roles under his belt, he was excited for the new chapter.

But that year, Arthur’s life and career path changed irrevocably when his father was involved in a workplace accident.

“You know those WorkSafe ads? My father was one of those workers,” he recalls. “I was that son who never got to see their dad come home from work.”

Arthur describes his father’s workplace death as “a catalyst for change”. Up until that point, Arthur knew he had a drive to create more mentally healthy communities. He knew he wanted to make a significant impact and create shifts on a deep systemic level. He just didn’t know how to do it.

“I had recently started the business and was trying to give it shape, but I hadn’t thought about my work through an OHS lens. When my father passed away, the workplace became my focus. The workplace represents the community, so I asked myself: How can we make workplaces mentally healthy and how can such workplaces be sustained? What could that look like? That started the journey.”

A new era of health and safety

Fifteen years on, and AP Psychology & Consulting Services has recently joined forces with WorkSafe’s Return to Work Innovations and the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) on a pilot program that provides free professional support to small and medium-sized businesses that want to minimise their mental injury hazards.

The Mentally Healthy Workplaces pilot involves Arthur’s team working with businesses to help them identify and manage their psychosocial risks. Then they provide tailored support to boost capability and create healthier workplace behaviours, systems and processes.

“What’s great about the upcoming psychological regulations is that it’s going to challenge businesses to confront the ‘too-hard basket’ of psychosocial risks by getting them to move upstream and give attention to the hazards and risks adversely impacting the mental health and wellbeing of their people.”

Since the early days of AP Psychology & Consulting Services, Arthur has seen massive, exciting changes in the way employers understand mental health and their responsibilities to manage psychosocial hazards. He recalls, for instance, the pervasive idea that physical health and safety was a serious workplace issue, but mental health was a domestic and private one.

“A lot of people thought that mental health was the stuff people need to leave at home. There was an idea that you don’t bring it into the workplace.”

The stigma and silence around mental health was palpable during what Arthur refers to as the “mental health awareness” phase. “We were just starting to have conversations, and there was this intrinsic fear amongst leaders of not knowing what to do if someone shared a mental health challenge. They weren’t sure how to handle it, so they just avoided it altogether.”

There was the time that Arthur designed a mentally healthy workplace training package for a business, and shortly before it was due to begin, he was asked by the Head of People and Culture to make a few changes.

She said to me, ‘I’ve run this past Exec and they’ve asked if you could maybe avoid saying ‘mental health’? And also not talk about ‘wellbeing’ or use the word ‘psychological’ either.’

The leader added, “We just don’t want to open a can of worms. If people start talking more about mental health… then what do we do?”

“I said to myself – this is great! I knew we needed to push back – this was an opportunity for change. Coming from a criminal justice background, I love a challenge and working with the most difficult of difficult because that’s an opportunity to create movement - even if the change is incremental.”

Arthur has subsequently spent a good part of the last 15 years patiently but determinedly opening cans of worms and helping employers turn their heads to see beyond their peripheral vision when it comes to understanding their obligations around psychological health and safety.

“We still need to create that awareness and education because some people are still on that journey, but what’s great about the evolution now is that we’re starting to move beyond that, into a preventative space of really honing in on the role work design, culture and leadership play in creating mentally healthy workplaces.

Arthur’s priority now is to start upstream and proactively manage risks through an integrated lens of risk management. When businesses come to him now, asking to help make their team “more resilient” he pushes back, asking things like ‘What’s going on in the workplace that’s requiring them to be so resilient in the first place? Maybe we should start there.’

“Dealing with employee burn-out – that’s after the fact. Stress is after the fact. These things have already happened. I want to help businesses minimise those things from happening in the first place.”

What does a psychological risk audit and intervention actually look like?

In Arthur’s experience, people are often able to identify psychosocial risks – but they struggle to know how to prevent them. When he runs training, he often shares the staircase analogy: A staircase is a physical hazard, which has inherent risks that can be compounded by extra factors like say, a missing handrail or inadequate lighting. Then there are other variables to be considered, like frequency and duration of use. If someone uses the staircase only once a year, then it’s a hazard – but it may not pose a significant risk. Other variables that could compound matters might be the person’s level of fitness, balance and mobility, or whether the steps are wet from rain and whether they are sprinting up and down them in stilettos.

“In that scenario, people understand about physical hazards and risks so I say to them: ‘Now think of ‘workload’ as a hazard. What would increase the risk of that?’ People quickly jump to ‘resources’ - but that’s not the only thing.”

As with the staircase scenario, Arthur lists a host of other factors that he refers to as ‘work design risk factors’ that can determine how a leadership team should go about managing something like workload from an OHS perspective.

For instance - how safe do people feel to speak up about their workload? Is it short-term or ongoing? Is there well-understood role clarity that empowers people to set boundaries and feel in control of their work? Do people feel valued for what they do? Is the team supportive of each other? Are there family-friendly policies in place that allow for work-life balance?

“When you look at it that way, you can see that just like with the staircase hazard, there are multiple factors when it comes to assessing psychosocial risk, and they need to be identified and managed in an integrated way.”

The team at AP Psychology & Consulting Services has developed a framework of seven focus areas for workplace psychological health and safety, providing guidance on how to assess and manage these risks effectively.

A tale of four warehouses

As an example of what this work looks like in practice, Arthur shares the case study of four distribution centres. His team worked with two of the warehouses, and the other two remained as the control group. The goal was to identify, assess and implement controls to reduce accidents and near misses in the workplace, and improve psychological health and safety. The project was led by strong cross-functional leadership across People and Culture, Safety, Learning & Development, and other teams that would not ordinarily collaborate.

Arthur says this cross-functional partnership was “key” to the project's success. “We were designing solutions that were about learning, culture, safety and reducing incidents – both physical and psychological risks.” There was power in the shared focus of managing these risks collectively, under the single banner of ‘safety’.

Arthur’s team conducted a psychosocial risk assessment and developed tailored interventions specific to each site. They discovered that the leadership's rhetoric around “zero tolerance” for workplace issues was preventing people from raising safety concerns and talking honestly about what wasn’t working.

It was common practice to call a worker to the office over the PA by their employee number – so they started using their name instead. They found that small adjustments to ways of working could make a huge difference.

Addressing logistical challenges such as staggering shift times so that parking was more accessible meant that people weren’t arriving late and stressed to work due to insufficient parking.

They addressed the root cause of some negative behaviours too. For instance in one case, workers were arguing with each other over access to forklifts because there weren’t enough batteries to run them all at once - so more batteries were purchased and there was no further conflict. “Some of these things are just really simple changes," reflects Arthur.

Eighteen months later, the results were impressive. "The centres that went through our initiatives improved by more than 10% on each of the 12 out of 14 psychosocial factors – so that was a huge shift. The control group either stayed the same or went backwards on all of them.” Arthur also observed that there was an increase in low-level incident reporting, but it was “less catastrophic because people felt more comfortable and safer to put reports in.”

And this relates to improving return to work outcomes… how?

The Mentally Healthy Workplaces pilot is funded by WorkSafe’s Return to Work Innovations program, a division of WorkSafe set up in 2024 to partner with organisations like AP Psychology & Consulting Services to come up with innovations that will improve the return to work experience for injured workers.

For Arthur, the key to achieving successful worker recovery lies in prevention, and how well an employer has set up the workplace to be psychologically healthy and safe in the first place.

“We know when someone’s sustained an injury, how challenging it can be to get back to work.

What we often find is that if an injured worker has already got a good relationship with their manager and their peers, if work design hazards are mitigated, and if they’re supported in the right way throughout their recovery, they will come back to work.

“That's why it's so important to build a workplace culture where care, compassion, support and role clarity are prioritised, regular one on ones occur, and all team members feel safe to speak up. These positive relationships and ways of working need to be established so that when something does happen, people take the time off that they need, but then they do come back as soon as they’re able to.”

Arthur adds that when those strong working cultures and structures don’t exist, and where an injured worker is disconnected from the workplace throughout their recovery, returning can take longer – if it happens at all.

“In those types of workplaces, it’s not uncommon that someone is meant to return to work on a given day, there’s a plan that's been put in place, and they get up, drive to the staff car park… and can’t leave the car. They turn around and go straight back home on Day one.

“That’s why it’d be great to see workplaces thinking about return to work through that preventative lens.”