Psychosocial hazards in Australian workplaces have garnered increasing attention due to their significant impact on employee mental health and organisational performance. Claims for psychological injury are rising at a rate that far outpaces physical injury claims. In New South Wales alone, there has been a 30% increase in psychological injury claims over the past four years. Contributing factors include bullying, harassment, and inadequate support prompting SafeWork NSW to introduce stricter compliance measures.
Psychological safety refers to an environment where individuals feel safe to express opinions, suggest ideas, ask questions, raise concerns, and admit mistakes without fear of negative consequences.
According to Harvard Business School – Dynamic Teaming, psychological safety is built on four key elements:
Willingness to help: Employees believe it is appropriate to ask for help, and trust their colleagues will support them.
Inclusion and diversity: Employees feel a genuine sense of belonging, and that their diverse experiences and perspectives are valued.
Attitude to risk and failure: Mistakes and failures are viewed as opportunities for learning rather than reasons for blame.
Open conversation: Employees perceive discussions as open, candid, and safe to participate in.
For a workplace to be truly psychologically safe, all four dimensions must be present.
While many leaders believe their teams operate in psychologically safe environments, research indicates otherwise. It is important for leaders to develop and hone their interpersonal and leadership capabilities, that are required to foster and maintain this kind of culture. This is not a question of will but of skill.
“We rarely teach people how to speak up or listen effectively – skills that psychological safety requires.” – Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School, The Fearless Organisation
In April 2025, Marana facilitated a two-day Leadership Forum for a State Government client, building on an internally delivered session on psychological safety. The forum explored practical skills and strategies to support a psychologically safe workplace culture. Key topics included:
The concept of risk in a public sector context
The courage and vulnerability required to ask for help, and the acceptance of mistakes and failures as part of learning
Risk management frameworks
Problem-solving skills
Communication strategies to encourage staff to contribute more openly and constructively including techniques to uncover what may not be openly expressed by individuals or groups.
Some discussion points covered and practices to build psychological safety include:
Make “helping” behaviour the norm. Institute “reciprocity rings” (Baker & Baker, 2016) where team members regularly share what they need, how others can help and how they can help others.
Define what team-orientated and/or collaborative behaviour looks like in practical specific terms.
Frame mistakes as opportunities for shared learning: “This didn’t work. What can we take from it?”
Teach teams to expect errors, detect them early, and learn from them.
Discuss unrelenting standards, what “over-servicing” might look like. Evaluate your own levels of perfectionism and/or unrelenting standards.
Train people in how to actively listen as opposed to talking about what active listening is.
Anticipate what might go wrong in advance to reduce the stigma if it does. Consider “What is the worst that might happen? What is the best outcome? What is most likely?
Lead with vulnerability. Share when you don’t know something. It gives others permission to do the same.
Creating a psychologically safe workplace is not about grand gestures or abstract ideals it is about building specific, learnable skills. Leaders and teams need to practice curiosity, empathy, humility, and courage in tangible, everyday ways.
The good news is that these are not personality traits, they are capabilities that can be developed. With the right tools, support, and intention, teams can build cultures where people feel safe to speak up, take risks, and grow.
Start small. Practice often. Reflect together. Psychological safety is not a destination it is a discipline.
What is one thing you can do this week to make your team feel safer, more supported, or more heard?
As we wrap up the financial year, we’re proud to share that over 1,700 people participated in Marana facilitated sessions. This is testament to the continued demand for practical, customised professional development. Amongst other areas, assignments have taken us across to Perth, out to Dubbo, Wagga Wagga and Tamworth, up to Gosford, Maitland, Newcastle and Coffs Harbour and down south to Wollongong, Goulburn and the ACT.
Our most requested topics reflect the current focus on people, purpose and practical support in the workplace. Especially as workplaces continue to respond to restructures, organisational change, and the accelerating influence of AI and automation.
Leading the list are our customised Leadership and Management Development Programs, with a noticeable rise in interest around our Leader as Coach content. Organisations are recognising that effective leadership today means adopting a coaching facilitated style with empathy, clarity, accountability and purpose to support engagement.
Close behind are sessions focused on Feedback Skills and Cultivating Positive and Respectful Workplaces. The latter continues to resonate strongly, especially as we collaborate with clients to customise case studies and skills practice that go beyond legal compliance. Facilitated face-to-face sessions allow for deeper, more robust conversations that genuinely support healthy, inclusive workplace cultures while also strengthening individual and team well-being. Well-being and resilient leadership have also emerged as dominant themes in many of our coaching conversations, highlighting the ongoing need for grounded, people-centred support in times of change and complexity.
Customer Experience and Service also remains a key focus, as stakeholders aim to enhance both internal and external relationships in an environment where expectations can be high, and situations of entitlement can emerge. This is particularly relevant in regulatory legislative settings, where managing expectations with clarity and being able to manage self to constructively respond is essential.
Recognising the need for a more practical approach to knowledge transfer within workplaces, we have developed and delivered a hands-on Delivering on the Job Instructions program. Unlike theoretical Qualifications such as the Cert IV in Training and Assessment, this program focuses on practical application, enabling employees to effectively share and embed expertise and effectively communicate Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Safe Work Method Statements (SWMs).
In addition to group sessions, we’ve seen steady investment in both one-on-one and team coaching, reflecting a broader shift toward tailored, high-impact learning that supports sustained performance and personal growth. In the past financial year, at least two government coachees were nominated for leadership awards, with one receiving the honour. This is meaningful recognition of their development and leadership in action. Coaching supports accountability for action, helping individuals turn insight into progress.
Leadership, feedback, communication, and workplace behaviour may be long-standing focus areas, but their relevance has never been more current. As the workplace continues to evolve, these core capabilities remain central to building healthy, effective teams. I’d like to personally thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to partnering with you in this coming financial year.
“The workshops were tailored to our business, hit the nail on the head in terms of the brief and delivered some great outcomes that helped shape some huge improvements in our service delivery, commitment to our customers and some positive change in how my leaders lead their teams.”
Testimonial from our Local Government – Leisure and Aquatics client regarding the recent training program designed and delivered by Marana.
Our Client
Our client provides Leisure and Aquatics facilities across multiple locations in their local government area. Visitors of all ages are welcomed and programs and services are offered including learn to swim, aquatic facilities, fitness classes, gym services and a golf course.
The Challenge
The Executive Team have a comprehensive direction and strategic plan for the Leisure and Aquatics facilities and required practical skills to support People Leaders and staff to lead and drive change. Part of the strategic direction is to have a Customer Experience Culture at the core of everything Leisure and Aquatics do.
It was identified that some staff may require assistance with adjusting to and embracing culture change including new ways of working. People Leaders needed the skills and knowledge to lead and drive change and staff would require the skills and understanding to implement this into both internal and external customer interactions.
Some of the key challenges were:
Mystery Shopper survey results revealed that customers wanted staff to be able to assist with their enquiries at the first instance. Staff were accustomed to helping only with enquiries for their section, and weren’t working as a whole team across the Aquatics and Leisure Team.
Staff understanding the importance of taking ownership for consistent service delivery and how their interactions reflect the Council as a whole. It is important to promote that Leisure and Aquatics are not separate to Council, they are Council.
People Leaders required the practical skills and knowledge to create, develop and maintain a Customer Experience Culture. This includes being able to facilitate difficult conversations with staff when actions or behaviour were not in line with agreed expectations.
Staff required understanding of how Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) fit in with the bigger picture and People Leaders required skills to measure the quality of customer experience / service and how to effectively use measures to support a positive customer experience culture.
The Customer Experience Charter was identified as outdated and required revising to underpin the Customer Experience Culture change.
The Solution
For People Leaders this consisted of a two-day Leading a Customer Experience Culture program that was designed to support participants to lead, champion, develop and maintain a customer experience culture.
During the program People Leaders developed skills in identifying customer expectations and linking these to the Customer Service Charter, working with and measuring KPIs, understanding change management, skills to praise and recognise staff as well as how to provide redirection when standards are not being met. It also included the importance of being detailed and specific when providing feedback related to service delivery.
Over the past few days we have received an influx of promotional marketing material – one reads “Massive changes have come to the workplace. In the past weeks, these times of uncertainty require your workforce to be flexible and resilient, and to reskill for the changes ahead.” It went on to say; “The most successful organisations are the ones that can navigate uncertainty, tackle challenges and pull together to drive innovation.”
Well I think we can all say we are currently facing uncertainty and challenges that we have never personally imagined or experienced before. Every day people are having to change ways of living and working. There is a lot of fear, concern, confusion and sorrow out there about how lives are being affected and changed and the impact this pandemic is having on all of us, right round the world. For those lucky enough to generate an income, it is hard to focus when we don’t know what the next moment will bring and we hear so much negative news.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) can be defined as a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way.
