Respectful & Safe Workplaces
Psychosocial hazards training and trauma-informed leadership development for Australian managers and people leaders. The programme is aligned with the model Work Health and Safety Regulations, Safe Work Australia's Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work, state WHS regulator guidance (SafeWork NSW, WorkSafe Victoria, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, WorkSafe WA, Comcare), ISO 45003 and the AHRC's Positive Duty, equipping leaders to identify, prevent and respond to psychosocial hazards in the workplace.
Book a strategic consultationNew to the obligation? Read our guide to psychosocial hazards in the workplace — the 17 hazards, WHS duties by state, and how to run a psychosocial risk assessment.
Culture Plus method
Behaviour-first. Evidence-based. Built to last.
Moving beyond policy to build leaders who prevent psychosocial harm
People leaders shape the psychological conditions of work. The way they communicate expectations, respond to distress, manage performance, and handle conflict determines whether employees feel safe, supported, and able to function effectively, or whether those interactions become sources of harm.
The model Work Health and Safety Regulations require employers to identify, assess, and control psychosocial hazards, identifying poor manager support as one of seventeen regulated psychosocial hazards. In practice, manager behaviour is now a regulated risk control. Neither WHS obligations nor Positive Duty are satisfied by a wellbeing policy and an EAP contract.
Where leadership training exists, it often focuses on stress management or resilience rather than on the leadership behaviours that create or compound psychosocial risk. Here are some honest reflections from organisations facing this challenge:
"Our leaders want to do the right thing, but they don't know what to say when someone is clearly struggling."
"We're concerned that there is a capability gap in how we manage performance, with our leaders sometimes lacking insight into how their practices might be causing or amplifying harm."
"We need real leadership development, not compliance training that stops at awareness and doesn't build capability."
The consequence of inaction
In December 2025 the Department of Defence became the first Commonwealth employer convicted for failing to manage psychosocial risks under work health and safety law. It was fined $188,000 and subject to an adverse publicity order. Defence had policies and guidance. What it lacked were supervisors trained to apply available controls when psychosocial risk emerged during performance management.
Read the case analysisReform-grade Respect at Work, delivered at the heart of government.
NSW Parliament
Culture Plus Consulting was engaged by NSW Parliament to design and deliver Respect at Work and Trauma Informed Response training across its workforce — a flagship reform initiative responding to the Broderick Review of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in NSW parliamentary workplaces. This engagement represents a proud achievement in delivering reform-grade Respect at Work training in high-scrutiny environments.
NSW Premier's Department
In an ongoing engagement, Culture Plus Consulting delivers Respect at Work training to the Premier, Ministers and Ministerial staff — a key recommendation of the Goward Review aimed at building respectful, safe and accountable workplaces at the heart of government.
Programme snapshot
People leaders, managers, supervisors, and team leaders responsible for managing teams, workplace behaviour, and psychosocial risk.
Endorsed capability partner
Culture Plus Consulting is proud to design and deliver flagship DEI programmes for the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) — Australia's peak HR professional body — supporting HR leaders and practitioners to build capability for inclusive leadership and organisational change.
Connect with us to explore how evidence-based DEI training can help your organisation build capability, strengthen culture, and deliver meaningful, measurable change.
Programme structure
The programme answers three questions in sequence, with approximately 70% of time spent on application, discussion, scenario practice and peer reflection. Three hours is the recommended minimum once trauma-informed leadership is meaningfully incorporated; a four-hour version allows deeper scenario practice and group debrief.
Part 1 of 3 · ~55 minutes
What are my obligations and what's creating harm in my team?
Establishes the regulatory foundation, builds hazard identification capability, and introduces the central insight that leadership behaviour is itself a psychosocial risk factor.
Part 2 of 3 · ~55 minutes
How do I lead so I minimise the risk of harm and don't cause or amplify it?
Leaders examine their own practice and build the capability to reduce risk through how they design work, regulate themselves under pressure, and hold accountability without causing avoidable harm.
Part 3 of 3 · ~55 minutes
What do I do when someone is struggling or discloses something sensitive?
Practical response capability for distress, disclosure, emotionally charged performance conversations, and situations requiring escalation or referral.
Foundational context
Trauma is an intense emotional, cognitive and behavioural response to an experience, or pattern of experiences, that overwhelms a person's capacity to cope, and leaves a lasting imprint on how they perceive safety, relationships, authority and threat.
What trauma is
How it shows up at work
You do not need to know whether someone has experienced trauma to lead in a trauma-informed way. The conditions that support people who have experienced trauma are the same conditions that allow everyone to function well.
Trauma informed leadership
Trauma-informed leadership is the capability to understand how trauma and chronic stress affect behaviour, communication, memory, emotional regulation and responses to authority, and to lead in ways that account for that reality without causing avoidable harm. Leaders do not need to have caused trauma to amplify it: a performance conversation, a restructure announcement or a critical email can activate responses rooted in experiences that predate the workplace entirely.
It is not a clinical skill. It does not require leaders to diagnose, counsel or lower standards. It requires them to lead with greater awareness, consistency and care, and to know what to do when someone is struggling.
Trauma-informed leadership is
It is not
The six principles
Adapted from SAMHSA's Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach (2014), these principles provide the design logic for how leaders structure management practices, communications and relationships to reduce psychosocial risk. They are introduced as foundational context and applied across all three modules.
01
Physical and psychological safety is the foundation, established through predictability, consistency, clear expectations and warm presence, not authority or control.
02
Leaders create conditions where colleagues connect, support one another and draw on collective resilience, rather than compete or isolate.
03
People need agency to function well. Leaders offer meaningful choice where possible, actively seek input, and build on strengths rather than deficits.
04
Leaders explain the why behind decisions, are honest about what they don't know, and do what they say they will do.
05
Power is shared, not hoarded. Leaders involve people in decisions that affect them and flatten unnecessary hierarchy.
06
Trauma is not equally distributed. Leaders recognise how race, gender, disability and other identities shape people's experiences at work, and adapt accordingly.
What this training covers
The programme is structured around the three questions leaders must be able to answer. Each module builds practical, observable capability, moving from understanding risk, to leading in ways that reduce it, to responding safely when distress or disclosure arises.
Build the foundational knowledge leaders need to recognise psychosocial risk and understand their obligations.
Leaders clarify the difference between psychosocial hazard and risk, psychological safety, psychological health, wellbeing and psychological injury, and their duties under WHS legislation, including the requirement to apply the hierarchy of controls. The question shifts from "how is this employee coping?" to "what is happening in the work that may be creating risk?"
Leaders work across the three hazard categories: work design and management, relationships and behaviour, and traumatic content and environment, and practise four diagnostic questions: what are we noticing, what is creating the hazard, who is exposed and how severely, and what can we change?
Leaders examine the unintended ways management practice intensifies distress: poorly handled feedback, unpredictable behaviour, public criticism, inadequate responses to conflict, and how hazards compound when role ambiguity, workload, low control and poor support combine.
A practical, non-clinical understanding of how trauma and chronic stress affect concentration, memory, emotional regulation, communication and responses to authority, so leaders can notice behaviour without assuming its cause, and lead safely without requiring disclosure.
Learning outcomes
Understand their obligations under WHS legislation, including the requirement to apply the hierarchy of controls to psychosocial risks.
Recognise the psychosocial hazards identified by WHS regulators and identify which are present in their team's work.
Understand, at a practical non-clinical level, how trauma and chronic stress affect behaviour, communication, memory, emotional regulation and responses to authority.
Identify how their own leadership behaviour can either reduce or amplify psychosocial risk, including pre-existing trauma.
Apply the hierarchy of controls in practice, addressing the source of risk through work design before reaching for individual-level responses.
Design management practices that create psychological safety without requiring disclosure.
Regulate their own stress responses during challenging interactions.
Maintain accountability and performance expectations without adding unnecessary threat, fear or shame.
Recognise early signs of psychosocial risk, distress and burnout in individuals and teams.
Respond safely when an employee is distressed or makes a disclosure, including what to say, what to avoid, and when to escalate or refer.
Embed at least one psychosocial safety behaviour into their everyday leadership practice within 30 days.
Example scenarios
All scenarios are co-designed with your organisation before delivery so they reflect your workforce, risk profile and operating context. The examples below are illustrative.
A major system implementation is approaching go-live. Two specialist roles remain vacant, milestones have not moved, and team members are regularly working evenings. A team member who raises workload concerns is told everyone is under pressure and to be more solutions-focused.
Leaders identify which psychosocial hazards are present, how they interact, and what they would control first.
A team member says: “I can't keep doing this. Every time I clear something, another urgent project lands.”
Leaders practise responding safely: noticing without assuming, stabilising before solving, identifying what can change about the work immediately, and following up.
A leader is addressing a pattern of missed deadlines. Partway through the conversation the employee becomes visibly distressed and says: “You're doing exactly what my previous manager did.”
Leaders practise holding the performance issue without escalating distress: slowing the conversation, maintaining clarity, and avoiding both abandonment and over-accommodation.
A senior leader needs to tell their team that several functions will change, role impacts are not yet known, and decisions are still being made.
Leaders practise communicating what is known, what is not, what has been decided and what remains open, reducing unnecessary uncertainty without pretending certainty that doesn't exist.
Compliance alignment
Every module maps to a specific duty. Duties are broadly consistent across Australia, with differences in how each jurisdiction words and enforces them. Delivery is framed to the states and territories you operate in. This is the evidence base for an internal business case, and the reason the programme is treated as risk control rather than professional development.
Across every Australian jurisdiction, employers and PCBUs must ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers, and health expressly includes psychological health. Poor manager support is a recognised psychosocial hazard, which makes leadership behaviour itself a risk control. This programme builds the capability to meet that duty in practice.
Design approach
The programme is designed around observable behaviour change, not awareness of obligations alone. Leaders leave knowing what to do differently, not just what the regulations say.
01 · Design
Every content area is anchored in observable leadership behaviours, not awareness of obligations alone. Leaders leave knowing what to do differently, not just what the regulations say.
02 · Design
Approximately 70% of the programme is application, discussion, scenario practice and peer reflection, not passive instruction.
03 · Design
All scenarios, case studies and policy references are co-designed to reflect your workforce, risk profile and organisational context.
04 · Design
Each participant leaves with a specific, documented behaviour change commitment: one thing they will do differently with their team within 30 days.
Facilitation approach
Facilitation quality determines whether this content produces insight and behaviour change or generates defensiveness and harm. Our facilitation models the practices leaders are being asked to adopt.
01 · Facilitation
This content can itself activate difficult responses. Sessions create psychological safety before challenging material is introduced, normalise a range of responses, avoid exercises requiring personal disclosure, and handle any disclosure with care and clear boundaries. No participant should leave distressed as a consequence of attending.
02 · Facilitation
The facilitator creates the conditions leaders are being asked to create for their own teams: predictability, warmth, clear expectations, no public criticism, and permission not to have all the answers. Leaders can reflect honestly on their own practice, including unintended harm, without fear of judgement.
What changes after this training
Organisations strengthen their ability to demonstrate proactive prevention, trauma-informed response, and leadership capability aligned with psychosocial safety obligations and Positive Duty requirements. Leaders identify and address psychosocial risks sooner, reducing escalation into formal complaints, psychological injury claims, absenteeism, turnover, and regulatory scrutiny. SafeWork NSW issued over 500 psychosocial-related notices across 2024 and 2025, targeting not the absence of policy, but the absence of genuine operational capability.
Measuring impact
The evaluation design deliberately separates immediate learning evidence from later application and wider organisational outcomes, so you can show progress early and impact over time.
Phase 01
Participant confidence ratings, a knowledge check, and a documented behaviour change commitment collected at the end of each session.
Phase 02
Leader self-report on implementation: what they tried, what worked, and what support they need to sustain it.
Phase 03
Organisational indicators: psychosocial-related complaints, engagement and psychological safety survey results, absenteeism, and WHS compliance evidence.
Leading indicators
Lagging indicators
A unified leader pathway. One specialist, one continuing case scenario, and 6.5 live hours across three integrated modules — psychosocial safety, respectful workplaces and inclusive leadership — replacing three separate programs with one compounding capability build.
Selected work
Trusted partners
I thank Felicity Menzies for the initial training sessions and commend her on the job that she has done.
How we work with you
Organisations operate within constraints: time away from delivery, budget, logistics and operational pressure. This is the engagement pathway we use to maximise impact within them.
We work with People and Culture to understand your psychosocial risk profile, existing policies, recent concerns and the leadership cohort's context.
We review your WHS policies, psychosocial hazard register, Code of Conduct and recent engagement or People Matter survey data.
All case studies and practice scenarios are co-designed and signed off before delivery: realistic, relevant and appropriately sensitive.
We recommend a pilot of 15–20 leaders before full rollout, allowing participant feedback and sign-off on the final design.
After each cohort we provide a short debrief covering themes, participant responses, and content or process adjustments for subsequent cohorts.
We help design and administer a simple pre/post evaluation measuring leader confidence, knowledge and behaviour change intention.
Your facilitator
CEO, Author and Principal Consultant
Every Culture Plus engagement is delivered with behavioural rigour and practical relevance by Felicity Menzies, organisational psychologist, author, and specialist facilitator.
Why Culture Plus
01
Psychosocial safety specialists, not generalist wellbeing providers, aligned with the model WHS Act and Regulations, regulator Codes of Practice, ISO 45003 and the Positive Duty.
02
Trained in trauma-informed practice and applying it in every session, not as an add-on module.
03
Engaged by NSW Parliament to design and deliver Respect at Work and trauma-informed response training following the Broderick Review, and delivered to the Premier, Ministers and Ministerial staff.
04
Designed around observable behaviour change, applied practice, action commitments and follow-up built in.
05
Scenarios, case studies and policy references co-designed with you to reflect your workforce and risk profile.
06
Every engagement delivered by Felicity Menzies, organisational psychologist, author and specialist facilitator.
07
Designs and delivers flagship programmes for the Australian HR Institute, Australia's peak HR professional body.
08
Delivered across government, health, resources, infrastructure and professional services, in Australia and globally.
From the book
Culture is the sum of behaviours leaders permit, model, and reward.A World of Difference — Felicity Menzies →
Free guide
This guide outlines the essential conditions for effective training that builds lasting leadership capability, moving beyond awareness to practical skills that prevent harm and create psychologically safer workplaces.
Download the guideExecutive white paper
The full 95-page executive operating model for psychosocial hazard and psychosocial risk management: a companion resource for leaders completing this program.
Download the white paper →Frequently asked questions
If you have a question we haven't covered, write to us. A real human responds within one working day.
Psychosocial hazards are aspects of work design, management, social factors and the work environment that can cause psychological or physical harm. Safe Work Australia recognises 17 psychosocial hazards including high job demands, low job control, poor support, unclear role expectations, poor organisational change management, inadequate reward and recognition, poor workplace relationships, violence and aggression, bullying, harassment, including sexual harassment, and exposure to traumatic events.
Still have questions?
Talk to FelicityWhile you're here
Identify, assess and control psychosocial hazards at work — aligned with WHS regulator expectations.
Psychosocial Hazards Consulting & Risk Assessment →Behaviour-change training that meets positive duty expectations across the workforce.
Respect at Work Training →Build speak-up culture, constructive challenge and high-performing teams — based on Amy Edmondson's research.
Psychological Safety Training for Teams →Further reading
Build leadership capability that prevents psychosocial harm
It's about building the leadership capability the current moment demands: leaders who understand how work and management practices can create harm, and who know how to lead in ways that prevent it.
Discuss your leadership team's needs
