Unveiling the Blueprint: Why Psychosocial Risk Will Define the Future of Work
Knowledge | 8 minute read
Insights from Dr Tessa Bailey’s keynote at the 2025 Work Well Conference.
This years Work Well Conference brought together leaders, practitioners and policymakers who are grappling with one of the most pressing challenges in modern work: how organisations can remain productive, adaptive and healthy amid accelerating change. For Sage Design and Advisory, it was a great opportunity to review, recap, and reach out to fellow experts in the … space.
Dr Tessa Bailey’s keynote was a compelling reminder that wellbeing, organisational design and strategy are interconnect in some way, shape or form. As the CEO and Principal Psychologist of OPUS, Bailey laid out a clear blueprint for understanding psychosocial hazards and why proactive risk management is becoming a strategic differentiator rather than a compliance task. This article distils the key takeaways and explores what organisations should action next.
The New Reality: Work Is Changing Faster Than Humans Evolve
Reframing psychosocial risk through a future-of-work lens. Recent trendlines show decades-long shifts in Australia’s workforce capabilities, with routine cognitive and manual tasks steadily declining, and non-routine, emotionally and intellectually demanding work rising in prominence.
This shift is mostly amplified by:
Automation and AI, which remove repetitive tasks and elevate cognitive load
Increased pace of communication, creating “always on” pressure
Complex social interactions, now mediated through remote and hybrid environments
Human cognitive limits, which are increasingly stretched
Together, these forces contribute to ‘psychological erosion’; the gradual wearing down of workers’ mental and emotional reserves due to sustained, poorly managed demands.
When Job Demands Exceed Human Capacity
Not all stress is harmful. Drawing on research, Bailey differentiated between challenge stressors, which can energise and motivate, and harmful demands, which arise when responsibilities exceed the worker’s capability, resources or support.
Workers experiencing low job control, high demands and job insecurity experience a sharper decline in mental health than those who are unemployed. This underscores the stakes. A poorly designed job, a mismanaged change initiative, or an unsupported team does not just diminish performance, it erodes wellbeing at a level comparable to profound life stressors.
What’s Harming Workers the Most Right Now?
Baileys 2025 Psychosocial Hazard data provides a snapshot of the hazards organisations themselves report as most damaging:
Top Psychosocial Hazards (N = 830)
High mental demands: 19%
Poor change management: 15%
Poor supervisor support: 13%
Excessive emotional demands: 12%
Inadequate reward and recognition: 11%
Bullying & harassment: 10%
These findings reinforce broader themes we see here at sage consistently in our clients’ scenarios: culture, leadership and organisational systems matter more than individual resilience. Although a resilience piece remains foundational to employee wellbeing, employees struggle not because they lack toughness, but because they face environments that chronically exceed reasonable human limits. These additional insights further illustrate what’s impacting the employee psychosocial environment:
High volume of work (22%)
Emotional demands and client interactions (15%)
Juggling multiple tasks (12%)
Interpersonal interactions and inappropriate behaviours (22% and 16%)
These are systemic issues, not personal shortcomings, and require systemic solutions.
The Blueprint: Best Practice Psychosocial Risk Management
Bailey’s keynote outlined a clear, four-stage, evidence-based risk management cycle:
Identify psychosocial factors
Determine level of risk
Design interventions
Ongoing evaluation
This is aligned with codes and regulations, but Bailey emphasised that the quality of implementation determines outcomes. From consultation to surveys, observation and data analysis, Bailey emphasises it is best practice for organisations to be building a deeper, more predictive understanding of their risk climate, particularly through lead indicators such as:
Senior priority
Management trust
Worker participation
Confidence in organisational systems
These indicators predict downstream outcomes such as mental health, physical health, engagement, presenteeism and turnover. To put it simply, if leadership commitment and participation are low, negative outcomes are all but guaranteed.
From Insight to Action: What Effective Intervention Looks Like
Bailey shared a practical roadmap drawn from the WorkEsteem™ implementation program, which combines:
Awareness building
Risk assessment
Facilitated action planning
Consultation
Leadership training
Process evaluation
Through case studies, Bailey demonstrated measurable, organisation-wide improvements when a structured, systematised approach is adopted. For example, in the medium-sized logistics organisation case study, she observsed:
45.1% reduction in overall psychosocial risk
71.4% increase in proactive climate
35.3% decrease in job demand risk indicators
22.1% decrease in exhaustion
13.3% increase in engagement
From a Sage enterprise architecture and design lens, this presets significant operational gains, operating as more than wellbeing “nice to haves”.
The Organisational Imperative: Psychological Health as Strategy
At Sage, we know that each organisation’s current state and future pathway will differ immensely, depending on size, maturity, context and strategy. But in most circumstances, the trajectory of change and organisational evolution is the same: psychosocial safety is more and more becoming a core organisational capability.
The benefits are clear consistent and applicable across all organisations and scenarios:
Improved talent attraction and retention
Higher engagement and productivity
Greater innovation
Reduced conflict, absenteeism, turnover and injury
Far from just being compliance-led, psychosocial risk management is now central to building resilient organisations capable of thriving in an era defined by volatility, cognitive overload and constant change.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Benjamin franklin
Proactive culture beats reactive process. Organisations that only respond to harm once it appears will always be on the back foot. Those who redesign work, strengthen leadership capability, evaluate risk continuously and embed psychosocial safety into everyday practice will be the ones best positioned for the next decade of work.
As workplaces continue evolving, the blueprint is increasingly clear, wellbeing is a strategic advantage, and psychological safety is one of the most powerful levers organisations have to unlock performance, innovation, and employee wellbeing.