Employers are missing the earliest signs of psychosocial injury

Employees are turning to microcultures within the work environment when conditions are less than adequate, creating a culture of secrecy and misalignment.

Despite being one of the most expensive, serious and increasingly common workers’ compensation claims, organisations are missing the warning signs of psychosocial injury.

According to Dr Anna Kiaos, founder of Mind Culture Life Australia, “most leaders are not seeing the real picture of how work is being experienced until it’s too late”.

And it’s often the microculture of work environments that disguises it to management, according to her ethnographic study of the NSW public sector agency.

“People often present a ‘frontstage’ version of themselves at work,” she said. “They suppress what they really think and feel until they feel safe.”

Small teams or subgroups see a shift in language and behaviour that provides a more open environment, one that encourages employees to open up and show their true selves. A side, Kiaos purports, that “human resources and people and culture teams are not privy to”.

According to the peer-reviewed research, microcultures are formed in response to workplace values, systems or leadership priorities that are not in line with employee needs. They often function to discretely preserve ways of working, bypassing inefficient processes and easing pressure.

They have been noticed across departments in the NSW public sector.

Kiaos highlighted that, while organisations might seem functional from the outside, “backstage, employees were expressing cynicism, withdrawal and ‘us-versus-them’ language”.

She said: “Senior leaders and HR teams were largely unaware of these shifts until serious psychological injuries, resignations and legal disputes began to emerge.”

Separate research in this area also revealed that workplace culture often caused employees to present a “frontstage” version of themselves, all the while suppressing real thoughts and feelings.

It is when employees feel pressure to look and present certain ways, disguising stress or unhappiness, that “they stop being honest about what’s really going on”, according to Kiaos.

“Those shifts are early warnings that psychosocial hazards are forming and that psychological injuries may follow, resulting in workers’ compensation claims,” she said.

As expected, this accelerates during periods of immense workload pressure, conflict, leadership changes or restructures, a time when company values may be more malleable.

The issue, according to Kiaos, is that these signals happen backstage, “not in the places organisations typically measure”.

She said: “The goal is to identify those signals earlier, before a psychological injury becomes a legal, operational and human crisis.”

Despite recent legislative changes that have strengthened employers’ and organisations’ obligations to identify and manage psychosocial hazards earlier, many have yet to see meaningful change.

Instead, inadequate tools such as surveys, policies and formal reporting mechanisms that tick boxes and target surface problems are still common.

Early detection is possible, but instead of increased surveillance or monitoring, it requires deliberate listening and structured observation, she highlighted. The insights come from noticing communication and behavioural changes, and the cultural pressures that may cause many to switch between frontstage and backstage personas.

Kiaos explained that psychosocial risk is not about checking boxes and filing paperwork, but “how work is actually being experienced day-to-day, inside teams and subcultures”.

“Correctly identifying and thereafter intervening with the right approach is key to stopping microcultures from becoming a breeding ground for psychological injury workers’ compensation claims,” she said.

“In many of the claims I’ve worked on, people had already been referred to EAP with little to no improvement, because the underlying cultural and systemic issues were never addressed.”