Webinar: Who sank the boat - A practical guide to governing psychosocial risk in the workplace

Most boards now recognise that psychosocial risks matter. The challenge is knowing what to look for – and what to do – when the signals aren't clear.

Unlike physical hazards, these risks don't sit neatly in one place. They show up in patterns, behaviours, and relationships, and often only become visible once harm has already occurred.
In this follow up session to More Than Safety Posters, we'll revisit why psychosocial risk is inherently complex and what that means for governance in practice.

Whether you're on a board or in a leadership role, this webinar will help you recognise and interpret early warning signs, and take practical steps to improve your governance approach

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

So, hi everybody, welcome to our webinar today titled Who Sank the Boat? Great topic, a practical guide to governing psychosocial risk in the workplace. And today we have Catherine Rouge, Amy Kerr, and Phoebe Kitto with us. My name is Sean McDonald, and I shall be your host and moderator in the background for the next 45 odd minutes. Firstly, though, thanks so much for attending today. We always appreciate the effort you make to be here for our live webinar events. Join the session if you have any questions, which of course we hope you will do. Please try and use the QA button on your toolbar. It just enables us to keep a track of the questions as we're going through the session and we'll try to get through as many of those questions as we have time for. And finally, if you stay through till the end, which of course we hope you will do, we have a really short one-minute survey that we'd like you to consider at the end. Your feedback really helps us bring relevant content to you week after week and enables us to position the wealth of expert presenters that we have for you each week. So please take a minute to complete the survey as you exit the webinar today. Now, for those not too familiar with BoardPro, we are a board software provider, sometimes called a board portal, and we serve around 35,000 users around the globe, and we're represented in about 34 different countries these days. And we enable organizations to prepare for and run their board meetings more efficiently and effectively with less time and deliver more impact and value for the organization. And as much as we are a board software provider, part of our wider mission here at Board Pro is to make the fundamentals of governance free and easy to implement for all organizations, but especially those organizations with resource constraints. And one of the many ways we do this is by providing free access to hundreds of governance templates, guides, and resources, which funnily enough, you'll find in the resources section of our website. And these webinars that we host every week are also a great way of accessing key governance knowledge without the time commitment and costs associated with in-person events. So for the next 40 odd minutes, just relax, uh sit back and listen and add to the discussion by asking as many questions as you would like. A full recording of the webinar along with the slide deck and transcript will be sent to you 24 hours after our session today. So let's get started by having the team introduce themselves, starting with you first, Catherine.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Thanks, Sean. Kia ora tenatkoto katoa and good morning or good afternoon, depending on where in the world you are. I'm Catherine Rouge, and I'm joining you from the city of Utotahi Christchurch in Tewaiponomu, the South Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand, where I'm currently combining master's study in psychology and neuroscience through King's College London with independent work as a leadership coach and consultant, which is my third career after 16 years in aviation and then a decade in strategic communication. I also do training for the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand and run various courses on emotional culture, leadership and change. I've been involved in governance since the late 1900s, and for as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated with how people get along or don't in any group context, whether it's sports or volunteering or paid work, and how those relational dynamics make it easier or harder to get the job done. So I'm really looking forward to today's conversation.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Thanks, Catherine. Phoebe, over to you.

SPEAKER_03 3:55

Thank you so much, Sean. Phoebe Kito. So I am coming here from Port Douglas in Queensland, Australia. So I am the director of Human Resource Dynamics. I am the person that you're often not wanting to call it as a board if you've got a psychosocial claim that is happening within your business, or maybe with your CEO, or you've got some concerns around some psychosocial safety. So we offer very much a practical hands-on assistance to businesses and making sure you're meeting your fair work obligations or your workplace health and safety obligations here in Australia around psychosocial safety in the workplace. And then there are claims in the workplace navigating through that process as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Thank you, Phoebe.

SPEAKER_04 4:45

And Amy.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Fantastic. Right, let me just advance the slide here and back to you, Catherine.

SPEAKER_02 5:23

So you're well covered today. I I should have said call me to help things not go wrong. So, you know, wherever you are in the in the uh timeline of your psychosocial risk, you've got a good uh good set of options. So this is our roadmap for where we're going in the next uh 40-odd minutes. As Sean said, we welcome your questions. Um please be kind to us and just an advance request for forgiveness. If we don't get to your one, uh your question before the end, we're all contactable after the session if you want to follow up with any of us about anything. So to start with, I'm gonna briefly tell you the story behind our title for today. Uh, then we'll look at some definitions. Uh so I could just flip back, Sean. Sorry, some definitions. So we have some common language for at least for this webinar. Uh, we'll look at a framework that gives us some guidance for complex systems, data, and signals to look for. I'm gonna throw a couple of scenarios at my fellow panelists and uh and then just five governance moves you can make as a board to help you govern psychosocial risk. So uh write the story. Well, I'm pretty sure that uh Pamela Allen wasn't thinking about psychosocial risks when she wrote this delightful story about five friends: a cow, a donkey, a pig, a sheep, and a tiny little mouse who were having a nice, calm day when they decided to go for a row in the bay. In this story, we see the animals gingerly and carefully getting into the boat one at a time. Each of their actions changing the environment for the next character. There's great suspense as we watch the boat fill up and make predictions about which animal will eventually sink the boat. The mouse, which is by far the tiniest of all the players, makes the smallest impact on its own, but the greatest impact on an already overloaded system. Next slide. So, how did we get from the beginning scene where it's a beautiful calm day and everyone's walking neatly and capably towards the goal to this dangerous and chaotic ending? In his book, The Chairman's Lounge, Joe Aston references Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, where a character called Bill asks Mike, How did you go bankrupt? The response? Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly. Often good goals, important goals, and we really want to achieve them. It can be especially hard if there hasn't yet been an incident and everything seems fine. How did the boat or that person or team or our organization sink? Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly. Some quick definitions to see us on our way. Stress versus harm. So the presence of stress, even high amounts of stress, is not an indicator of an unhealthy or unsafe workplace. There are plenty of high stress jobs around. But stress creates harm when it's chronic, uncontrollable, or unsupported, which is something for boards to be aware of. When demand exceeds resources for an extended period of time. In other words, there's no recovery. There's simply no way that people can recover from their everyday work. Hazards versus risks. So a hazard, anything that has the potential to cause harm. And a risk is the chance of that happening. So a hazard, we just have to notice and identify it. But a risk we calculate based on a heap of variables that affect the likelihood and the severity of harm when people are exposed to the hazard. So that is by definition going to be different for every organization and every team. Psychological versus psychosocial. So psychological is internal and it focuses on individual emotions and cognition. So my thoughts, feelings, and emotions are part of my psychology. Same with Amy, Phoebe. Psychosocial, on the other hand, is external. It focuses on the interplay of individual psychologies in a social context. So it's environmental and it's interpersonal. And baked into this word by definition is the fact that we're dealing with a complex system. And with that, I will pause and just invite Phoebe and Amy to make any comments about why psychosocial risk is so important in your context.

SPEAKER_03 11:33

Look, certainly uh for those of you that are coming to this from Australia, uh, if you're not seeing it uh as just a general something that you're wanting staff to be safe in the workplace because you want to do the right thing, hopefully that you know as a board you have legal responsibilities around this. Um there's been some very clear legislation through workplace health and safety about the uh it is the you have a positive duty uh requirement to ensure that staff are not only physically safe at the work, but that they are also psychologically safe in the workplace as well. Um so there's some good reason from that perspective, from a legislative perspective. Um, but then you know, talking through to the cultural aspect as well. If you've got a workplace which is filled with grievances and um stress claims, increased absenteeism, low productivity, um, that's not going to be good for attracting, retaining, or producing results for the organization as well, um reputational damage. Like it just goes on and on. So there's this is not a warm, fuzzy, nice to do thing. This is something that is a legal obligation and also makes really good business sense to be um proactive and in the forefront of.

SPEAKER_04 12:54

Um for those of you in New Zealand, uh the situation is not dissimilar to Australia, although we're a little bit behind the Australian environment um in a regulatory sense. Um in New Zealand, there has been a lot of high profile uh discussion about this problem, particularly off the back of the the hotel meeting movement in the early in the early 2020s. Uh and and so what we in addition to the considerations that Phoebe talks about, we uh we now see a workforce that has a language to raise these issues and is and is ready to bring them to the forefront. Now, sometimes um when you're sitting on the board or if you're the CEO, that feels like everyone's jumping on this bandwagon. Uh and you're to be forgiven if if that's how you feel. But the reality of business now is that you have to be able to engage with the psychosocial environment in order to effectively lead your people. Um and a business that can't do that is is going to very quickly become a dinosaur if you haven't already.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Great. So lots of uh compelling, uh essential um legal and moral imperatives to be active in this area.

SPEAKER_03 14:15

Can I just add to that, Catherine, too? Like we've been in a number of situations when we've had a board that have had some um performance management issues uh in relation to the CEO or some senior members of the leadership team. Um and when those have tried to be addressed, um, the person who they're talking to is uh brings up a lot of uh was able to demonstrate that their workplace was not safe or reasonable, so they were expected to work unrealistic hours, they were put under unnecessary stress, you know, they were micromanaged. So there's all these psychosocial issues that have come up. Now, the board may say, well, they're using that as an ex as an excuse, you know, not to deal with what the actual issues are with their performance. But if we can't show that clearly those were issues that, you know, we do have some protocol and some policies and some systems in place um to deal with it, you're on the back foot of being able to deal with what some of those issues are. And I'm sure, Amy, that's some of the things that that you have seen as well from a practical perspective.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Thanks, Fabi. Um so what do we do with a complex system? Well, with uh can we have the next slide, please, Sean? Um so with the rapid adoption of AI to do more and to process vast quantities of data at lightning speed, we might naturally wonder if AI can in fact do a better job of this than we can. I mean, it's a pretty, it's a pretty hard area, psychosocial risk. Can we not just outsource this to a machine? And my answer to that is you can try, but it won't do a very good job. And uh to illustrate, I'm just gonna share some insight from people far smarter than me with this diagram of the Kinevan framework. So Kinevin is a Welsh word with many layers of meaning. It doesn't have a direct English equivalent, but it relates to a place of uh, sorry, a sense of place and familiarity. I highly recommend following the Kinevan Company on LinkedIn if you don't already aren't familiar with their work. This diagram is taken directly from their newsletter last month, and when you get the slides, there's a link to it at the bottom. So they're doing a lot of pioneering work in the realm of decision making, sense making, team culture, and change. A fundamental part of figuring out what to do in any situation is that you have to first understand where you are. So when you're making leadership decisions in particular, if you misunderstand your context, your next move might not be a very good one. So, very simply, many of you on the call will be will be familiar with this framework, but for those who aren't, the right-hand side represents the predictable world and on the left is the unpredictable world. Machines excel only in the bottom right-hand corner where there are fixed constraints and where cause and effect is obvious. When things get a bit more complicated as we move anti-clockwise around the quadrants, so we're in the top right-hand side. In the complicated domain, experts might disagree on what the best move is because there isn't a single best move. There are lots of good practices we can follow. But machines still provide a lot of support, so they can do analysis and help us weigh out options and so on. When we cross over to the left-hand side with the unpredictable world, you can't tell what's going to happen next just because it's happened before. When you get a new board member or a new chair, you hire a new CEO. You can't always accurately predict how it's going to go just because you've hired a CEO before, or you're used to regular rotation of board members at the end of their term. Remember, we all come with our own individual psychology. The way we think, feel, and respond is different. And the interplay of our combined psychologies creates this wonderful and rich complexity of human relationships that also create risk. So leading people, culture change, governing psychosocial risks sits in this domain in the top left where humans are essential. So good news, you still have a job. Now the AC in the middle of this framework is not actually half of an Australian 70s rock band or a type of electrical current. But these letters stand for aporea and confusion. Both of these relate to uncertainty. But the difference is that confusion is generally unpleasant or a negative state that we want to leave. But aporea, and a side effect of following the Kinevan Company is that you will increase your vocabulary. A poria is more a state of puzzlement or wondering, maybe doubt. So you might find yourself in this state when existing categories or existing answers, existing ways of working, the way we've always done it, doesn't hold anymore. So something's off if you're experiencing aporia and you need to ask questions or probe. Take small actions and observe what changes. So the key in this domain is small experiments, trying uh safe-to-fail actions, and then careful observation, observing the whole system. And I think boards have a a huge advantage perhaps often over management because you are supposed to be removed from day-to-day operations. So you if anyone should be able to see things from a systems level, it should be the board who can do that that careful observation and probing. So actually, I'll just before going on to the next slide, Amy or Phoebe, anything to add there? Comments or observations? That's all good. Okay. So we have heard uh about the need, uh the the very obviously legislated need in Australia, um, and that will, I'm sure, soon become more explicit in New Zealand, about the need to be proactive in managing these risks. And one of the challenges in in governance, uh, advantages and and challenges is that you're not hands-on and you're often making decisions and setting direction based on, depending on your board, maybe 150 pieces of paper each month. And you trust that paper and those reports and that information to be giving you an accurate picture of the overall health of the entity that you're governing. And this slide, I just want to draw your attention in particular to the top row, to lead indicators. So it's not enough. We've heard today, it's not enough to have a well resourced ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Boards need to be proactively seeking to reduce these risks. And this might involve looking a bit differently at the data that you are being given, but it also might involve. Asking and for different data and doing different, maybe adopting some different practices to obtain some different data. So lag indicators, which we most often rely on to fix things, tell us where harm has already occurred or where it might be in the mix. So things like absenteeism, staff turnover, incidents, and so on. But lead indicators are what you need to give you an indicator, again, of what's happening before harm occurs. And we can use these to reduce the likelihood that harm will occur. So things like there's a tool called Fearless Scan, which is uh gives you a snapshot of the climate, the psychologically safe, that gives you a psychological safety index at a point in time. Also, worker voice forums. You might engage uh independent external support, you might um establish independently facilitated focus groups and so on. Any environment where people can share their stories is going to give you uh different data or going to reveal things that data maybe will not. The Kinevin Company is actually doing a lot of work in this area with stories. They are particularly interested in developing tools and frameworks that help reveal insights uh inside a system when people are in it, as opposed to uh at the conclusion of something. Um so they're developing ways that uh just bring people together in workshops and create rituals around the sharing of experiences, which gives context to the issues, the everyday issues that people are facing. Amy and Phoebe, is there anything uh you want to add about those indicators and the importance of some of those?

SPEAKER_04 24:06

I I was gonna um reinforce what you said, Catherine, that that that top line is essential. Um when uh when you're aboard, if you're relying on report from the CEO or you're relying on the report from the the head of people and culture, you're you're only seeing the picture that they want you to see. And sometimes you miss crucial stuff. Um another another comment uh I wanted to make is that a thing that happens with psychosocial harm that doesn't happen with physical harm is that the instinct is to look to the person to fix themselves or so and I I hear this all the time. Um a complaint's been raised about uh burnout or overwork or bullying. And the response is, yeah, but Amy needs to take some time off, or Amy needs to delegate better, or Amy does. Um when your tractor breaks down, we don't hear people saying things like, well, that tractor needs to put up its stops and just and just fill itself back up with diesel. Um the uh the the difference in the way that uh that uh people in leadership think about harm to humans versus harm caused by machines or equipment or environment is really stark because the first thing they start saying to me is that well, this person's a difficult person, or this person needs to ask for more help. Um that's a that's a culture that we need to move on from. When I when I first started practicing in the health and safety area, a a lecture I used to give to clients a lot was your health and safety system needs to assume that your employees are stupid. Not because they are stupid, but because to be a good health and safety system, it has to operate even when employees do stupid things. So it's not enough to say don't put your hand in the sausage machine. You have to also have an emergency stop button and a hand guard and an override and training and appropriate PPA roles. And and in the area of psychosocial health, I I challenge you to think about whether you're doing that or whether you're actually looking to employees to fix themselves or now sometimes I dare to suggest more often than not, employees who are who are harmed in the workplace, and I I try to use that term neutrally, okay. Employees who who end up feeling like they've been harmed in the workplace, they don't know enough about how they're managing their own sense of wellness. You know, they they may have a mental um health issue that hasn't been diagnosed, they may not understand that the uh that the way that they're leaning into their job is going to lead to burnout, which is gonna cause effectively a brain explosion, which um which makes them ineffective in the workplace. So, so not only think about uh how you're how you're scanning for those problems, but also how you're planning for working with these really flawed machines that are human beings who may not have all the information that they need to keep themselves safe at all times.

SPEAKER_03 27:20

Um just from uh uh in Australia, but I I think this probably you know does go across the Tasman and overseas as well, is um in Australia we have workers' compensation, which is an insurance for workers. Um, and the psychosocial or stress-related claims for them to be accepted, they used to have to be uh you used to have to the employee had to prove that it was a significant contributing factor of the workplace place, which caused their stress factor. Um, now it only needs to be a contributing factor. So they've taken away the significant, which is why we have seen a large rise in the number of stress claims and psychosocial claims that have come through in Australia. Now that that is going to happen, um, and we try and get the worker back to work, etc. It comes to a point that if they have an ongoing stress claim with it, they may be able to go for common law to be able to say that you provided an unsafe workplace, which has caused me to have a continual psychosocial stress, mental health claim, which is going to impact my life, you know, potentially forever. And that's where in Australia we see these massive payouts. Now, in those situations, what you are wanting to do as an organization or as in a board is to show that you have not been negligent in providing an unsafe workplace. Some things happen at work which causes massive stress claims. We understand that. Some of it's avoidable, some of it's not avoidable. Um, but have you created a safe work environment? Um, and this is where we're wanting you as a board and as an organization need to be able to demonstrate that you have put in the right policy processes, systems, and you have appropriate ways of monitoring how effective that was, that you can't be seen as being negligent around it. So it's really to protect yourself and also for the organization to show that you have taken reasonable steps to ensure that this is going to be a safe working environment for people.

SPEAKER_02 29:28

We've got quite a few questions um in the in the QA. So I'm just gonna uh spend a few minutes seeing if we can answer as many as possible now. Um I'll start with the um I'm gonna in no in no particular order. Um when a non-executive director is doing a site visit and meeting frontline staff, what are your top tips for getting a true picture of the workplace psychological, health, and psychosocial risks? Uh so what questions could you ask? Something that, again, thinking about stories, um, I would simply ask the people well, first of all, do make sure that you're not doing most of the talking. Um, ask the people you meet, what is one story from your last week at work that you would share with someone who doesn't work here? Or maybe ask them for a story which best reflects what it's like to work there. Um you will be amazed what people are prepared to talk about if they uh think somebody is actually going to listen to them for a long time. Um somebody else has asked, I'm going to throw this one to Amy, um, why does the burden of proof of a psychosocial injury solely rest with the injury?

SPEAKER_04 30:44

Um the answer to that question is easy. When you make money off the labour of other people, you have a could current responsibility or commensurate responsibility to prevent harm to those people. So um as I was saying before, uh, you know, this this tendency to look to people to fix themselves, that's natural. But if you want the privilege of using other people to make your money, you have to take responsibility for the for the well-being of the people who are doing that. That's part of the that's part of the social contract at work.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

Thanks. Um, one risk that often occurs is good performers getting loaded with more work while poor performers are often left alone. Phoebe, any comments on that?

SPEAKER_03 31:34

Uh, I can get on a complete soapbox on uh on top of this. So um, you know, we want to put our head in the sand and not have those tough conversations with people early on. And it is it's going to come back and bite us because if you push your high performers too hard for too long, um, you know, you they're gonna crack. It's just like a machine, you know, you can't just run it forever without servicing, looking after it, putting petrol into it. Um, you know, it's it's gonna start, you're gonna start to get some wear and tear coming through. So it, you know, it's very bad leadership practice to allow that to happen. Um, and you just have to lean into it. You you have to lean into each role, what their uh expectations are, what they're contributing, how productive are they, and make sure they're meeting that.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

Great, and um, we'll take one more for now. Um the top question is, or sorry, top as in the first question. Top of the list. As chair of my board, I sometimes have to remind board members of the separation of governance versus operational issues, which can result in disharmony and conflict within the board itself. Um, one comment I would make about that is to invest in some governance training. Uh, you can obviously spend a lot of money on governance training, um, both I know, at least Australia and New Zealand, both of our uh relevant uh organizations, institutive company directors on both sides of the Tasman offer governance training. There are also free resources. Board Pro, I'm sure, would probably have some webinars you can scroll through their extensive library. Um it can help. Uh I guess the main thing is to get an external independent person saying the same thing as you are to just further support and validate the need for people to understand their role. I mean it's key to any job, whether you are an employee, a volunteer, um, in any context, is just understanding the job you're there to do. So that's um all about role clarity. Uh right. Um I've got a scenario, or look at one scenario here, and then we'll come back to some questions. Um, so your board receives a monthly people report, turnover's stable, there's no formal complaints, training is completed and up to date, EAP is available, we've got our ambulance there and ready. And then a bullying story breaks publicly. It's on social media, of course. Um, what was missing? What could the board have asked for uh from their picture of assurance that they had at the last board meeting? Phoebe or Amy, any thoughts on that? And what should a board do in that context? If anything.

SPEAKER_04 34:21

Phoebe, you go.

SPEAKER_03 34:22

Oh, sorry. Um, so I I guess you know, uh it does depend where the bullying's coming from. So if the bullying is coming from senior leadership or from the CEO, um, and they're the ones that are providing all of the uh information, um, then obviously that that is a bit of a a concern. So I'd be looking like you you have to look in and see what is the root cause of this bullying story, where has it come from, how long has the staff member been there? Um, and and you know, again, this is really if it's um this is part of the CEO's operational experience um responsibility um to be managing with these situations on the ground. Your responsibility is to hold accountable the CEO. So I would really be checking in, you know, were you aware, what were you doing, how were you handling it? So, you know, really managing the CEO to be getting more information how as to how this has happened, um, that that would be, you know, how did it slip through? And and it and it happens like let's we see it happen all the time. We think everything's going really well, and then suddenly we get out of the blue this massive spike. And and there's a whole raft of reasons as to why you get bullying complaints. Sometimes it's legitimate, sometimes it's because the person has some own personal mental health issues that's happening outside of work, but they're bringing it into the work and they're leaking it through to the media. So, you know, it's not always a result of the workplace. So don't jump to conclusions, you know, that's where you need to have your good relationships with your CEO and and really get your head around well, what is happening and how have we got to this point?

SPEAKER_04 36:03

Anything, Pat? Yeah, well, my my questions would be okay, so you get you get your monthly people report, but as we all know, what we measure matters. So what's being measured in that report? And and I know this is a is a hypothetical scenario, but what you've told me about the report is that turnover is stable. Okay, well, what what's stable mean? Against what baseline? What do we know about turnover in different departments? Because that might tell a story um that's different to the hey, turnover's stable and everything's good. Um what what do we know about of why there's no formal complaints? Is there no formal complaints because there's no complaint system? How do employees go about making complaints? Where are the safe places for for complaints to be raised? Who are the who are the people who are walking around and and making uh making it possible for questions to be asked or or issues to be dealt with? Um so you know, on the face of it, uh that monthly report looks really positive. But what questions are you asking? What are you measuring? And and these are your these are your lead factors that that Catherine referred to in the previous table. Don't don't be fooled by a nice looking report that's reported in exactly the same format that you've asked for for the same three years, because you might have forgotten to um to scratch behind the surface and see what's really going on.

SPEAKER_03 37:33

One question that we always put in our staff surveys is uh, would you recommend other people to work here? Why or why not? Um, and I find that is really interesting sometimes as to what people will say. Um so yeah, I agree with Amy. Some of those questions can really are you asking the right questions to uncover the right information?

SPEAKER_04 37:58

I'll add to that. I know that in a lot of schools they they're using a well-being monitoring tool where they ask children, this is primary school age children, to do a weekly, you know, happy to sad face scale about how they how they sense their own well-being is. And the schools uh are trying to use that tool to monitor for student well-being. That's a really simple tool that that might tell you a lot about change over time. Um, it doesn't require a survey, it doesn't require any significant monitoring. But if every every Wednesday you asked your staff to rate themselves on a one to five in terms of how happy they're feeling, you might start to get some data that starts to paint a picture that becomes helpful. These are simple tools that that could make a big difference.

SPEAKER_02 38:48

I'm just gonna throw one more question uh to you, Amy, relating to this. Um if the uh bullying story relates to allegations about the CEO, so then the board does have a a job to do. Um, my question actually relates to the word investigation, um, which a lot of people I've noticed get really hit up about. And I and I think of of the word very neutrally in terms of we just have to find out what's happened. First thing is we have to find out what the facts are. Um but there are a lot of the word investigation, and I don't know about your context, um, Phoebe in Australia, comes comes it's pretty loaded in HR context. Like, oh, if we're doing an investigation, then suddenly it's a whole thing. And how do we just find out what happened without when there's so much uh emotional load with that word? Do you have any advice there for people?

SPEAKER_04 39:41

I I work really hard to not use the word investigation for that very reason. Um you know, it's it's not a it's not a special word in any legal sense, but it's come to have really significant meaning. Um very often the the word investigation suddenly creates this connotation of some external examination by some someone high-powered and big deal, and and it doesn't need to be like that either. So I like to use words like I want to ask some questions, or I'm curious about this, I need to find out more information. Um it it's silly, but I I completely agree with you, Catherine, that that suddenly we get to this point where we've got we've got to do an investigation capital I and it has a whole lot of assumed components to it that um aren't always necessary and very often aren't always helpful.

SPEAKER_03 40:37

Yeah, I think gathering of facts and gathering of information is a good way to talk about it. Um, for those of us that live in Australia, we'll know that um investigations have just gone off the route. Like when I first started the business about 18 years ago, like we're we'd have several investigations every year that would come up. Um I honestly, I would say that I would have coming um an investigation coming through our doors every single week at the moment, call it investigational gathering of facts or information. Like it has absolutely gone crazy in Australia, um, which is a good and a bad thing. Um certainly there's an investigation and there's an investigation, like there's uh discovering the facts, getting some key information, pulling it together, and then these, you know, crazy, you know, forensic, you know, month-long investigations. Um, but you know, you you do you do need to gather the facts, you need to get the information together, and we are seeing a lot of that happening in the Australian landscape in the workplace, I would say, at the moment.

SPEAKER_04 41:39

I can see the question from um Kelly Douglas in the QA. And um the the the question is how does the board handle things when they have a sneaking suspicion that the problem is in fact the CEO? That is probably one situation where one of my first recommendations would be maybe you need someone external to come in and and and to do that work to tell you what the CEO is not telling you. Um that that is a situation where I think investigation capital I might be a good idea.

SPEAKER_03 42:10

Yeah. Um a 360-degree um uh report is a really helpful way to do that. Um some of you are familiar with that, which is getting a whole lot of feedback on a person. So um often when we think it is the the CEO might be an issue and there's a lack of perception or understanding of their behaviour and how they've been perceived by the staff, um, we find that to be a great tool. Not that expensive to have to do, pretty easy to be able to execute. Um so that's also a good way to be able to do it.

SPEAKER_02 42:43

Okay, we've been fast tracked to the last slide. Um, so we promised you a practical, manageable steps you could take from a governance perspective. So here are five. Um put psychosocial risk on your risk agenda. Um, this means treating it as a legitimate governance topic. It's not just parked or hidden in HR well-being or something you look at after a complaint. What you discuss gets attention. Um, remember what you ignore can drift. Ask where exposure is highest. So not every part of the organization carries equal risk. And at any different time in your organization, it might be job design or the physical environment or your leadership relationships that are where you are carrying the most risk. It won't necessarily be evenly spread all of the time. Ask for lead and lag indicators. Remember, you need both. Review, speak up, confidence, and trust. A bit of a clunky sentence, but um, just a clean dashboard can be meaningless if it means people are actually afraid to report their concerns or they have no faith in the system that anything will happen. Finally, monitor system improvements, not just individual harm. Again, if anyone can see things at a systems level. It should be the board. So ask some different questions so that you can get better at preventing harm as well as providing support after it's occurred. As a board, you don't have to be therapists and you don't have to know everything, but you might just need to ask better questions earlier.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

Sean.

SPEAKER_00 44:26

So thanks everybody. Please feel free to connect with our presenters today on LinkedIn. I'm sure they'll look forward to your connection. And if you'd like to be put in touch with any of our panelists, Catherine, Phoebe, or Amy, for assistance in this particular area, please indicate your interest on the survey as you exit the webinar. Now just draw your attention to some of the great webinar topics we have coming up over the next few weeks. All of these are listed on our website, on the webinar page of our website. So I'll prompt you to have a great look at those great topics that we have coming up. You'll receive an email from me tomorrow, which will include a recording of today's webinar, the transcript and the presentation slides and the links to those resources that Catherine described. They'll also be hosted. The recording, I should say, and the resources will be hosted on our library of the website over the next 48 hours. Now, of course, if you're considering board management software for your organization, then we'd love to hear from you. Better still, why not try our free 30-day trial? It's really simple and straightforward. There's no credit card required, and it's simple to get started. So thank you again, everybody, for your attendance. I hope you enjoyed the session today with Catherine, Phoebe, and Amy. I know I did. Don't forget our quick survey as you exit. Thanks again, Catherine, for your conversation today. Amy and Phoebe for your attention as panelists. I look forward to seeing you all at our next webinar. Everybody, have a great day.