‘Chronic Unease’ has captured the imagination of businesses and is considered an essential component of High Reliability Organisations. The author proposes that chronic unease is not a sustainable psychological or emotional state. However, there are clearly times for ‘acute unease’.
Health and Safety decisions should be made in a culture where corporate Values are perceived positively, with business systems driving behaviour.
Critically, Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) decisions for all roles should be ‘factually informed’. Objective OH&S thinking is required, unclouded by emotions likely to be present in a social environment pervaded by ‘chronic unease’.
The paper suggests chronic unease has the opportunity to be factually informed, but there is a preferable alternative:
Create a positive social environment, embracing objective thinking where 80-90% of an organisation’s Health and Safety resources focus on opportunities for predicting and managing the potential for permanent personal damage. This is accomplished through embracing factual information, internal and external to the organisation. It is suggested that an organisation adopt at least the following points:
1. Be factually informed with respect to external information e.g., the taxonomies of damage associated with particular Consequences of Interest. It is critical to recognise that patterns of multiple fatalities differ from patterns of single fatalities, as does non-fatal permanent damage differ from minor damage.
2. Be factually informed with respect to some of the mythologies associated with single fatality and non-fatal permanent damage, with such mythologies allowing damage to continue at epidemic levels.
3. Be factually informed regarding the gains made by the medical profession with respect to human longevity and disease management being due (in part) to objective, value free terminology.
4. Be factually informed with respect to extending thinking associated with ‘accident prevention’ to ‘damage reduction/mitigation.’
This list is not exhaustive. This paper suggests that chronic unease is not a useful notion. Periods of acute unease will, and must, occur. However, becoming factually informed is an essential component if industries are to achieve the necessary reductions in the burden of work-related injury and disease.

This session introduces a holistic approach to safety excellence, recognizing the importance of the frontline workforce in shaping safety culture. "Safety Starts with Me" is more than a slogan—it’s a call to action based on a shared set of beliefs and values. The powerful connection between what we think, what we feel, and therefore what we do underpins a new way of engaging with existing safety management systems. Rather than simply following rules, our teams are encouraged to explore the deeper reasons behind them, fostering insights into attentional awareness and how the human brain processes information.
We will explore how this approach integrates the principles of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) with cognitive and social psychology to address the causes of unsafe behavior. By combining BBS with an understanding of cognitive processes and social influences, we can better understand how safety decisions are shaped not only by external reinforcement but also by internal thought patterns and social dynamics. This holistic model moves beyond individual behavior change, focusing on creating a culture where safety is a personal commitment.
The session will also emphasize the need for leadership to actively role model their personal safety commitment to foster the culture of "safety starts with me." This integrated approach goes beyond leaders traditional compliance focus to creating an environment where teams are able to make thoughtful, reasoned decisions that lead to lasting safety improvements. By blending proven behavior-based safety principles with psychological insights, this unique approach ensures more effective, sustainable safety outcomes for both individuals and organizations.

Culture is arguably an organisation’s most valuable asset.

An organisation that invests time in building and improving workplace culture is more likely to have an engaged workforce. This has proven to result in higher productivity rates, lower workforce turnover and stability in safety trends.

A key responsibility of Frontline Leaders is to directly influence the engagement and performance of their team. Essentially delegating the critical role of building trust to a group of individuals who are too often promoted into leadership roles based on their technical abilities, without the right support model and adequate training are then left to navigate the complexities of people management through trial and error.

The result? A disengaged workforce and lost strategic opportunity.

In 2024, the Gallup State of Workplace Survey was conducted, gathering data from more than 183,000 business units across 53 industries and 90 countries. A key finding revealed 62% of employees globally are not engaged in the workplace, leading to a productivity loss of $8.8 Trillion across the global economy. Additionally, organisations with higher engagement rates had a 63% reduction in safety incidents.
What if we treated frontline leadership as a strategic priority? Building trust requires balancing competence and character, representing a psychologically safe and engaged organisational culture.

Five behavioral principles of a Frontline Leader who understands the importance of building trust when engaging their people are:
• Be Visible through building habits that create presence amongst teams.
• Be Connected through taking time to understand differences in people and providing valuable feedback to encourage engagement.
• Be Curious ask questions and seek to understand how you can help your team with their work to achieve the Vision and Mission
• Be Consistent engaging regularly and with integrity to create a psychologically safe workplace.
• Be Valuable Assist in providing support to bridge gaps, enhance collaboration to achieve shared objectives and success.
Ultimately, engaged teams are at the core of an enviable Organisational Culture with majority of cultural responsibility sitting with Frontline Leaders. What are we doing to develop a strategic approach to Frontline Leadership development?

This presentation outlines a field-based psychosocial safety and cultural audit model tailored for high-risk mining environments. It will provide attendees with practical guidelines for surveying and understanding workforce perceptions of psychological safety in the workplace. The method treats culture as a live operational factor and applies a statistically supported approach to identify and address the root causes of psychosocial risks.

A case study involving mine site surveys will be discussed, highlighting the limitations of traditional, reactive cultural assessments. The proactive method described offers a practical alternative—serving both as an early warning system and a cultural diagnostic tool. Anonymised data from two mine sites will be presented to demonstrate how consistent theme saturation emerged and how confidence in the audit process was established.

The audit was designed to provide a more accurate and consistent approach for establishing a cultural baseline, forming the foundation for improved psychosocial controls. Random and strategic sampling techniques were used to assess perceptions of fairness, psychological safety, and supervisor trust. Sampling was conducted across shifts and panels until thematic saturation was reached, ensuring the data reflected site-wide conditions rather than isolated stakeholder or group views.

This audit process achieved over 80% confidence in its findings and provides a solid platform for ongoing well-being monitoring, psychosocial risk control selection, and evidence-based leadership decisions. It supports a shift from reactive compliance to proactive auditing—building high-confidence insights into environments where psychological safety is actively prioritised and sustained.