Leaders are very much on notice that the "health" in work health and safety includes psychological health.

While there is a high degree of awareness of the legal duties imposed on officers and businesses, how to discharge those duties and what "good" looks like for officers and businesses alike, when it comes to managing psychosocial risks, remains an area where most are still seeking answers.

Dr Erin Quinane, leader in sustainable high performance, has been leading a global qualitative research study, in partnership with RMIT University, Columbia University and Manchester University and sponsored by Ashurst, which explores the evolving role of Boards in governing organisational psychosocial risks, mental health, drawing insights from 45 international Board members of publicly listed companies to develop practical, scalable governance frameworks for psychosocial risk and employee high performance.

In this session, in partnership with Dr Erin Quinane, Tamara Lutvey, Employment partner, Ashurst will explore:
• why and how psychosocial risk has emerged as a priority area for Queensland and other Australian regulators;
• how do leaders and organisations think about and approach leadership and wellbeing from an Australian perspective; and
• what does "good" look like for leaders seeking to discharge their legal duties to manage psychosocial risks and how can businesses support them

Great supervision shouldn’t depend on who’s leading the shift.

In practice, supervisors can find themselves constantly squeezed between production targets, safety obligations and their crew’s immediate needs.

Our brain’s reward system is wired for the urgent. Present bias means we consistently value immediate outcomes over future ones, even when we know the longer-term focus is more valuable. Supervisors aren’t choosing wrong, they are wired for solving what feels urgent. As a result, the pressure of 'right now' leaves frontline leaders stuck in a cycle of just ‘getting it done’.

BUMA Australia needed a change, and leant into the opportunity to define what frontline leadership really means for them — shifting mindsets and behaviours from a compliance focus to one of true capability, across all of their operations.

In this showcase, we share how we collaborated with BUMA to bridge the gap between organisational expectations and site reality to help build real leadership consistency that shifts the daily experience from ‘spinning wheels’ to ‘gaining traction’.

We’ll explore:
The productivity trap: Why supervisors feel more productive when they fix the urgent, even as it steals energy needed to get ahead of the day.

Compliance to culture: How shifting mindsets from compliance to performance helps build real, consistent capability.

Gaining traction: How a simple framework for building small, daily habits helps leaders make real progress in both their day-to-day work and across different roster cycles.

Recent cases and regulatory developments make clear that safety outcomes are shaped by leadership decisions, behaviours and priorities at the highest levels of an organisation. For officers, safety due diligence is a key responsibility and non-delegable obligation. Courts expect to see evidence of personal inquiry, challenge and follow-through. In Queensland's mining sector appropriate due diligence supports the safety of operations and the ultimate goal - that every person who goes to work returns home safely.

This session will equip board members, executives and senior leaders in the Queensland mining industry with a practical framework for demonstrating proactive due diligence, informed by what the courts have told us constitutes genuine, active engagement with safety governance obligations.

We will examine the key lessons for mining executives and senior leaders from recent cases – both within and outside of the sector – to ensure:

- Officers are prepared to appropriately exercise WHS due diligence;
- Leaders understand their role in supporting due diligence;
- Organisations have appropriate information systems and governance frameworks to support safety and evidence the exercise of due diligence.

Mining companies spend considerable time and resources collecting health and safety (H&S) data – for example, incident reports, near-miss records, audits, hazard observations, and leadership observations. Yet, despite this investment, leaders routinely struggle to answer a fundamental question: what is this data actually telling us about the risk in our business?

The reality is that most organisations are data-rich but insight-poor. Information sits in disconnected systems, and much of it is free-text, making quantitative dashboard summarisation difficult. As a result, important investment decisions about controls, training, equipment and culture are often made with incomplete information.

This presentation explores how artificial intelligence (AI), and large language models in particular, is changing what is possible. AI can now read and interrogate thousands of incident narratives, investigation reports, audits and hazard observations, surfacing precursors, recurring failure modes and weak signals that human reviewers can’t detect at scale.

Drawing on Brady Heywood's work applying AI to large H&S datasets across the resources sector, the presentation will demonstrate, using real examples, how AI changes the questions leaders can ask: What are our true repeat events? Which controls are failing? Where is the language in our reports masking serious risk? And, critically, what does this tell us about where our critical controls are potentially weak?

This presentation illustrates how AI does not replace the judgement of senior leaders but dramatically improves the quality of information on which that judgement rests.