Work Without Harm

Most organisations producing psychological harm at work are not doing so out of indifference. They are doing so because the frameworks their leaders inherited do not match what the law now demands, what the science now establishes, and what the consequences of failure now entail. Work Without Harm closes that gap. Drawing on four decades of research and the regulatory frameworks now operating across Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union, and beyond, the book sets out what the duty to provide psychologically safe work actually requires of officers, executives, boards, and the people who manage work day-to-day. The book moves past wellbeing programmes, employee assistance schemes, and resilience training—the interventions evidence shows to be the least effective response to psychosocial risk—and into the territory the law is actually targetin how work is designed, how managers behave, how organisations decide what conditions to permit, and how boards govern what they cannot themselves observe. Five case studies, constructed as composites from documented enforcement outcomes, published inquiry findings, and patterns encountered repeatedly in practice, demonstrate what failure looks like in professional services, mining, healthcare, the public sector, and remote work, and what the analytical frameworks would have surfaced earlier. Written for executives, officers, directors, safety and HR leaders, regulators, and policy makers, Work Without Harm is neither a compliance manual nor a wellbeing book. It is a treatment of psychosocial risk as the safety, governance, and personal liability issue the legal frameworks have already concluded it is, and a practical guide to discharging the duty that follows.