Vertical Development Consulting · Melbourne, working internationally
Psychosocial safety and how managers behave under pressure
Victorian employers have had a psychological health duty since December 2025, and manager behaviour sits inside it. Below is what the regulations ask for and what the compensation data shows. There is also a line worth drawing between developing managers and controlling a hazard, because the two get confused often enough to be worth separating.
What changed
The duty reaches work design, systems of work and the way people treat each other
Since 1 December 2025, Victorian employers have had to identify psychosocial hazards in work design, systems of work, management and workplace interactions, then eliminate the risk or reduce it so far as is reasonably practicable. It is an ongoing obligation rather than a single assessment, and it has to be revisited when the work changes, when new information turns up, or when somebody reports a problem.
Aggression or violence, bullying, exposure to traumatic content, high job demands and sexual harassment are named in the regulations. Several of those run straight through how a manager runs a team, which is why the duty keeps landing on the desks of people who think of themselves as running an operation rather than managing a hazard.
Source: WorkSafe Victoria on the new regulations. Nothing on this page is legal advice.
What the claims data shows
Mental health claims cost roughly four times what other serious claims cost
Compensation claims are a lagging measure and a partial one. They count the people who made it as far as a claim, which is a small share of the harm. Even so, the direction is hard to miss.
Source: Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2026. The 2024–25 claim figures are preliminary and typically revise upward. Both compensation medians reference 2023–24.
The honest version
Developing managers is not the same as controlling a hazard
A manager who can hold a hard conversation without the team going quiet afterwards is a genuine control on some of these hazards. It is not the whole answer, and treating it as the whole answer is how organisations end up with a trained workforce and an unchanged problem.
Workload, role clarity, resourcing, reporting lines and what actually happens when somebody raises a problem are set above the manager. No amount of coaching moves them. A manager who has been taught to listen better, and who is then handed a team with twice the work and half the authority, will burn out faster than the one who was never trained at all.
The sequence matters more than the spend. Identify the hazards, look at what in the design of the work is producing them, fix what can be fixed there, and develop the people who have to run what is left. Starting with training inverts that, and it quietly moves responsibility onto individual managers for conditions they did not create.
Where this practice fits
Work on how managers behave, with the limits stated
Two things are on offer here. The Capacity Program runs four live sessions over eight weeks for one cohort of eight to ten people, with a psychosocial safety instrument administered before and after. Executive coaching does the same work one to one, over twelve fortnightly sessions.
The measurement comes with a caveat that gets left out of most proposals. A before and after comparison with no control group cannot establish that the program caused the change. It shows movement, movement is worth having, and it is not proof. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you a number.
None of this is sold as a compliance service. An employer who needs a risk assessment needs a work health and safety specialist, not a coach. What this practice can do is work on the part of the problem that lives in how a manager behaves when the pressure is on, which is a real part of it and not the only part.
Next step
Forty-five minutes to work out whether any of this helps
Vertical Development Consulting Pty Ltd · ABN 15 628 060 015 · Melbourne, working across Australia and internationally · rudi@vertdev.co