When High Performance Cultures Create Psychosocial Hazards
Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation now requires businesses across Australia to identify and manage psychosocial hazards. The hazards themselves aren’t new; what’s changed is that ignoring them, or treating them as a box to tick is no longer an acceptable form of risk management.
What used to be guidance under the Act is now under strict enforcement. Regulators no longer need to wait for a claim; they can penalise a business for failing to address hazards, and they have appointed more regulators to do that*. And regulators do not grant exemptions for "startup culture”, “startup hours” or fast-paced operating models.
In practice, meeting the duty means three things: assessing where harm could occur and how serious it could be, putting controls in place to remove or reduce those risks and monitoring whether they're actually working. Regulators expect this to account for how often and how severely people are exposed to a hazard and look at work design, systems and workplace behaviours - not just written policies.
* Perhaps the most evident case of this to date is the UTS case, check out a summary here. https://ccfnsw.com/safework-nsw-pauses-uts-downsizing-over-psychosocial-risk-concerns/
A distinction worth making
Psychological safety, the term made famous by Amy Edmondson, describes whether people feel safe to speak up, challenge each other, admit mistakes and take risks without fear of humiliation.
Psychosocial safety is broader and it’s what has now become legislated. It describes the features of how work is designed, organised and managed that can cause psychological harm - workload, control, role clarity, support, the way change is handled, exposure to conflict and feedback channels to name a few.
The distinction matters because you can have a team where people feel comfortable speaking up and still be running a psychosocial hazard if the workload is crushing them or the constant addition of tasks to their role has made it unachievable.
Australian claims data shows that more than half of all serious psychological injury claims trace back to how work is designed and how people are treated (Safe Work Australia, 2025).
Why Your High Performance Culture Might Be The Risk
“We have a high performing culture” - many CEOs and founders tell me this, without hesitation. And when I ask what that means, they'll give me a good answer.
Here's the thing that I’m more interested in. Does that answer live inside their head, or is it visible to their teams too? Usually, what "high performance" actually means - what good looks like, which behaviours matter most, how someone knows they're clearing the bar - stays invisible.
This isn't an argument for a lower bar. The bar can be high. But there's a difference between a high bar and an invisible one, and when people can't see clearly what they're aiming for, it's usually the most committed people who feel it most - the ones working hardest to clear a mark they can't quite make out. Where mistakes and iteration aren't visibly part of how you work, that same lack of clarity can harden into a culture where people focus more on not getting it wrong than on doing good work - where "high performance" becomes "don't f*&k up.” On the other hand, when people can see clearly what good looks like, they spend their energy on the work itself rather than on guessing what's wanted.
Most of what follows comes down to work design - how roles, ways of working, decisions and workload are structured. It’s the least visible part of a business if you’re not asking the right questions, and it’s the place regulators are now looking at closely. It’s where psychosocial risk is either built in or designed out and ironically, in fast paced start ups and scale ups, work design is usually accidental.
Here are some of the most common psychosocial hazards for start ups and scale up environments that sit under the high performance culture:
Role over-load and role under-load
This is outlined in the Act as a hazard and it’s where your high performers live. When the demands people carry consistently outweigh their resources (time, support, information and clarity), that is a psychosocial hazard. It’s also the hardest to see in a fast paced business. If high job demands have become such a part of your culture that you could add it to your values statement - that is a hazard.
One quick (and valuable) way to see this is to pick a critical person that you know has a high workload. List what the person actually spends their time on, then compare it to what the role was originally meant to be. In a fast growing business the two often drift, fast. That gap isn’t a performance problem, it’s a design problem that’s worth checking in on to make sure your most critical people are working on the right thing, not burning out and not over-loaded.
Another challenge in this area I see is less experienced managers ignoring the signs because they are always receiving strict “we have no budget” and high delivery messaging from executives. There’s numerous case law where managers have ignored employees expressing that their workload is too high - and it generally does not worked out in the employers favor - make sure your managers are all treating these concerns seriously, find out what’s actually happening and where team and role design is actually no longer working, rather than just communicating back to their teams “it is what it is, just get on with the work”. The reality is, in a fast paced business, scope creep, especially in critical roles, is guaranteed to happen.
Job control and decision making rights
Decades of occupational-psychology research tells us pressure and burnout aren’t driven by high demand alone - they’re driven by high demand combined with low control. A heavy workload feels different when someone holds decision rights and a say over how they work - and that alone can lower the risk of harm.
When I’m working with leaders, I’ll often challenge them to take one low risk decision that keeps landing back on them and ask why it does. Usually it’s not that the person doing the work can’t make it - it’s that no one ever decided it was theirs to make. Naming who owns what decisions removes a whole bottleneck and it’s a design choice. This isn’t just reducing psychosocial risk, it’s good leadership - the best developers of people are always handing over control. The ones who hold everything become the bottleneck and the hazard at once.
Role clarity
Unclear, shifting or conflicting expectations are a recognised hazard and they multiply during growth, when roles mutate without recognition. While job descriptions are important for compliance, they tend to list tasks and credentials needed for a job rather than provide role and growth clarity, and in fast growth businesses they are out of date as fast as you write them.
Consider job profiles - a high level overview of a role’s purpose, capability, development needs and performance expectations - things that are really helpful when it comes to role clarity and. Performance expectations. A job profile lasts longer, stays flexible, and keeps the language outcome based so tasks flow in and out naturally. Pair it with a system where leaders are continuously checking workload and psychosocial safety risk
Questions to ask your people
The fastest way to find out what your high performance culture actually is, is to ask the people inside it - because the version most leadership teams can see is the one they wrote in a room and never tested. The answers tend to reveal both the discrepancies and, often, a psychosocial hazard or two. A few worth asking:
- Performance clarity - do people know what good looks like in their role, and how they'll know they've hit it?
- Room to try - what actually happens here when someone makes a mistake?
- Priorities under pressure - when priorities shift quickly, how do people get realigned, and what happens to the old ones?
Raising problems and workload - when something isn't working or the workload is too much, do people know who to raise it with, and what happens when they do?
Decision rights - do low risk decisions get delegated into the teams that do the work? If they don’t, does this cause significant delays or delivery bottlenecks? Another way to look at it - if a manager or leader is on leave, does work stall?
Keep in mind that if you’re gathering data through any method - asking questions directly, surveys, focus groups - you must document where psychosocial safety gaps exist and document the work done to mitigate risk. You must ensure that the same process is followed for all managers in your company. If you are deemed an officer under the legislation, you will be accountable to show proof that you have put processes in place to proactively identify hazards throughout your business and remedy them.
Where this leads
Psychosocial safety, stripped of the legislation, is the accumulated effect of how work is designed and how people are led. The framework has made it a legal duty - but the same things that keep people safe are the things that let them do their best work. Clarity isn't just a compliance exercise - it’s what a high performance culture actually runs on.
If this resonated
If you can see this gap in your business or want to know more about how to build high performing teams, that’s work I do. As a fractional HR leader (a senior people leader without the full-time cost) I help you diagnose where the real pressure and upside sit and put the structure around it. I also coach and train your leaders one-on-one and as a team; the people often carrying the most and feeling least equipped as things move fast, helping them build the clarity and confidence to lead well under pressure.
I'm always open to a conversation about your business, what I've seen work in other businesses like yours, and how I can help.
If you'd like a broader read on your leadership bench first - the strengths, gaps, and where the pressure points might be - you can start with a short diagnosis of your leadership bench strength here.
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Georgia Kelaher is a Fractional HR leader, leadership coach and advisor, and the founder of The Curious Leadership. She works with senior leaders and the organisations they lead - in fast-growth businesses, especially where growth has outpaced leadership capability. Georgia has spent 16 years as a People & Culture, including as a Chief People Officer, inside exactly the kind of high-pressure, fast-scaling companies her clients lead now.
(Please note, this article is not intended as legal advice about Psychosocial safety)
