Insights  |  August 2026

Big month. Big people. Big signals for the sector.

Fix the Work. Not the Worker.™

Hello,

Some months you tick along. Others you look up and realise something has properly shifted. August is one of those.

Psychosocial safety has moved from a compliance conversation to a leadership one. Regulators have sharpened their focus, boards are asking harder questions, and the organisations getting ahead are the ones treating psychosocial risk the way they have always treated physical risk: identify it, assess it, control it, and prove the controls are working.

This month: a new partnership with SES SA, a case study on what happens when the phone rings, a new face on the Humn team, a Workplace Investigations series coming to Humn Academy, and a client story out of RSPCA SA that sets a real benchmark for their sector.

We are proud to share that Humn has been successful in partnering with the State Emergency Service SA, supported by the South Australian Government, Department of State Development, to deliver Humn IQ® across the organisation.

This one matters to us. SES SA volunteers and staff turn out to storms, floods, road crash rescues and searches. They are exposed to some of the most demanding psychosocial conditions of any workforce in the state: traumatic events and material, unpredictable hours, high job demands, and the reality of doing difficult work in your own community. Managing that risk well is not a nice-to-have. It is a duty of care, and it is what keeps people coming back.

Humn IQ® turns what their people already know into a live risk picture leaders can act on and defend. Worker consultation, hazard identification, risk assessment, controls and evidence in one connected system, mapped to WHS law, the Model Codes of Practice and ISO 45003.

It is also a meaningful vote of confidence in South Australian capability. A locally built system, backed by state government, protecting the people who protect the rest of us. Thank you to the teams at the South Australian Government, Department of State Development and State Emergency Service SA for backing this work.

If there is one thing we want you to take from this newsletter, it is this. Psychosocial risk is no longer a paper exercise. Regulators are active, they are asking pointed questions, and they do not need you to volunteer the information.

We are currently working with organisations who have been contacted by the regulator following anonymous tip-offs. Not after a serious incident. Not after a formal complaint through internal channels. One worker, one phone call, and the organisation is being asked to demonstrate how it identifies and manages psychosocial hazards. Insurers are doing the same thing on the claims side.

Every organisation we speak to that has been through it says a version of the same thing beforehand: we did not think it would happen to us. It is worth being blunt about that. The question is not whether your workplace is a good place to work. The question is whether you can produce evidence, on the day you are asked, that you consulted your workers, identified your hazards, assessed the risk, implemented controls and reviewed whether those controls are working.

A survey on its own will not get you there. Comcare is explicit that an assessment tool is, at best, a first step within a coordinated risk management approach. What stands up is the full cycle: consult, identify, assess, control, review, and document all of it as you go.

Belinda Matijevic Safety, Wellbeing & Governance, Humn

We are thrilled to welcome Belinda Matijevic to the Humn team.

Belinda brings more than twenty years across government and business at a strategic level, including senior leadership of the investigations and compliance function at SafeWork SA, earlier service with South Australia Police as a prosecutor and training development officer, and experience as a safety and wellness leader in a global business. She holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Exercise and Sports Science, sits on boards as a non-executive director, and is completing an MBA.

Given everything above, the timing could not be better. Belinda has sat on the regulator's side of the table, deciding what warrants investigation and what evidence stands up to scrutiny. She has also sat on the employer's side, building safety and wellbeing systems that have to work for real people on real shifts. Very few people can see a psychosocial risk problem from both angles at once. Our clients will feel the benefit of that immediately.

Belinda, welcome to the team. We are glad you are here.

Here is a pattern we see constantly. A complaint lands. Bullying, sexual harassment, aggression, a serious grievance. The organisation has a duty to respond, the response has to be fair and defensible, and the people asked to run it have never been trained to do it. So it gets outsourced at significant cost, or it gets handled informally and the risk multiplies.

A poorly run investigation is itself a psychosocial hazard. Drawn-out timelines, unclear process, no procedural fairness and no communication cause real harm to everyone involved, including the person who raised the concern. Done well, an investigation does the opposite: it contains the risk, restores trust and gives leaders the evidence they need to act.

This is where Belinda will be leading the way for us. She is developing a new Workplace Investigations learning series for Humn Academy, designed to build lasting internal capability for organisations that need to upskill their people in this critical area of expertise. Practical, evidence-based, trauma-informed and drawn from someone who has run and reviewed investigations at the highest level, it covers scoping and planning, procedural fairness, interviewing and evidence, managing psychosocial risk throughout the process, findings and reporting, and knowing when a matter needs to go external.

The program launches on Humn Academy shortly. If you would like to be notified the moment it goes live, register your interest below.

Working with RSPCA SA has been one of the highlights of our year, and their story deserves a wider audience.

Animal welfare is emotionally heavy work. Inspectors attend cruelty cases. Shelter and veterinary teams manage grief, aggression from members of the public, compassion fatigue and euthanasia decisions. Volunteers carry a lot with limited buffer. These are textbook psychosocial hazards, and in many organisations they get quietly absorbed as "part of the job".

RSPCA SA has chosen a different path. They named the risks, gathered honest data from their people, and got their leadership team engaged in what the data was telling them rather than defending against it. That takes courage. It is much easier to run a wellbeing initiative than to look clearly at where the harm is coming from and change how the work is designed.

The result is a benchmark for the animal welfare and not-for-profit sector: a documented understanding of psychosocial risk, controls that reflect the actual work, and a leadership group that can speak to it with confidence. For a purpose-driven organisation working with tight resources, that is a serious achievement.

To the whole team at RSPCA SA: thank you for the trust, and for being willing to lead rather than wait. Your sector is watching, and it should be.

Let us start the conversation

Need a system, not another dusty survey?

Talk to Humn about strengthening psychosocial risk management, leadership capability and governance evidence.

Team Humn.

Fix the Work. Not the Worker.™
Minimise Risk. Maximise Humn.™

Humn Pty Ltd
Lot Fourteen, North Terrace, Adelaide SA 5000
+61 8 7008 9826  ·  hello@humn.global

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