FAQs

Who have you worked with before?
The Healthy Workplaces by Design program has been delivered in more than 85 work sites across sectors such as health, food retailing, custodial corrections, community services, and government agencies in areas such as transport, land services, education standards, legal aid, and child safety.

What is workplace bullying?
‍Workplace bullying is repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed at a worker or group of workers that creates a risk to their health and safety. Based on this definition, for a pattern of workplace behaviour to meet the criteria for bullying, there must be repeated exposure to aggressive or unreasonable treatment that has the potential to harm the targeted worker or group of workers. Bullying behaviours are often work-related, such as making unjustified criticism or complaints, deliberately excluding someone from work-related activities, withholding information that is vital for effective work performance, setting unreasonable timelines or constantly changing deadlines, setting tasks that are unreasonably below or beyond a person’s skill level, denying someone access to information or resources they need to do their job, or changing work arrangements such as rosters and leave to deliberately inconvenience someone. Other bullying behaviours can be person-focussed, such as spreading misinformation or malicious rumours, or making belittling or humiliating comments, but these typically also occur in combination with the work-related behaviours.

What are psychosocial hazards?
‍Psychosocial hazards are potential sources of harm to psychological health and safety that arise from how work is organised, social factors at work, aspects of the work environment, and hazardous work-related tasks. Psychosocial risk concerns the potential for these types of hazards to cause harm to individual health, safety, and well-being and, more broadly, to undermine organisational performance and sustainability. Organisations are responsible for identifying psychosocial hazards and minimising the associated risks, and must involve workers at all stages throughout the process of understanding and mitigating psychosocial hazards.

Are psychosocial hazards and bullying the same thing?
‍Bullying is one type of psychosocial hazard – alongside others such as workplace violence, sexual harassment, lack of role clarity, and traumatic events – and a well-documented cause of harm in workplaces around the world. In Australia, bullying is a particularly serious psychosocial hazard. The latest data from Safe Work Australia (2021) shows that injury compensation claims due to workplace bullying and harassment constitute the largest proportion of accepted mental stress claims, are the most frequent type of mental stress claim, and result in the highest median claim cost.

Who is Professor Michelle Tuckey?
‍Professor Michelle Tuckey from UniSA’s Centre of Workplace Excellence has spent the last 18 years researching mentally healthy workplaces that are resistant to workplace bullying and occupational stress. Her research advances the risk management of bullying as a work health and safety hazard, including evidence-based practical tools and interventions to diagnose and minimise the organisational risks for bullying. Michelle’s research has been applied in a range of public and private sector organisations, and by health and safety regulatory bodies nationally and internationally. Michelle has over 100 significant research publications and her work has had significant national policy impact through expert consultation, advice, and reports.

What is the Healthy Workplaces by Design program?
‍The Healthy Workplaces by Design program is an evidence-based risk audit tool and risk management intervention process, initially developed at the University of South Australia (UniSA). Professor Michelle Tuckey and her team are now partnering with Teamgage to deliver their work via the Healthy Workplaces by Design program to an even wider audience.

Is employee feedback generated in the Healthy Workplaces by Design program anonymous?
Yes. To generate open and honest insights, no one will be able to view who has submitted or left feedback within Teamgage.