Whistleblowing isn't the fix for psychosocial risk. But without it, the fix doesn't work.

When psychosocial risk makes headlines, organisations often reach for the nearest reporting tool. Install a hotline. Publish a policy. Move on.

That response misses the purpose of whistleblowing systems. But dismissing whistleblowing as irrelevant to psychosocial risk creates its own problems. The two disciplines intersect, and most organisations haven't worked out where.

The wrong default

Tony Morris, a workplace health and safety expert with over 30 years' experience across law enforcement, prosecution, and consulting, makes the boundary clear: "We don't want the whistleblowing avenue of reporting to be the default reporting for all psychosocial hazards. Absolutely not."

If a team is understaffed and the workload is unsustainable, that's a management problem. It should be raised directly, addressed operationally, and resolved through the normal health and safety process. Running that through a whistleblowing channel adds friction, slows the response, and frames a routine hazard as something clandestine.

"You can't get onto it quick enough either if you do it that way," Morris adds.

Most psychosocial hazards, properly handled, belong in the same reporting stream as a broken guardrail or a faulty extractor fan. Identified, logged, risk-assessed, controlled. The machinery already exists.

When whistleblowing becomes necessary

Then there are the cases where the hazards aren't isolated. Where the people creating the risk are senior enough that raising it through normal channels means raising it with the problem itself.

The WorkSafe Victoria v Court Services Victoria prosecution fits this pattern. Multiple intersecting psychosocial hazards compounded over years. WorkSafe's finding was that CSV was not aware of the conditions within the Coroner's Court division. Power imbalances made reporting feel career-ending.

"Whistleblowing needs to be there if you've got an issue such as the case that we're talking about, where it was just a toxic culture and a toxic workplace," says Morris. "For me, the whistleblowing avenue would have been the proper and the right way to raise an issue in that, in that case."

David Morgan, Managing Director of Veremark’s Whistleblower Technology Solutions, describes the dynamic he sees in similar cases: "Things like culture of silence, people not feeling that they know where to go. Power imbalances, because some of the worst people in terms of their behaviours were very senior people. People felt threatened by that and didn't feel that they could speak their mind."

When the hazard is the culture itself, and when the people responsible for managing risk are contributing to it, standard reporting channels are unlikely to surface the problem.

The design question

Accepting that whistleblowing has a role in psychosocial risk raises a practical question: is the system actually designed for it?

Most whistleblowing programmes were built around fraud, corruption, and financial misconduct. The reporter has information, they disclose it, an investigation follows.

Psychosocial risk disclosures work differently. The reporter is often the person being harmed. The misconduct may involve sexual harassment, bullying, or patterns of behaviour that are difficult to document with the kind of evidence a compliance investigation typically expects. Anonymity and security requirements are higher.

"Yes, we do want that safe reporting channel to be in place for people to be able to raise sexual harassment concerns," says Morgan. "What is important in that context is making sure that the organisation promotes that in the right way and designs it in the right way so that people feel safe, because it's a very different type of offence to something more fraud or financial crime related because of the impact on the victim."

The gap between having a whistleblowing system and having one that works for psychosocial risk comes down to design: how the channel is communicated, who triages reports, how investigations are scoped, and whether the process accounts for the fact that the reporter may be psychologically vulnerable.

What leadership reporting needs to include

Morris's psychosocial risk maturity model places most Australian organisations at stage two: Reactive. They respond to incidents. They don't anticipate them.

"The executives, the board also for guidance, but more the executive leadership team, the decisions that they make... they cannot exercise due diligence unless they're getting the proper and good reporting back," says Morris.

The same question applies to whistleblowing programmes. If the board receives a report showing three disclosures in a quarter, the absence of further disclosures could mean the absence of problems, or it could mean the absence of trust in the system. Both possibilities need to be considered.

Whistleblowing won't fix psychosocial risk. Proper hazard identification, risk assessment, and operational controls will. But when those systems fail, whistleblowing is the mechanism that can break the cycle. How well it's designed determines whether it catches problems early or lets them compound.

This article is a companion piece to Episode 4 of the Trust at Work webinar series. Watch the full conversation between David Morgan and Tony Morris →

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