How Well Is Your System Tuned to Notice Early Warning Signs? World Day for Safety & Health at Work 2026
Today (Tuesday the 28th of April) is World Safety & Health at Work day, with a focus on psychosocial safety.
It couldn’t be more timely as organisations across Australia are reshaping their safety systems following the rollout of new psychosocial legislation last year. This year’s World WHS day theme, ensuring a healthy psychosocial working environment, points to the behavioural shift in what we pay attention to. The challenge lies in building the awareness of both the hazards you can see and what sits underneath them.
The signals.
Psychosocial Safety in the Media:
The recent Elijah Hollands moment in the AFL brought this into focus:
In case you missed it, just over a week ago, Elijah Hollands became a talking point during Thursday’s blockbuster AFL game. The media reported on how he shanked kicks in the warm up, had just one touch for the whole game, and was filmed behaving erratically to the crowd throughout the evening. The initial commentary focused on Elijah’s performance because that was the result that we could see. But the more important question came after:
What was happening around him? and how early could it have been recognised?
Hollands played out more than three quarters of the game before the club kept him off the field. In the aftermath, we’ve seen interrogation of the system around him. Rightly, questions are being asked about how effective club cultures are in supporting people to spot and act on warning signs. That question extends well beyond football.
The challenge (and opportunity) for Organisations
The AFL has ambition to play a national role in the prevention of mental ill-health. It recently launched a 24/7 player and coach helpline as a part of its broader strategy to foster ‘mental fitness’. But moments like this highlight the broader systemic challenges facing any organisation shifting reactive to proactive safety work. It serves as a good reminder that psychosocial risk rarely arrives as a clear event. It usually accumulates quietly in the background.
Catching things earlier is possible when our awareness of subtle changes - in people, context and environments - is honed and precise. That’s the opportunity that good psychosocial risk management affords us. But to achieve it, we need to fundamentally rewire our cultures and ways of working. This is about more than incidents and individuals and investigations.
Today, on World Safety & Health at Work day, ask yourself: How well is our system tuned to catch the earliest warning signs?