Designing Safe & Respectful Workplaces in 2025: The Shift from Response to Prevention
In this blog, we share highlights from the recent How to Design a Safe Workplace in 2025: Respect@Work & More webcast featuring Dr Laura Kirby - Executive Director and Chief Psychologist, Australian Psychological Services, Andrew Brooks - Head of Employment and Workplace Relations, Law Squared and hosted by Cassandra Hatton - Chief People and Capability Officer, Law Squared.
Every employee deserves to feel safe at work - physically, psychologically, and psychosocially. The challenge is that, despite Australia’s reputation for progressive workplace legislation, the statistics tell a different story.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has found that more than 40% of women and 26% of men have experienced sexual harassment in the past five years in the workplace. Those numbers are even higher in at-risk groups, including those from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, LGBTQI+ communities and in younger age groups. That means many workplaces in Australia are not meeting their legal obligations to prevent sexual harassment.
An Our Watch Survey also found that 40% of workplace leaders are not even aware of their current legal obligations around the prevention of workplace sexual harassment.
So, what does the law say on workplace safety, and what do leaders urgently need to know about designing safe workplaces? Let’s dive in.
The Legal Requirement for Safe Workplaces
As of December 2022, businesses don’t just have a responsibility to react to harassment in the workplace. The Sex Discrimination Act 1984 puts a positive duty on organisations to eliminate harassment, as far as possible.
That means a shift from responding to an active responsibility on prevention and designing safe workplaces. And this requirement applies regardless of business size or organisation type.
For those who don’t adhere to the law, Law Squared employment lawyer, Andrew Brooks, highlights the potentially serious legal ramifications. These include the potential for negligence claims, general protection claims, and high penalties.
“Businesses can face penalties of up to $1.66 million, while senior leaders, individually, can be subject to penalties of up to $332,000 and up to 25 years imprisonment,” he said.
Following the law and understanding how to prevent harm, then, isn’t just a nice-to-have––it’s critical in all Australian workplaces.
Applying Respect@Work Principles in the Workplace
Created by the Australian Human Rights Commission, Respect@Work sets out key principles for workplaces.
Chief People + Capability Officer, Cassandra Hatton, said: “Respect@Work refers to a set of legal principles designed to prevent sexual harassment, discrimination, and other harmful behaviours in the workplace. These principles require employers to take proactive steps to create a safe and respectful environment for all employees.”
Adhering to those principles is an essential part of designing a safe workplace. The key aspects include:
A focus on preventing harassment from taking place, not just responding when harm has already occured
Providing a safe culture for employees to work in
An emphasis on strong leadership
Avenues for support
Risk management, monitoring, evaluation and transparency
Getting to the Root Cause of Unsafe Workplaces
In practical terms, the first step for designing safe workplaces, according to Australian Psychological Services’ Dr Laura Kirby, is not at the individual level––which can mean overlooking key risk factors––but looking at the organisation collectively to discover root causes. The current state in the business can help indicate where harm might be arising and why that’s the case.
“This is where understanding root cause factors contributing to harmful workplace behaviours becomes really important,” she said.
“When you take a look at the research in terms of those root cause contributing factors, some of the biggest contributors… include role ambiguity, role conflict, work overload or high-job demand as well as work constraints.”
Analysing root cause factors enables a business to identify areas that are working well, while highlighting those areas where change is needed. This means having an impact not just at the individual level, but across the entire organisation.
Promoting Safety Factors, Minimising Harm
Once the root cause is identified, the focus then should be on promoting safety factors while minimising harm. Actionable steps to mitigate harm and risk of harm are key.
In practice, nurturing safer workplaces can look like:
Having a united strategy across the workforce to promote workplace safety and harm minimisation that all employees are aware of and aligned with
A clear set of objectives and principles that the organisation follows to keep employees safe
Targeted risk mitigation work such as sexual harassment prevention plans, training trauma-informed principles, embedding psychosocial safety investigations, and managing exposure to potentially traumatic materials and events
Continuous training for all staff on workplace safety - with an emphasis on training senior management to promote a positive flow-on effect through the business
Access to multiple support channels for employees to raise concerns without fear of retribution
Considering how harm can still occur in remote settings - via call, video meetings, and messages - and seeking to minimise it
Importantly, rather than considering workplace safety a checkbox, all of these efforts should be continuous and regularly assessed for effectiveness.
The Critical Factor: Supportive Leadership
One additional and essential factor highlighted by Dr Laura Kirby is having a supportive leadership capability.
“The need for leaders to be particularly capable from a psychological job competency perspective is really important because it’s so clear how much that relationship with our leader infiltrates our experience of work,” she said.
Having leaders highly capable in this area can include senior leadership training, promoting cognitive empathy, and setting a standard whereby senior leadership models positive behaviour across the business.
Senior leaders can also promote respectful workplaces by offering support to employees, job autonomy, a clear understanding of job roles, and, importantly, a culture of safety.
Putting Speak into Practice and Principles
While many businesses might talk about safety in the workplace, if that talk isn’t backed up by specific actions, it may well fall short.
Taking key actions––whether that’s training, putting together a set of principles to adhere to, or developing support pathways––is critical. Not just that, Andrew highlights that it’s essential to document those actions too.
“From a legal perspective, it’s essential to consider how you document your business’s policies, procedures, prevention plans, attendance records, and training. If a regulator comes on site, typically, documentation is the first thing they will ask for,” he said.
Documentation helps your team not just walk the walk, but make your organisation legally compliant too.
Ultimately, workplaces designed with safety in mind aren’t just going to adhere to the law––they’re going to be safer places to work and, therefore, attract and retain employees in the long run. A critical win for business and employees alike.
If you need help navigating your obligations under Respect@Work or would like advice on harm prevention strategies, or please reach out to our Employment team via [email protected]
There are also still a few places remaining at the Respect@Work Officer Training on 3 September in Melbourne – find out more here: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/respectwork-officer-training-september-3-melbourne-2025-tickets-1508249006379