Author’s note: In an episode of the RelyOn podcast Nathan Luker sat down with Keith Govias, Workplace Safety and Risk Principal at EML Group and Fellow of the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship.
Keith and his team partnered with Monash University to produce Inside the Minds of Australia’s Workplaces, one of the most comprehensive examinations of worker mental health this country has seen.
The episode covered:
- The most vulnerable workforce cohort entering your organisation
- What job design has to do with psychological safety
- The 15-minute leadership conversation that changes everything
- Why the data gap between suffering and claims should alarm every employer
Listen to the episode on Apple or Spotify.
—
Forty-one percent. That’s the proportion of Australian workers aged 14 to 24 who report living in a state of psychological distress for six months or more. Not a bad week. Not exam stress. Six months or more of sustained mental ill health — and they haven’t even hit the middle of their careers yet.
Keith Govias doesn’t reach for the usual generational clichés when he talks about young workers. As a Vincent Fairfax Fellow in Ethical Leadership at EML, and co-author of the landmark Inside the Minds of Australia’s Workplaces report with Monash University, he’s spent the past year looking at what the data actually says. His conclusion is blunt: “We are looking at probably the most vulnerable cohort of workers that have ever entered the job market.”
The temptation — and it’s a strong one — is to chalk this up to a softer generation. To mutter something about resilience and suggest they toughen up. Govias has heard it. He pushes back, firmly but with the patience of someone who has had this conversation many times.
The structural picture
The EML and Monash research paints a picture that goes well beyond generational temperament. Around 60% of young workers reported low autonomy in their roles. Roughly 23% reported low skills or variety. The HILDA Survey from the University of Melbourne reinforces the picture: underemployment is associated with poorer job quality for young people, with underemployed youth reporting lower subjective job security, and the national sense of control over life events declining from 75.8% in 2019 to 71.3% in 2023. These are the textbook ingredients for psychosocial risk — not a character flaw, but a job design problem.
And the sceptic’s objection writes itself: of course young workers have low autonomy. They’re stacking shelves. They’re scanning groceries. That’s the starting line.
Govias doesn’t dismiss this. He’s spent more than fifteen years in retail himself and understands the reality of entry-level work. But he argues the question isn’t whether the tasks are inherently simple — it’s whether employers are doing anything to give those tasks meaning, variety, or a visible pathway forward.
“If a worker has a sense of low value, because they’re only stocking shelves, but doesn’t understand how their contribution on that day plays into a larger goal for the broader team or the broader return for the business, that can sometimes be a struggle,” he explains. “Offer workers a chance to have a degree of autonomy in how they choose to undertake their task where possible or give them a sense that they can switch into and out of jobs as long as it’s within a nominated framework.”
It’s not about lowering standards. It’s about designing work that doesn’t grind people down before they’ve had a chance to build anything.
A generation shaped differently
What makes this cohort distinct, Govias argues, is not that they’re weaker. It’s that they arrive in workplaces with a fundamentally different set of expectations — and they’re managed by people who have no frame of reference for meeting them.
These are young workers who grew up in an environment that is more open about mental health, more literate in the language of positive psychology, and more accustomed to receiving regular feedback than any generation before them. They arrive in workplaces managed by leaders of an older generation who never received that schooling — managers who are uncertain how to apply skills they were never exposed to, because there’s no lived experience to draw on.
“We’re at a crux where you’ve got two distinct groups coming together where one has more power, but no lived experience to help manage the other,” Govias says.
The mismatch runs in the other direction too. Young workers’ understanding of what a role involves is often shaped by brief online research rather than deep engagement with an industry, and the gap between expectation and reality can hit hard. “I think there’s a high degree of people coming in where after the first three months or six months, they’re going: this isn’t the job I signed up for,” Govias observes.
The long shadow
There is a tendency to treat young worker mental health as a passing phase — something they’ll grow out of once they settle into adult responsibilities. A separate set of data suggests the problem doesn’t fade with time. It gets worse.
KPMG’s 2024 report for the Council of Australian Life Insurers examined permanent disability claims across all age groups over the past decade. The sharpest spike was in the 30-to-40 bracket: a 732% increase in TPD claims for mental health. In 2013, just 10.1% of permanent disability claims in that age group were attributed to mental health. By 2022, it was 36%. Across all ages, the average claimant dropped from 48.8 years to 46.5. Australians are leaving the workforce permanently due to mental ill health at a younger age than ever before.
The KPMG data doesn’t track the same individuals from their teens into their 30s — it’s a cross-sectional comparison, not a longitudinal study. But the directional picture is hard to dismiss. The conditions the EML and Monash research documents among today’s youngest workers — low autonomy, low variety, low agency — are the same conditions the evidence consistently links to long-term mental health deterioration. The distress showing up at career entry doesn’t evaporate with a promotion or an industry change. It compounds. And the insurance data is already showing where it ends up.
What employers can actually do
Govias is practical about the interventions that matter. More frequent check-ins — not just at the six-month probation mark, but regularly throughout the early months. Supervised or buddy-system training programs that build social skills and experiential learning through observation. Transparent hiring processes that give candidates an honest picture of what the role involves, warts and all.
“It’s not just about an employee value proposition anymore,” he says. “Employers need to be far more transparent with workers, right at the very beginning of the job interview process — clear and blunt sometimes.”
Govias also raises neurodiversity — the recognition that people learn and operate in different ways. This doesn’t mean someone is unsuitable for a role, he argues, but it does mean employers need to think more carefully about how they build roles with meaning around individuals and give them the right tools to succeed. “There are people that surprise us based on their output and capability, but we have to give them a chance,” he says.
And job rotation. Simple as it sounds, giving young workers the ability to move between tasks within a framework — to see different parts of the operation and understand how their work connects to something larger — changes the equation. It requires more effort from managers in terms of scheduling and oversight, but it creates something invaluable: hope.
“When the worker understands that they have hope, they have more positivity and they feel like anything that they’re contributing back in terms of requests for job rotation or change is actually being effectively listened to,” Govias says. For him, that last point is the crux: being listened to is the important part of worker mental health.
A forty-year investment
Here is the arithmetic that should keep workforce planners awake at night. The young workers entering Australian workplaces today will be in those workplaces for the next 40 to 50 years. They will move from retail and hospitality into every industry in the economy — healthcare, construction, government, professional services, education. If they arrive already carrying six months of psychological distress, and the workplaces they enter do nothing to address the conditions that perpetuate it, the compounding effect across four decades of working life is staggering.
Govias sees silver linings. Australia is at its peak, he argues, in terms of awareness about mental health, in terms of destigmatising the conversation, and in terms of understanding what actually drives good outcomes. The tools exist. The evidence base is there. The benchmarks — HILDA, the EML and Monash research, the KPMG data — are available.
The question is whether employers will use them to redesign the starting line or continue wondering why so many people are falling at the first hurdle.
