Author’s note: In our latest podcast 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.
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In the financial year 2022, Australia accepted 13,000 workers’ compensation claims for mental health. In that same period, 4.1 million Australian workers reported living with a mental ill health condition for six months or more. That’s 4.1 million out of a total workforce of 14 million and barely a fraction of them showed up in the system.
The maths is uncomfortable. Just 0.33% of the potentially affected cohort lodged a claim. For every worker who appeared on a scheme’s books, roughly 315 others were quietly carrying the weight.
For the latest episode of RelyOn, we sat down with Keith Govias, Vincent Fairfax Fellow in Ethical Leadership and Workplace Safety and Risk Principal at EML. Over the past year, Keith has been trying to make sense of these numbers. In partnership with Monash University’s Healthy Working Lives unit, his team produced Inside the Minds of Australia’s Workplaces — one of the most comprehensive examinations of worker mental health the country has seen. The headline finding didn’t land in the claims data. It landed in the gap between what the claims data captures and what workers are actually experiencing.
“I think what it does is it tells us that this isn’t just a workers’ compensation issue,” Govias says. “This is a societal or public health issue.”
He’s not speaking from a distance. Govias can draw on personal experience of what happens when the system fails to catch someone in time. “I can tell you from lived experience what burnout feels like,” he says. “I can tell you from personal experience (roles prior to EML) the health implications of not managing your mental health and workload well in high stress environments. And it’s not pleasant. It’s not pleasant for you, your family, the community around you, and it actually doesn’t help the quality of your work.”
His recovery, he says, came down to something disarmingly simple. At EML, a general manager two levels above him sets aside 10 to 15 minutes once a quarter with no operational discussion, no output review, just to ask how he’s doing and whether he’s thriving. “There’s no cost to checking in with your people,” Govias says. “But the value that you give them… it can’t be measured.”
The cost is showing up elsewhere
If the compensation system is only catching a sliver, the question becomes: where is the rest of the burden falling?
The answer, according to KPMG’s 2024 report for the Council of Australian Life Insurers, is life insurance and superannuation. Insurers paid out more than $2.2 billion in mental health claims in 2024 which is almost double what they paid five years earlier. Mental health is now the leading cause of Total and Permanent Disability claims, accounting for nearly one in three payouts.
These are not hypothetical costs. They are landing on balance sheets, driving up premiums, and pulling working-age Australians out of the labour force permanently.
The human face of the data
Behind the billions is a pattern that should concern every workforce planner in the country: the crisis is hitting younger workers hardest, and they are almost invisible in the system designed to catch them.
The EML and Monash research found that 41% of workers aged 14 to 24 reported living in a state of psychological distress for six months or more. Around 60% reported low autonomy in their roles. Roughly 23% reported low skills or variety. These are the textbook conditions for psychosocial harm, and this cohort is barely registering in workers’ compensation statistics. They are present with mental ill health, but they are not claiming.
Govias describes them as “probably the most vulnerable cohort of workers that have ever entered the job market.” And while the 14-to-24 data captures the entry point, a separate set of figures suggests what happens further down the line. KPMG’s report found a 732% increase in TPD claims for mental health among people in the 30-to-40 age bracket over the past decade the sharpest spike of any age group. In 2013, just 10.1% of permanent disability claims in that bracket were attributed to mental health. By 2022, it was 36%. Across all age groups, the average age of mental health claimants 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 young workers reporting distress today are not a problem that resolves itself with career progression. They are a leading indicator of where the next wave of permanent disability claims will come from.
The missing half of the workforce
The crisis is also gendered, and the picture is incomplete without acknowledging it. Women are concentrated in the three industries with the highest rates of mental health claims: public administration and safety, education and training, and healthcare, aged care and community services. Outside of work, they carry a disproportionate share of caring responsibilities for children, elderly parents, and those who are unwell. The GLWS Gender Wellbeing Gap report from 2025 found that while men and women reported comparable wellbeing around balance and boundaries during work hours, women experienced significantly lower wellbeing in this area outside of work, where those caring demands accumulate.
Govias adds a dimension that is easy to overlook: almost all anthropometric data used in workplace and equipment design, from furniture to personal protective equipment, originates from male datasets collected during World War II. Women are working in environments that were not designed for their bodies, wearing safety equipment that doesn’t fit properly, in industries where the standards were set without them in mind.
And when women do raise concerns about these conditions, the response is often punitive. The Human Rights Law Centre’s 2025 Women Speaking Up report found that two-thirds of its whistleblower clients were women, overwhelmingly reporting threats to human safety, and that nearly one in three faced harassment and bullying as direct retaliation. The systems failing women at work are also failing them when they try to fix what’s broken.
“We’ve got 50% of the workforce who are a vulnerable population in some cases that leave the workforce early,” Govias says. “In an environment where we have constant staff shortages … there are good people out there. They just don’t believe that they’re living their best life at work.”
Measuring the wrong things
The instinct for most employers is to look at their own workers’ compensation data and conclude that things are manageable. Govias argues that this is precisely the problem — the measurement system was never designed to capture the scale of what’s actually happening.
Victoria has already moved to restrict the types of eligible mental health claims. New South Wales recently followed. The effect of these legislative changes is predictable: fewer claims will appear in workers’ compensation scheme data. But the underlying prevalence doesn’t shrink with the eligibility criteria. The injury remains… it just finds a different exit.
“We’ve seen pressures that have really moved people from scheme to scheme,” Govias notes. When claims are restricted in one system, they surface elsewhere: in the life insurance system, in GP waiting rooms, in absenteeism data, in resignation letters. An employer watching their workers’ comp numbers fall after a legislative change isn’t watching their workforce get healthier. They’re watching the measurement become less accurate.
Where to start looking
For employers wanting to understand what’s happening, Govias recommends starting with data most organisations already have: absenteeism rates, staff turnover, and exit feedback. If people are leaving and citing burnout, but that burnout isn’t visible in day-to-day metrics, there’s a job design problem worth investigating. Teams that are consistently over indexing on overtime or accruing excessive time in lieu are another signal.
For organisations with more capability, Govias points to the HILDA Survey (the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia study run by the University of Melbourne). HILDA measures job quality through twelve items across three components: job demands and complexity, job control, and job security. Employers can survey their own workforce using the same indicators and benchmark the results against national data, broken down by industry.
“If you want to take a look at that data, there are only a number of job quality indicators that are used, including autonomy, skills variety, engagement at work,” Govias explains. “But if you then wanted to survey your own workers to get a sense of how they are representative to the Australian population, you can use that as a benchmark.”
It’s a practical starting point and it has the added benefit of demonstrating genuine effort on psychosocial hazard management, an area where regulators around the country are increasingly active.
Job design, not wellness posters
The EML and Monash research lands on a central finding that cuts against the grain of how many organisations have approached workplace mental health: the primary lever for improving outcomes is not individual resilience programs, wellness apps, or morning teas. It’s job design.
It looks like autonomy over how employees complete their tasks. Enough skills variety to keep the work engaging. Pathways that let workers see a future in what they’re doing and the knowledge that their feedback actually changes something.
These aren’t soft metrics. They are measurable, benchmarkable, and directly connected to the mental health outcomes the research consistently identifies. They respond directly to what young workers are reporting — and they benefit every cohort in the workforce, from new starters to experienced professionals managing the competing demands of work and life outside it.
The three-to-five-year horizon
Govias is realistic about how long meaningful change takes. He recommends employers think in three-to-five year windows, with clear targets at each stage. The comparison he draws is to roadworks. Once you start, the landscape keeps shifting. Workforce needs change, the economy shifts, and the culture you’re building has to adapt accordingly.
But if the fundamentals of job design are right, the ongoing work becomes operational rhythm rather than a special project. “If you get the skills with job design correct, between your worker and your manager, it becomes part of your operational rhythm,” Govias says. “It’s not something that we have to put lots of extra effort into.”
Govias uses the metaphor of an orchestra to describe what good job design feels like in practice. No single instrument dominates. You need the trumpets and the quiet players. You need the crescendos and the soft moments. The conductor who demands that everyone play like a version of themselves gets group think. The one who designs space for each person’s individuality, who builds autonomy, variety, and meaning into the score, gets innovation, psychological safety, and a culture where people want to stay.
The real question
Australia’s mental health crisis is not a future risk. It is a $2.2 billion annual reality that has doubled in half a decade, is permanently disabling younger Australians at an accelerating rate, disproportionately burdening women, and remaining overwhelmingly invisible to the system designed to manage it.
The 0.33% figure isn’t a reassuring sign that things are under control. It’s proof that the instrument panel is broken.
So, the question for every employer reading this is not whether the crisis is real. The evidence has settled that. The question is whether you are measuring the right things and whether you have the honesty to act on what you find.embedded risk culture assessments into supervisory practice for the same reason: formal controls don’t guarantee sound decisions.
