Building Influence Without Authority

In this practical Think Tank, we take Rebecca's work on influence and leadership and put it squarely into an HR context: influencing executives, challenging decisions, navigating competing agendas, getting traction for people initiatives and shifting behaviour when you can't simply tell people what to do.

Communication That Earns Trust and Changes Behaviour

Using Opal’s Check for Respect campaign as a real-world case study, Ben Da Costa from Noble Agency and the Opal team unpack how they approached a complex psychosocial safety challenge and developed a campaign designed to support genuine cultural and behavioural change. The session explores the role of human insight, creative thinking and collaboration in stronger workplace communication - moving beyond compliance messaging to create stories and campaigns that feel relevant to the people receiving them. Take away practical ideas for internal communication, employee engagement, employer branding, workplace culture, psychosocial safety and behaviour change.

Why We’re Failing to Manage Psychosocial Risk

• Psychosocial safety is no longer optional. But being compliant doesn’t 
  necessarily mean you’re getting it right.Australian organisations have 
  duties to proactively identify and manage psychosocial hazards at work. 
  Yet therecan still be a sizeable gap between having the right policies and 
  what employees actually experience every day.
  
  In this Humaneer Think Tank, Ruth Kent and Mike Hagan get practical 
  about where organisations are getting stuck and what better psychosocial 
  risk management looks like.
  
  We’ll explore:

• What psychosocial risk actually means, including the hazards 
  organisations need to understand and manage.

• The cost of getting it wrong, for people and for the organisation.

• Where organisations commonly struggle, from identifying hazards to 
  implementing effective controls.

• Prevention over reaction, and why waiting for an incident, complaint or 
  claim is already too late.

• The gap between policy and lived experience, and how to start closing it.

• What psychosocial safety feels like in practice for employees, managers and leaders.

• Why HR and WHS need to work together, rather than allowing 
  psychosocial risk to disappear into the gap between the two.

This isn’t simply a conversation about legislation or another compliance checklist.
It’s about understanding the risks in the way work is designed, managed and 
experienced, and what organisations can do to create safer, healthier workplaces.

Compliance is the floor. The real work is what happens beyond it.

About Ruth Kent and Mike HaganRuth Kent, founder of Sunrise Well, brings more 
than 20 years of experience across corporate wellbeing, psychological safety and mindfulness, working with organisations including ANZ, Commonwealth Bank and Cochlear.

Mike Hagan is an HR and Health, Safety & Wellbeing consultant with almost 30 
years’ experience helping organisations identify and manage workplace risks 
affecting health, wellbeing, engagement and productivity.

Workplace Burnout Needs More Than A Fruit Bowl

Burnout isn’t a resilience problem. It’s a work design problem.If your workplace 
wellbeing strategy stops at fruit bowls, pizza parties and an EAP number on the 
intranet, this Think Tank is worth watching.

Burnout is often treated as something individuals need to manage. But what if the way we design work is part of the problem?

In this Humaneer Think Tank, Dr John Chan, Managing Director of Infinite Potentialtakes us through the research on workplace burnout and what organisations can 
do differently.

We explore:
Cognitive load and why it may tell us more about burnout than workload alone.
Constant complexity and context switching, and what they’re doing to our ability to think and recover.
AI and the changing nature of work, including whether technology is reducing 
cognitive load or simply adding another layer.Workplace loneliness and why 
connection at work matters.
What organisations get wrong about burnout and workplace wellbeing.
What actually works, including the systemic changes that can create healthier, 
more sustainable work.

For HR, there’s a bigger question underneath all of this:Instead of helping people 
cope with poorly designed work, how can we help design better work in the first 
place?

Watch the Think Tank for practical, research backed thinking on burnout, cognitive load, psychosocial wellbeing and designing work that allows people to perform without running on empty.

Less fruit bowls. More attention to how work actually works.

About Dr John Chan

Dr John Chan is Managing Director of Infinite Potential and an Industrial and Organisational Psychologist with more than 20 years of global experience.He leads Infinite Potential’s long-running research into workplace burnout and authors its annual State of 
Workplace Burnout report. 

His work focuses on burnout, workplace wellbeing, productivity, leadership and 
creating more sustainable workplaces.