Doing the Work Without Doing Yourself In: Protecting Your Own Mental Health as a WHS/HR Practitioner

Dr. Georgi Toma | Director, HeartBrain Works | Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland

Introduction

Most WHS and HR practitioners are exposed to a series of hazards in their roles that historically have not been given their due attention. Exposure to traumatic or distressing content from staff disclosures, tension between responsibilities towards the employer and duty of care towards staff, lack of job control, to name just a few.

This article applies a risk management approach to the practitioner role and discusses a series of practical approaches within the practitioner’s control to implement.

The hazards built into the role

A hazard that comes with the role is foreseeable, and foreseeable hazards belong in the risk register.

In this article, we will focus on six common hazards inherent to most practitioner roles:

1. Role conflict. You are accountable to the organisation for its compliance and responsible to the people who work in it. Both sides treat you as their adviser, and each may at times feel let down.
2. High emotional demands. Managing other people’s distress while displaying composure, and delivering decisions you did not make.
3. Exposure to traumatic material. Investigations, serious complaints and critical incidents, plus the informal disclosures that arrive because you are the person people trust.
4. Low control over outcomes. Advising without decision rights, while carrying responsibility for consequences decided somewhere else.
5. Poor support and isolation. Sole practitioners and small teams, with no supervision structure comparable to the clinical disciplines that handle similar material.
6. Harmful behaviours directed at you. Hostility from complainants, respondents and managers, with the practitioner treated as the problem rather than the process.

Investigations as a source of harm

The harm from an investigation can extend to the person leading it, not only to the people subject to it. The chapter on investigators in Under Investigation (Saundry & Cooper, 2025), published by Bristol University Press, documents what that looks like: isolation, demoralisation and vicarious exposure, with burnout where it goes unchecked.

Two Australian precedents highlight the importance of recognising foreseeable risks and putting in place preventative controls:

In Kozarov v Victoria [2022] HCA 12, the High Court held that where work is inherently likely to cause psychiatric harm, the risk is reasonably foreseeable from the nature of the work itself. The employer’s duty to take reasonable precautions is therefore engaged from the outset and does not depend on waiting for signs of distress in a particular employee.

In the ongoing matter of Department of Education v SafeWork NSW (No 2) [2026] NSWIRComm 1014, the investigation process as run is treated as a psychosocial hazard in its own right, with failures of communication, clarity and resolution timeframes at the centre.

Taken together, these cases point to a principle that applies to the practitioner role as much as to any other. Some processes, such as investigations, carry risks for all the people involved, including those leading them, and the PCBU has a duty to address those foreseeable risks in a proactive manner.

The practitioner as the control

On paper there is a system: policies, procedures, training, an EAP, a complaints process. In practice, every one of those is written, run and monitored by one person or a very small team, and that person absorbs the gap between work as imagined and work as done.

Reliance on a single individual is treated as a control weakness in every other domain of safety. It is a control weakness here too, and naming it that way could be a useful strategy when escalating the issue to executives.

Rating your own exposure

Before reading on, score each of the six hazards for your role, from 1 for rarely present to 5 for a constant feature of the role. Your two highest scores represent a priority area for you to address using some of the tools presented below.

1. Role conflict — accountable to the organisation and to its people at the same time.
2. Emotional demands — managing others’ distress while staying composed.
3. Traumatic material — investigations, serious complaints, critical incidents.
4. Low control over outcomes — advising without deciding.
5. Isolation — no supervision, debrief or peer structure built into the role.
6. Hostility directed at you — from complainants, respondents or managers.

When members of our Community of Practice scored their own roles during the session, emotional demands, low control over outcomes and hostility came out highest for most participants. All three are characteristics of work design, which is what makes work design a useful lens for the response.

A work design lens on the role

Work design refers to the content and organisation of a person’s work tasks, activities, relationships and responsibilities (Parker, 2014). In plain terms, it is what a job asks of the person in it, how much say they have over how it is done, and what support surrounds them while they do it. It matters here because most of the hazards above are features of how the practitioner role has been designed rather than features of the people in it, and features of design can be changed.

The SMART model of work design (Parker & Knight, 2024) draws a large body of work design research together into five higher-order characteristics of a well-designed job. It is a useful frame for this conversation because it covers both the demands and the resources in a role, and because it was built to be applied by people in organisations, not only by researchers.

Stimulating. The work gives you something to think about: variety in tasks, use of a range of skills, problems to solve and information to work through. Work that is repetitive and narrow scores low here.

Mastery. You know what your job is and how you are doing in it: role clarity, feedback from the task itself and feedback from other people. Work where the scope is vague and the only feedback that arrives is complaints scores low here.

Autonomy. You have a say over how, when and what gets decided: method autonomy (how you do the work), timing autonomy (when you do it) and decision-making autonomy (what gets decided). Work where you advise but someone else decides scores low here.

Relational. The work connects you to other people and to something that matters: support from colleagues and managers, a sense that the work is significant, and contact with the people who benefit from it. Work done alone, or whose effect you never see, scores low here.

Tolerable. The demands stay within limits you can sustain: low overload, low role conflict and low spillover into home life, with peaks followed by time to recover. Work that regularly exceeds those limits scores low here, and this is where the health risk tends to sit.

Before reading on, rate your own role against each of the five as High, Moderate or Weak. High means the characteristic is present and working for you; Weak means it is largely missing from the role as it currently stands.

For comparison, here is the profile we presented in the session for a typical practitioner role. It is a generalisation drawn from the practitioners we have worked with, and your own ratings may well differ from it.

• S — High. The work is rarely the problem.
• M — Weak. Feedback arrives as complaints.
• A — Weak. Advises, rarely decides.
• R — Mixed. Significance high; support weak.
• T — Weakest. High overload and role conflict.

Job crafting

Job crafting describes the self-initiated changes people make to their own work in order to fit it better to their needs, skills and goals. The term comes from Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001), who observed that employees alter the task and relational boundaries of their jobs, and the way they think about them, without waiting to be asked. Tims and Bakker (2010) later reframed it in job demands–resources terms, as seeking resources, seeking challenges and reducing hindering demands, and Zhang and Parker (2019) brought the two traditions together into a single structure. In practice, people craft three things: their tasks (what they do and how), their relationships (who they work with, and how closely) and the meaning they give the work.

Work redesign can be top-down, initiated by the organisation, or bottom-up, initiated by the person in the role. Job crafting is the second kind.

Everyone crafts already. The question is in which direction, and that is the part that tends to get the least attention.

Approach crafting expands the role by seeking resources, reshaping how tasks are done, building relationships and reframing what the work means. It behaves like other proactive behaviour in the evidence, and is associated with engagement and lower burnout (Lichtenthaler & Fischbach, 2019; Rudolph et al., 2017).

Avoidance crafting contracts the role by dropping tasks, avoiding people and disengaging. It is associated with burnout and turnover intention, and the two appear to reinforce each other over time.

These findings are largely correlational, so they are best read as associations rather than proof of cause. Even so, the pattern is consistent. Here is the difficulty: under high workload, people tend to reduce hindering demands rather than build resources (Knight et al., 2021). The form that overload pushes people towards is the one with the weakest evidence behind it.

Two ways to reduce demand

Reducing your load when there is too much on is a reasonable response. Nobody should feel they are failing by doing it.

Done quietly and alone, it is the version linked to burnout. Emails go unanswered, a task is allowed to lapse, a meeting is skipped. Nobody has agreed to any of it, so the work has not moved anywhere. It is still yours, just undone, and now guilt and exposure sit on top of the original overload.

Done explicitly and agreed with the people it affects, the same reduction becomes something else. Take it to your manager, name what cannot fit in the hours available, and ask which item goes or who else can take it. The work has been formally moved, someone has agreed, and it is documented.

In risk management terms, that is a control on the role. It is the same thing you would write into a register for anyone else.

The case for role-level controls

Bottom-up redesign works across three tiers, and sorting your two highest-scoring hazards into the right tier is the most useful thing you can do with them.

Tier 1: Craft. Nobody has to say yes, because this is change inside the discretion the role already gives you. Practitioners in the session named setting the times of day they are available, capping the length of support conversations, limiting complex matters in a day, redirecting repeat venting to a more appropriate contact, building a few minutes of journalling in after an interview, and setting up a regular connection with another sole practitioner.

Tier 2: Negotiate. Your manager has to agree, because the change touches scope, hours, timing or decision rights. The research calls these idiosyncratic deals, or i-deals: personalised working agreements that are individual rather than policy, negotiated out in the open, and beneficial to the organisation as well as to you. That last feature is also the selling point in the conversation.

Tier 3: Escalate. The organisation has to say yes, because the hazard sits in the structure of the role or in the organisation itself and no manager has authority to fix it. These belong on the risk register with a control up the hierarchy.

Crafting is where you can start, and starting there matters: it is within your reach this week, and it builds the resources you will draw on for the other two tiers. Some of what overloaded practitioners carry, though, sits in scope, hours and decision rights that no amount of personal crafting can shift. For those hazards, Tiers 2 and 3 are the lever, and the hazard scores and SMART profile above give you the evidence to open those conversations.

How to frame the ask

Use the organisation’s own duty. The PCBU’s primary duty of care extends to the people who administer the safety system, and the six hazards above are the same categories the organisation already uses in its risk register. Framed that way, the request asks for the same approach the organisation applies to any other role, with redesign sitting above training and EAP in the hierarchy of controls.

Use the work design evidence. Parker, Andrei and Van den Broeck (2019) found that people with more autonomy in their own jobs tended to design more enriched work for others, while those with less defaulted to person-focused fixes such as training the individual rather than changing the work. The implication for an executive is that the design of your role is likely to shape the quality of risk management across the organisation.

Link it to the organisation’s priorities. Controls that help you deliver what the organisation most needs from the role this year are easier to say yes to than controls framed only around your own wellbeing, even though both are legitimate grounds.

Ask for something specific. Vague requests for support tend to get an EAP referral. Specific requests for controls are more likely to get either a yes or a documented no, and both of those move things forward.

Controls most organisations can grant

Decision rights on process. Who investigates, when, and with what support, written into the procedure. Addresses low job control.

A second person on high-exposure matters. A co-investigator or external supervision for serious complaints and critical incidents. Addresses poor support and harmful behaviours.

Structured debrief after critical incidents. Scheduled, facilitated, within days, with time allocated as part of the work. Addresses exposure to traumatic material.

Protected recovery time after investigations. No new matter assigned until the last is closed out and debriefed, or a cap on concurrent matters. Addresses high job demands.

Scope boundaries in the position description. What the role holds, what it refers on, and who holds the rest. Addresses role conflict and overload.

In most organisations, none of these requires a restructure. Most require a conversation and a procedure change.

A scenario: one practitioner, three investigations

Company X is a mid-sized services organisation with one WHS practitioner supporting 800 staff. Over a single quarter she ran three investigations involving serious allegations, each with multiple interviews, with no debrief and no cover, while continuing to run the full compliance program.

Her register entry reads:

Hazard. Exposure to traumatic material through incident investigations.

Exposure. The practitioner and all parties to each matter, three matters in the last quarter. The only existing control is an EAP referral available after the fact.

Control requested. A co-investigator on serious matters, and a facilitated debrief within five working days. Both sit at the work design level.

That entry does two things. It converts an individual complaint into a risk management record, and it puts officers on notice, which engages their due diligence duty.

When the organisation is the source of exposure

This is the hardest case: the hazard is senior behaviour, or the organisation’s own non-compliance, and you are expected to manage it without authority. It can help to treat it as an escalation path, with every step documented.

1. Name it in the register, because this is what converts a personal complaint into a risk management record.
2. Raise it with the officers, since due diligence sits with them and the register entry is the mechanism that puts them on notice.
3. Use the HSR and committee pathways, which carry statutory standing the practitioner role does not, so that you are not negotiating with executives alone.
4. Take it outside, to external professional supervision or a peer community of practice, where people have no stake in the outcome.
5. Consider regulator support where the matter warrants it, noting that raising a matter with a regulator and whistleblowing are different processes with different protections.

Documentation is the control that protects the practitioner.

When nothing you can do inside the role will make it safe, the role itself has to change. Reaching that conclusion is a finding about the work, not a failure of the person in it, and it opens options of structural change or exit that are themselves controls.

Tools for the practitioner

Individual tools sit at the lower end of the hierarchy, and they work best once the role-level controls above are in place.

In the moment

Three tools, each with an evidence base, for use immediately after a difficult disclosure or incident.

Name the feeling. Putting an emotion into words reduces amygdala reactivity (Lieberman et al., 2007; Torre & Lieberman, 2018). Even when the words feel imprecise, keep going; the naming is what helps the stress response settle.

Lengthen the exhale. Cyclic sighing, two inhales followed by one long exhale, outperformed mindfulness meditation on mood and arousal in a month-long randomised controlled trial (Balban et al., 2023). Ten slow cycles at the end of the working day is a realistic place to start.

Step back from it. Distanced self-talk, using your own name or the second person, lowers distress and rumination under stress (Kross et al., 2014). It combines naturally with the first tool: “Georgi, it looks like you’re feeling …, because …”

Over the long run

Four routines, each a higher-order control than the tools above because each changes the conditions rather than the response.

A regular mindfulness practice. Mindfulness-based programs reduce stress and distress, including in workplace randomised controlled trials (Khoury et al., 2015; Bartlett et al., 2019). An eight-week program is one way in, but a three-minute practice is a reasonable place to start, whether that is attention on the breath or simply listening to the sounds around you without following your thoughts.

Recovery you protect. Detachment after hours predicts lower exhaustion over time (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015). A set end-of-work ritual is the mechanism.

Talking to someone. Social support buffers the effect of stress on health (Cohen & Wills, 1985; Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). One named person you debrief with after every hard matter.

Structured supervision. Supervisory support is linked to lower burnout and turnover in human service work (Mor Barak et al., 2009). The clinical disciplines build this in; in WHS and HR it usually has to be asked for and budgeted.

The session walked through each of these, and members of the Community of Practice can revisit that walkthrough in the recording.

Where to start

One action at each tier:

One thing to craft. Approach-oriented, within your own discretion. Small is fine.

One conversation with your manager. Scope, timing or decision rights, framed as an i-deal.

One routine for the long run. Your one regular way to support your wellbeing.

Start with the register entry. It is the step that moves a hazard out of the category of just how the job is.

The full recording and slide deck from this session are available to members of the Healthy Work Community of Practice, alongside the toolkit library, quarterly knowledge-sharing sessions and member office hours. For practitioners working without supervision structures, the Community functions as the peer version described in the routines above: people doing the same work, with no stake in your organisation’s outcome.

If you would like support navigating any of these priorities, we are here to help. Get in touch with us!

About HeartBrain Works

We have supported high-profile clients including Myer, RMIT University, Hitachi Energy, and Environment Canterbury to create mentally healthy workplaces. We offer Alice, your psychosocial risk team in software, training for leaders and staff, and the scientifically validated Wellbeing Protocol.

About the Healthy Work Community of Practice

The Healthy Work Community of Practice is a professional community for health and safety professionals. Members access quarterly knowledge-sharing sessions, a psychosocial risk controls library, real-world case studies, regulatory alerts, practical toolkits, a job board, research summaries, and ongoing training and workshops. Intake opens three times per year. To learn more, visit https://www.heartbrainworks.org/Healthy-Work-CoP

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