Four things to prioritise on Australian boardroom agendas
A large part of what we do at The Strategic Step Advisory is sit with boards and executive teams and have frank conversations about what's actually going on. Over the past year, four themes have come up consistently. They're showing up across sectors and organisation sizes, with different levels of urgency, but persistently enough to be worth naming.
1. Psychosocial safety: the regulations are here. The governance is catching up.
Victoria's new Psychological Health Regulations commenced in December 2025, completing a national framework that has been building across Australian jurisdictions for several years. In most states, psychosocial risk assessments are now enforceable obligations, managed under the same hierarchy of controls as physical hazards. The numbers are significant. Safe Work Australia's most recent data shows mental health conditions account for 12 per cent of all serious workers' compensation claims, with median time lost from work almost five times that of other injuries. Claims have increased by close to 37 per cent since 2017–18. Directors have individual legal obligations under WHS laws to exercise due diligence on psychosocial risk — understanding the hazards and confirming appropriate resources and processes are in place.
The gap I see most often is the translation of awareness into governance practice: knowing what questions to ask, what good management looks like at an organisational level, and the difference between a genuine system and a set of policies that provides the appearance of compliance.
Psychosocial risk is an operational and governance issue. Regulators are treating it that way.
2. AI is moving faster than WHS frameworks.
Australian organisations are adopting AI at pace, and the productivity benefits are real. The profession of health, safety and wellbeing is still working out what that adoption means from a harm-prevention standpoint. In November 2024, an Australian Senate Select Committee recommended that WHS laws be explicitly extended to cover workplace risks posed by AI. The House of Representatives' Future of Work Report, published in February 2025, recommended AI systems used for employment purposes — hiring, performance management, rostering, termination — be classified as high-risk. NSW has since amended its WHS laws to include AI-specific provisions.
The regulatory direction is set. The question for organisations is whether their safety management systems reflect that.
The boards doing this well are asking their organisations to think prospectively: where does AI have decision-making influence over workers? What are the foreseeable harm pathways? What controls exist, and have they been tested? That kind of structured thinking is what HSW governance is built for. The opportunity is to apply it before the regulatory pressure arrives.
3. Success is its own risk.
This one is harder to name because it runs against how most organisations think about governance. When performance indicators are strong, the instinct is to keep doing what's working.
The organisations I find most useful to work with are the ones that resist that instinct — asking for external, objective challenge not because things have gone wrong, but because they know sustained success can mask the erosion of the conditions that created it.
Complacency in high-performing organisations looks like confidence. It looks like a board that's seen the numbers improve for several years and has internalised that as evidence of a healthy system, when in some cases it's evidence of a system that hasn't been seriously tested yet.
The most useful question in these situations is not "what does our data tell us?" It's "what is our data not capturing?"
4. The capability gap on boards is structural.
Board composition changes. New directors bring fresh perspectives, and that renewal is valuable. It also means the collective HSW capability of a board is constantly being rebuilt.
This is a structural issue, not a failure of individuals. Most board members I speak with are genuinely curious and committed to getting this right. The gap tends to show up in the same place: directors who understand their fiduciary and strategic responsibilities clearly, and are less certain about what effective HSW oversight looks like in practice — what questions to ask, what good answers look like, where the real exposure points are. The AICD has noted that board time on compliance has more than doubled over the past decade. Boards are governing across more domains, with more complexity. The expectation that every director develops deep capability across all of them is unrealistic. What helps is targeted, practical development — and access to advisors who can help boards ask the right questions.
What these four things have in common
They are all longstanding issues whose legislative and operational context has shifted. The pace of regulatory change, the specificity of director obligations, and the speed at which new risk categories are emerging have all increased. The margin for "we're aware of it and working on it" has narrowed.
The organisations navigating this well have moved from awareness to active, structured governance — with the right questions built into their regular cycles and the right support in place to answer them.
If any of these areas are sitting unresolved on your board's agenda, we'd be glad to have a conversation.
Greg Lazzaro is Principal, HSE and Risk at The Strategic Step Advisory. He works with boards and executive teams across Australia on governance, psychosocial safety, strategy execution and leadership capability.