Nobody gets promoted for the claim that was not lodged
Week three of Australia’s National Safe Work Month is about the long-term impact of work on people. Which makes it a good week to ask why prevention is so hard to fund, even in organisations that want to fund it.
The objection is rarely that prevention does not matter. It is "show me the return."
That is a fair question from anyone accountable for a budget. It is also one that prevention currently struggles to answer, for two reasons that compound each other.
The research is thinner than the field likes to admit. As I wrote last week, high-quality evidence on the financial returns of prevention specifically is limited. There are figures available and some of them are good, but there is not the weight of evidence behind prevention that there is behind reducing physical injury. Anyone asking for proof is not being difficult. They are asking for something that does not fully exist yet.
And the organisation has no baseline. Even where a business wants to demonstrate that prevention worked, it has never measured its own exposure, so there is nothing to show improvement against. "Did this work?" cannot be answered by an organisation that did not measure the thing before it started.
So the trap closes. Prove the return, says the board or senior executive, reasonably. We cannot, says everyone else, because none of it was ever measured. And the money goes to the column that reports itself.
Response generates evidence of itself
Everything in the response column produces something you can put in a board pack.
Counselling sessions have a utilisation rate. Claims have a cost and a duration. Return to work has a timeframe. Training has an attendance figure and a completion percentage. Incidents have a count that goes up or down.
None of those numbers is especially meaningful, as anyone who has tried to interpret an EAP utilisation rate will tell you. But they exist, they arrive monthly, and they let someone demonstrate that the money did something.
Prevention, done properly, produces an absence. The person who did not deteriorate. The team that did not lose three people in a quarter. The conversation that went well enough that nothing escalated. The workload that was redesigned in March, so nobody was still carrying it in September.
You cannot count any of that, because it did not happen. And in most organisations, a thing that cannot be counted is a thing that cannot be defended at budget time.
Which means the argument for prevention is almost never won by making the case more passionately. It is won by making it reportable.
What prevention can actually report
The mistake is trying to prove the absence. You cannot, and attempts to do it usually produce something that does not survive scrutiny.
What you can report is exposure, and the work you are doing to reduce it. Three categories, none of which require proving a negative.
What the work is doing to people. Not how many people are struggling, but what they are being exposed to. Workload distribution across a team. How many roles have been unfilled for more than a quarter. Where the overtime is concentrated. How many people report unclear expectations. These are measures of the hazard, not of the harm, and the hazard is measurable in a way the harm is not.
What you are doing about it. How many teams have had a psychosocial risk assessment completed in the last twelve months. How long it takes from an issue being raised to something changing. What proportion of leaders have been trained in something they will actually use. Process measures are unglamorous and they are exactly what a regulator, a board and an insurer all recognise.
Whether the conditions are improving. The same exposure measures, tracked over time. A trend is reportable even when a single number is not, and a trend that moves in the right direction is the closest thing prevention has to a result.
One caution on all three. Measurement without the capability to act on it produces a report. If an assessment finds that a team has unclear expectations and no manager knows how to have the conversation that would fix it, you have documented the hazard and changed nothing. The measuring and the capability have to arrive together.
None of that proves harm was avoided. All of it demonstrates that exposure was identified, acted on, and reduced. That is a defensible story, and it is the story the WHS framework is actually asking for.
The long-term impact, which is this week's theme
Response costs are immediate and visible. Prevention benefits are delayed and invisible. That asymmetry means the case for prevention is almost always made in the wrong timeframe, against numbers that arrive this quarter.
But psychological harm is the category with the longest tail.
The claim is not the end of the cost.
The capability that leaves with the person is not on the balance sheet.
The team that watched it happen and adjusted accordingly does not show up anywhere at all.
If the campaign theme this month is that safe work is for life, then the reporting has to look further ahead than the next quarter. That is a governance question, not a wellbeing one.
Worth asking
1. What do we currently report about psychological health, and is any of it a measure of exposure rather than of response?
2. If prevention worked perfectly here for twelve months, what number would move? If we cannot name one, that is why it is not funded.
3. How long does it take, from someone raising a problem to something about the work actually changing? Does anyone measure that?
4. Whose job is it to report on exposure, and do they have access to the data that would let them?
The point
Prevention's problem is not that nobody believes it works. The evidence that well-designed work produces better outcomes is not seriously contested.
What is thin is the evidence of financial return, and that gap will not close while organisations are not measuring their own. Every workplace that tracks exposure and acts on it is a data point that does not currently exist.
So this is a reporting problem before it is a research problem, and reporting problems are solvable. Measure the hazard rather than the harm, report the exposure rather than the absence, and the case starts to look like every other case an organisation funds.
Next week, what those exposure measures actually look like.
Stay Curious,
Genevieve
Measurement tells you what to change. Capability is what makes the change happen. Oasis Mind Body® works with organisations on the second.
This article is general information about work design and leadership capability. It is not legal advice, work health and safety advice, or clinical advice.
