Compensation schemes are built to find a single moment of harm. Most psychological injuries don’t have one – and that mismatch is quietly costing organisations more than any claim on the books.
Some claims trace back to a single event – a major incident, a potentially traumatic event, something identifiable enough to point to. But the psychological claims that seem to come out of nowhere rarely do. Look underneath most of them and a pattern shows up: repeated complaints about workload that went nowhere, being let down by a manager who didn’t show up when it mattered, broken promises, repeated implications that the worker was to blame for workload pressures, inefficiencies, or customer complaints. None of these are the injury itself. They’re the workplace emotional bruises that sit underneath it – small, unremarkable moments that linger, accumulate, and eventually contribute to something breaking.
This is where I keep seeing a disconnect. Compensation schemes are built around a single, identifiable
event – a date, an incident, something to point to. That works for a physical injury, less well for a psychological one, where the harm was never one moment but hundreds of small ones. Asking someone to name a “date of injury” is asking them to locate a single crack in something that fractured slowly, over years.
Every working relationship runs on an unspoken deal: what a person gives, and what they can reasonably expect back – effort, discretionary care, going above the job description, in exchange for recognition, support, fair treatment, a leader who has their back when it counts. Nobody signs this. Nobody has to. It’s understood. Organisational behaviour research calls this the psychological contract, and a well-established body of evidence links its breach to exactly what shows up here: reduced discretionary effort,
disengagement, and falling performance (Rousseau, 1989; Zhao et al., 2007). In my experience – as a psychologist, a former Director of Health & Safety for an emergency services organisation responsible for its workers compensation administration, and someone who has sat on the family side of a claim – it’s this deal that’s actually broken, whether or not it ever becomes a claim, and whether the break happened all at once or over years.
And here’s the part that matters even more for anyone working in WHS or culture: plenty of people whose deal has broken this way never meet the threshold for a compensable claim at all. But it’s still broken. What’s left is a culture and performance problem: quiet disengagement, less discretionary effort, someone who used to speak up who no longer does. It never shows up in a claims register, so it never gets counted as what it actually is.
What follows is rarely defiance or a motivation problem, even though it often gets read that way. It’s closer to grief – the person is adjusting to the loss of something they were relying on to feel safe, valued and supported at work. Research on bereavement grief shows measurable effects on cognition, even without depression: reduced executive function, slower processing speed, narrowed attention (Hoffmann et al., 2024). The context differs – most research is on grief after a death – but the mechanism holds: a mind absorbed by loss has less left for the functions a workplace depends on most – problem-solving, judgement under pressure, thinking ahead. Quietly, that’s a performance cost. Less quietly, it’s a liability and risk cost too.
This is the part most workplace responses still miss. When performance drops or someone stops speaking up, the instinct is to manage the behaviour. But if the break happened in the system – a hazard left unmanaged, a complaint that went nowhere – correcting the individual doesn’t fix the break. It reinforces it. The person gets, a second time, the message that the deal was never really theirs to expect.
None of this means individuals carry no responsibility for how they respond under pressure – they do. But accountability has to sit where the break actually occurred. Asking someone to simply do better is asking them to absorb a hazard the organisation was supposed to manage – one it may never even have to count.
On Monday morning: don’t just ask whether something meets the threshold for a claim. Ask where the deal might already be broken for someone who’ll never appear in a register at all.
Rebuilding it isn’t a program or a one-off workshop, and it isn’t leadership behaviour alone. It’s an integrated response – across the work itself, the worker, and the workplace around them. Leadership that closes the loop on a complaint, follows up properly after an incident, acknowledges effort before it’s asked twice. Work design that doesn’t quietly run people into the ground. Technology and processes reliable enough that people aren’t managing around them just to get the job done. Miss one of the three and the others can’t fully compensate. Organisations that get this right work at exactly that level: small, deliberate acts across all three, practised consistently, until they become how the place actually runs.
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Contributed by Tenneile Manenti, Founder, Mind Logistics & The Business Psychologist
Tenneile Manenti is a Registered Psychologist (AHPRA PSY0001624321) and founder of Mind Logistics — Psychology & Performance and The Business Psychologist. She works across clinical psychological injury recovery and organisational psychosocial risk, helping individuals navigate burnout and work stress, and helping organisations build psychosocial safety and healthy, sustainable workplaces.
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/tenneile-manenti
