When we shared some of our report's findings with business wellbeing expert Ben Moss, he had a clear explanation for the gap in psychological safety many organisations are demonstrating.

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Having a good process is not the same as having a good culture

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"It's really critical in this context to understand and accept that process is not culture."

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Ben's view is that this distinction gets lost in how organisations talk about psychological safety.

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"The employee is the person who defines whether psych safety exists or not. It isn't the leaders and managers who define that, because it's not them that's experienced it."

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The Culture Shifters Annual Report 26-27 backs this up in the data. Only 1 in 5 organisations actively measure psychological safety, and under half provide managers with training on how to create it. Ben's point is that organisations are often confident in their own definition of safety, without the evidence to know whether employees experience it the same way.

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Prevention means understanding root causes, not managing cases faster

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Ben pushed back on the idea that efficient case handling is the same as prevention.

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"You have to be focused as an organisation on understanding and changing harmful conditions, rather than solely on processing cases in an efficient way and ensuring individual outcomes."

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This matches what the Culture Shifters Annual Report found about the gap between intention and practice. 57% of organisations describe their approach to misconduct as proactive and preventative, yet only 41% consistently aggregate and analyse their speak-up data to identify patterns. Without that analysis, Ben's point is that organisations are treating symptoms rather than causes.

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An unexpected pressure point: AI

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Asked about shifts in the last 12 months, Ben raised something outside the report's scope but relevant to where workplace pressure is heading next.

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"Interestingly, across all generations, it was the expectation and the load coming from having to take on and learn a whole range of new technologies like AI, and the speed that AI was moving."

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His concern is that workplace culture and management practice have not caught up with this shift.

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Ben's one tip for employers...

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"Measure presenteeism effectively. It's consistently there in the research that presenteeism has a much bigger impact on productivity than absence. If you can find ways of measuring and managing presenteeism, you have a lever to avoid health-related productivity loss."

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Our Culture Shifters Annual Report found that 87% of organisations feel exposed to risk from workplace misconduct, with 1 in 5 rating themselves highly exposed, and 1 in 10 HR professionals now spend more than a day a week dealing with misconduct issues directly. Ben's argument is that presenteeism is where much of that cost is hiding, largely unmeasured.