Methodologies for cultural change for a healthier workplace
Creating a healthier workplace is a legal, cultural, and commercial necessity. Across Australia, updated psychosocial regulations now expect employers to manage mental health and wellbeing risks with the same seriousness as physical hazards.
Global bodies like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) are clear: workplaces that intentionally invest in health and wellbeing see better safety outcomes, higher productivity, and stronger retention.
So how do you actually change culture and not just write another policy that gets ignored? And where do drug and alcohol testing fit as part of a modern wellbeing program for a healthier workplace?
Why is cultural change needed for a healthier workplace?
A healthier workplace is one where workers and managers collaborate in a continual improvement process to protect and promote health, safety and wellbeing. That collaboration sits at the heart of culture.
When culture shifts, you see changes such as:
- Psychological safety becoming the norm
- Workers feeling safe to speak up about stress, fatigue or unsafe behaviour
- Leaders being measured not just on output, but on how they support their teams
- Health initiatives (including testing) being understood as care, not punishment.
The business case is strong too. Mentally healthy workplaces deliver a positive return on investment through reduced absenteeism, presenteeism and compensation claims.
Here are six steps your organisation can follow to bring about the kind of change necessary.
Step 1: Diagnose your current culture and risks
Cultural change starts with a clear picture of where you are now.
- Assess psychosocial hazards such as workload, poor support, and bullying.
- Use staff surveys, focus groups and incident reviews to understand where people feel unsafe or unsupported.
- Map “hot spots” where performance and safety issues occur.
This establishes the baseline for cultural change and highlights where your efforts will have the greatest impact.
Step 2: Secure visible leadership commitment
Culture follows leadership. If senior leaders treat wellbeing as a compliance box-ticking activity, it won’t embed in any beneficial way.
- Set clear expectations that wellbeing is a core business priority.
- Incorporate wellbeing and safety behaviours into leadership KPIs.
- Model healthy behaviours like taking breaks and respecting boundaries.
Leaders need to treat wellbeing in the workplace as a priority.
Step 3: Co-design your wellbeing strategy with your people
Top-down programs often fail because they don’t reflect real working conditions.
- Consult widely with employees about what a healthier workplace looks like.
- Involve them in revising policies and workload management.
Step 4: Integrate wellbeing into existing systems
Wellbeing initiatives should not be separate from work health and safety (WHS) systems.
- Embed psychosocial risk controls alongside physical safety controls.
- Align wellbeing actions with your WHS policies and investigations.
- Treat wellbeing and safety as interconnected responsibilities.
Step 5: Build capability through training and conversations
Culture changes when conversations change.
- Train leaders to recognise psychosocial risks and support staff appropriately.
- Provide workforce-wide education on mental health literacy and stigma.
- Normalise team check-ins on workload, fatigue, stress and safety.
Step 6: Measure, refine and celebrate progress
Cultural change at work is a continuous process. It’s not just something you set and forget.
- Track indicators such as injury rates, absenteeism, and turnover.
- Gather feedback on psychological safety and leadership support.
- Review and refine initiatives regularly.
- Celebrate milestones and share success stories.
- Utilise drug and alcohol screening to help your workplace become safer.
This should be done regularly, but events such as National Safe Work Month are great opportunities to lean into and pop in the calendar to provide annual checkpoints.
Follow the existing models
Briefly, here are three organisational change models you may like to adopt:
Kotter’s 8 Steps for Leading Change
Developed by Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter, this award-winning 8 Steps for Leading Change model focuses on guiding organisations through transformation by engaging both leadership and employees for a healthier workplace. The eight steps are:
- Create a sense of urgency
- Build a guiding coalition
- Form a strategic vision
- Enlist a volunteer army
- Enable action by removing barriers
- Generate short-term wins
- Sustain acceleration
- Institute
It’s widely recognised for linking emotional buy-in with practical execution, which helps to embed wellbeing and safety initiatives into the organisation.
Lewin’s Change Management Model
Developed in the 1940s, Kurt Lewin’s classic framework breaks cultural change into three stages.
- Unfreeze: Prepare the organisation by challenging existing beliefs and encouraging openness to new behaviours.
- Change: Implement new systems, processes, or values and implement practical application of all the preparation done in stage 1.
- Refreeze: Reinforce and stabilise these new behaviours through leadership support, recognition, and policies, so they become the norm.
This model is simple yet powerful, particularly effective for embedding health and safety-related cultural change.
ADKAR Model
The ADKAR model focuses on individual transformation as the foundation for organisational change.
It outlines five sequential building blocks:
- Awareness: Recognising why the change is needed and what’s driving it.
- Desire: Developing a personal and collective willingness to support and participate in the change.
- Knowledge: Gaining the understanding of the skills, processes and behaviours required.
- Ability: Applying and embedding the new skills and behaviours into everyday practice.
- Reinforcement: Sustaining the change by implanting it into culture through recognition, feedback and accountability.
This approach is highly practical for wellbeing initiatives, as it addresses both the mindset (awareness and desire) and capability (knowledge and ability) required to sustain a healthier workplace culture.
The role of testing in a wellbeing program
A healthier workplace addresses impairment from alcohol and drugs by promoting both safety and wellbeing. Regular, fair, and transparent testing demonstrates due diligence in managing safety-critical risks while supporting early intervention and reinforcing a culture of care and shared responsibility. When combined with education, clear communication, and genuine support pathways, workplace testing helps build employee confidence that everyone is working safely and that wellbeing is a collective priority.