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Episode 144 Buy Episode

Not on My Watch: Addressing Psychosocial Hazards in the Workplace

Law as stated: 31 January 2025 What is this? This episode was published and is accurate as at this date.
Fay Calderone, Employment Partner at Hall & Wilcox and author of 'Broken to Safe,' sits down with David to discuss how law firms can cultivate safer and healthier workplaces. addressing toxic workplace cultures. Fay explores the new duties under the Respect@Work amendments and provides her best strategies on how to proactively address psychosocial hazards and build work cultures that don't just survive, but thrive.
Bullying and Harassment Bullying and Harassment
Practice Management and Business Skills Practice Management and Business Skills
Substantive Law Substantive Law
31 January 2025
Fay Calderone
Hall & Wilcox
1 hour = 1 CPD point
How does it work?
What area(s) of law does this episode consider?Safe and healthy workplaces, and the Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022 (Cth).
Why is this topic relevant?In recent years, the legal industry, like many others, has faced growing scrutiny over toxic workplace environments. Issues such as burnout, bullying, and sexual harassment are being met with heightened regulatory requirements, compelling businesses to adopt more proactive measures to protect workers. Law firms are now tasked with managing not only compliance with work health and safety obligations but also preventing psychosocial hazards and fostering respectful, inclusive workplaces.

With the introduction of key legislation such as the Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022 (Cth) and updates to the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), the focus is shifting from reactive complaint-handling models to preventive frameworks. Lawyers and law firms need to adapt quickly to these evolving legal and cultural expectations to stay compliant and support healthy, sustainable working environments. This includes, as we’ll discuss today, effectively addressing psychosocial risks, promoting gender equality, work flexibility, and an overall inclusive, positive culture. Firms that fail to adopt such practices risk significant reputational and financial damage while losing the trust of employees, clients, and the broader community.

What legislation is considered in this episode?Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022 (Cth) (Respect at Work Act)

Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth)

Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth)

Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Cth); Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW); Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Qld); Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (ACT); Work Health And Safety (National Uniform Legislation) Act 2011 (NT); Work Health and Safety Act 2012 (SA); Work Health and Safety Act 2012 (Tas); Work Health and Safety Act 2020 (WA) (WHS Act)

What are the main points?
  • Psychosocial hazards can be difficult to identify, because unlike many other workplace hazards, they are often invisible.
  • A broader mindset shift is needed to recognise and address psychosocial hazards, which encompass issues like workload imbalance, lack of role clarity, workplace bullying, and discriminatory behaviours, all of which are crucial to consider within workplace health and safety frameworks.
  • Lawyers must comply with workplace laws, which more recently include the positive duty imposed on employers under the new Respect at Work Act. This positive duty requires employers to take reasonable measures to eliminate discriminatory behaviours like sexual harassment and victimisation.
  • Fostering diversity, inclusion, and belonging in a workplace is a significant contributing factor to a successful business. Studies are showing correlation with numerous workplace benefits, including increased job performance and reduced turnover and absenteeism. Overall, it seems that inclusive teams consistently outperform those in environments characterised by fear and toxicity.
  • Surveys have shown that the majority of millennial employees are willing to reconsider their career options or workplace if required to return to the office full time, and this desire for flexibility and autonomy among the younger generation in the workforce has been a consistent trend over the past decade.
What are the practical takeaways?
  • It is important to pace oneself to avoid burnout – a career in the law is a marathon not a sprint. Learning to prioritise and say “no” when necessary is crucial for maintaining a healthy work-life balance and avoiding sacrificing important aspects of life such as family, health, and relationships. Being deliberate about conserving energy and focusing on purpose can help both individual employees and their organisations perform at their peak and avoid burnout.
  • Employers should try to identify broader issues in their organisations. Indicators of psychosocial hazards in the workplace may include high turnover rates, high absenteeism, and silence from employees when approached for feedback about their working environment.
  • Maintaining a strong supervisor-employee relationship amidst challenges is crucial. Establish systems to ensure safety and accountability within your organisation and foster a culture of trust and shared responsibility in your workplace for upholding safety standards to prevent dangerous practices like concealing non-compliance.
  • It is important to engage in open and ongoing communication with employees to understand the hazards they face and address potential risks, including third-party conduct.
  • Implementing a trust-based system of communication can help identify and mitigate psychosocial hazards, with a focus on prevention and management strategies.
  • Organisations should incorporate their brand, purpose, and values into campaigns aimed at eliminating disrespectful behaviour in the workplace.
  • Proactive interventions and encouraging bystander action and reporting are essential. Failing to address complaints or disclosures can break trust and have lasting negative impacts on relationships.
  • We love Fay’s SAFE approach:
    • Start with baseline compliance
    • Align with purpose, values, and trust
    • Flourish with inclusion and flexibility
    • Enforce policies
Show notesAustralian Human Rights Commission (2020), ‘Respect@Work: Sexual Harassment National Inquiry Report’

International Bar Association (2019), ‘Us Too? Bullying and Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession Report’

Dobbin, F. and Kalev, A. (2016), ‘Why Diversity Programs Fail’, Harvard Business Review’, Harvard Business Review

Diversity Council of Australia (2024), ‘Inclusion@Work Index 2023-2024’

AIA Insurance (2020), ‘AIA Australia partners with Australasian Menopause Society to combat frequent misdiagnosis of menopause’

Deloitte (2024), ‘2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey’

Psychosocial Hazards Codes of PracticeSafeWork, NSW Government, ‘Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work’

WorkSafe, Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety, ‘Psychosocial hazards in the workplace: Code of practice’

WorkSafe, Queensland Government, ‘Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work Code of Practice 2022’

WorkSafe, WorkCover Board Tasmania, ‘Managing psychosocial hazards at work’

WorkSafe ACT, ACT Government, ‘Work Health and Safety (Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code of Practice) Approval 2023’

WorkSafe Victoria, Victorian Government ‘Psychosocial hazards contributing to work-related stress’

NTWorkSafe, Northern Territory Government, ‘Managing psychosocial hazards at work’

Safe Work Australia (2022), ‘Managing psychosocial hazards at work: Code of Practice’

DT = David Turner; FC = Fay Calderone

00:00:00DT:Hello and welcome to Hearsay the Legal Podcast, a CPD podcast that allows Australian lawyers to earn their CPD points on the go and at a time that suits them. I’m your host, David Turner. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Lext Australia. Lext’s mission is to improve user experiences in the law and legal services, and Hearsay the Legal Podcast is how we’re improving the experience of CPD.

Hi listeners, before we begin today’s episode of Hearsay, I wanted to let you know about a quick content warning. In this episode, there will be some discussion of some sensitive topics, including suicide, gendered violence and sexual harassment.

On this episode of Hearsay, we’re talking about safe and healthy workplaces. In recent years, the legal services industry, like so many others, has faced growing scrutiny about toxic workplace environments. Issues like burnout, bullying, and sexual harassment are being met with heightened regulatory requirements, compelling businesses, including law firms, to adopt more proactive measures to protect their workers. Law firms are now tasked with managing not only compliance with WHS legislation, but also preventing psychosocial hazards and fostering respectful, inclusive workplaces with a positive obligation.

With the introduction of key legislation like the Respect at Work Act, the long title of that is the Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022 (Cth), and updates to the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), the focus is shifting from reactive, complaints-handling models to preventative, proactive frameworks. Lawyers and law firms need to adapt quickly to these evolving legal and cultural expectations to stay compliant and support healthy, sustainable working environments. This includes, as we’ll discuss today with our guest, effectively addressing psychosocial risks, promoting gender equality, workplace flexibility, and an overall inclusive and positive culture. Firms that fail to adopt these practices risk reputational and financial damage, and they lose the trust of their employees, their clients, the broader community.

To help us explore how employers, especially law firms, can build safer, more supportive workplaces, we’re joined today by Fay Calderone, Employment Partner at Hall & Wilcox, and the author of ‘Broken to Safe’, which I’m looking forward to talking about a bit more later in the episode. Fay is a leader in workplace law with extensive experience advising businesses on managing psychosocial risks, navigating cultural shifts, and complying with evolving WHS and anti-discrimination laws.

Fay, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay.

00:02:32FC:Thanks for having me, David. Great to be here.
00:02:34DT:Now, excited to talk about the book. Excited to talk about our topic for today. We’ve touched on the Respect at Work amendments a little bit on the show, but haven’t really dived deep but before we get there, as always, I wanted to start by hearing a bit about your journey in the law. How did you get into this space and how did you get to being a published author?
00:02:49FC:Thanks, David. Let me try and summarise, I suppose my career of nearly 25 years, in a couple of sentences. I’ve always wanted to be an employment lawyer, strangely, like I searched through UAC books when I was at school and decided that HR and law were the perfect combination for me. That’s why I specifically enrolled into Western’s combined law and human resource management industrial relations degree. I love people. I’m fascinated by the human condition and that was what drew me into this specialty and I suppose is really what has evolved my career to the point of writing a book, which is really about how the law intersects with the human condition. So started off in Gadens in 2001, post-some work experience as an employment lawyer, acting for employers, and have continued in that specialty across a number of firms. I was made partner in about 2010, and that was just after the GFC, and at that time it presented as an opportunity – and I feel bad to say something that was terrible for people presented as an opportunity – but it really did. Businesses were really strained, as they are at the moment, I think, and they were really worried about their legal spend and really looking for practical solutions. It coincided with the introduction of the Fair Work Act as well. I was in Western Sydney at the time – a really big growing business community there, I’m back in town now – but a lot of pressure on businesses and medium sized businesses in particular. So it’s been about 14 years, say now 14, 15 years, that I’ve been taking this more diagnostic approach to write what can go wrong, what has gone wrong, but let’s take a step back and understand why it’s gone wrong. What’s happened here and what can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again, rather than employment lawyers being, as we are, putting out bushfires all the time?
00:04:46DT:Yeah. I mean, topical for today, going from that reactive approach to that proactive approach, right?
00:04:51FC:Exactly.
00:04:51DT:It’s so interesting that you say, this is what you always wanted to do. I hear so often when I ask that question, that “I fell into it or I didn’t have an interest in it until I started practice.” That was true for me. I ended up being an insolvency and a corporate advisory lawyer quite by accident, right? So it’s unusual, I think, to hear that yeah, as a young teenager, you knew this is what you wanted to do and you stuck to it.
00:05:14FC:I probably didn’t know it was going to evolve quite as well as it did. I knew that I was a people person. My careers counselor said – I say it in the book – “girls from Western Sydney schools don’t tend to become lawyers.” So I needed to have a backup. So my backup was psychology. And so I knew that I wanted to do something with people, but I also knew that I was too much of a bleeding heart to do family or criminal law, and I would never maintain the interest or energy to do sort of more commercial, transactional law. So I was pretty deliberate that I went down that lane, but in terms of how it’s evolved and how I’ve been able to flip it and get more purposeful and more focused on what I love, throughout the last few years in particular, I feel very lucky and blessed that it has worked out so well.
00:06:05DT:And I suppose part of that is your book ‘Broken to Safe’ which released earlier this year, which is doing very well as I understand it. Tell me a bit about the book.
00:06:12FC:Alright. So ‘Broken to Safe’ is an amalgamation of probably the last decade’s worth of thoughts, discussions, podcasts, presentations, experiences with clients and particularly executive leaders and boards and things that I’m learning from looking behind the curtain. And the reason I wrote it was, I mean, first of all, you get to an age and stage where you want to give back. I think that it’s a bit of a legacy, as I have learned a lot and I think that there are organisations that sadly can’t afford a lawyer in a bigger law firm in Sydney and that are struggling. So there’s that aspect of it, and I’m happy to help, and help them be compliant and to survive in the Australian market at a time when so many are not surviving or are closing their operations for overseas businesses. Our multinationals are closing Australian businesses. So, worried about that more broadly, and so it’s a bit of a giving back piece, but also to demystify some of the concerns around the law. I’m getting a lot of, not pushback, but a lot of overwhelm from business leaders and the broader community, board members, particularly non-executive directors, who are really worried about the law going too far and stepping down from boards because they think that it’s all too much.
00:07:40DT:Well, certainly work health and safety concerns for directors, that is a risk that can leave them personally liable. And yeah, I can imagine that being a concern in the business community.
00:07:49FC:It absolutely is, and in fact, Marina Go – everybody knows who Marina Go is, if you don’t, look her up, she’s awesome – but she said at the launch that she’s been on boards where non-executive directors have stepped back after the introduction of the Respect at Work laws because it just seemed like it was going to be too hard to control and too hard to manage. Mind you, I think that work health and safety should be, as you quite rightly point out, the bigger concern because that’s the one that can land you in an orange jumpsuit.
00:08:17DT:That’s right. Well, let’s talk about our topic for today. We’re talking about psychosocial hazards in the context of the Respect at Work amendments and especially in law firms. So I suppose we’re thinking about this as both a substantive law topic for those advising clients on these amendments – this is useful information and for those of us who aren’t advising clients on this topic and are just trying to run healthier, safer workplaces, this is also very useful information. So I guess a good place to start is, what are we talking about when we say psychosocial risk?
00:08:48FC:Yeah, maybe let’s do that, because I think it is such a nebulous concept that people are struggling to appreciate it because you can’t see it. You can’t see it in the same way as if there was a cord running across the room.
00:09:00DT:I knew you were going to say a cord running across – because it’s kind of the archetype.
00:09:03FC:People will be like, “oh, right. That’s a work health and safety risk.” They snap their fingers. They know. Everyone makes the joke. It’s a hilarious lawyer joke to make and we all know what we’re talking about. I don’t think we do that with psychosocial hazards. We don’t see someone that’s got too much work or someone that’s got not enough work and go, “psychosocial hazard.” We don’t see someone that’s scratching their head, trying to work out what their role is, like lack of role clarity, and say,  “psychosocial hazard.” And we don’t, more concerningly, I think, look at someone that is being bullied in the workplace in a more subtle way, you know, we’re not talking about throwing folders across the room or slamming fists on the table, but you know, that has that repeated unreasonable behaviour directed towards them or where there is a sexually hostile workplace, just that insidious undertone of everyday sexism. We don’t look at those things and go, “psychosocial hazard.” And so I think there is that broader mind shift that we need to make in order to understand that these things, even in relation to policies and procedures, or the lack thereof, and remuneration and organisational justice around remuneration decisions, those things are all broadly captured within the codes of practice in relation to what can be a psychosocial hazard in the workplace.
00:10:30DT:I guess when we think about physical risks to health and safety, we often adopt a process driven or systems driven approach to identifying and managing those, right?
00:10:39FC:Correct.
00:10:40DT:The accompanying archetype to the cable across the floor is the person with a checklist going around the office and ticking things off, right?
00:10:47FC:That’s exactly right.
00:10:47DT:It’s self evident, it’s overt, and we just go around and make sure that we’ve followed the process, followed the system. And policies and systems are vitally important here as well, but we’re talking about things that are covert, that are insidious, that are cultural and intangible, right? So it’s not as simple as identifying them with the checklist. Okay, so that’s what a psychosocial hazard is, right? We’ve identified that. What are some of the risk factors when you walk into a workplace, whether it’s a law firm or not, what are some of the indicators that these sorts of things might be present?
00:11:22FC:Terrific question. And I’m so glad you asked me this because I’ve always talked about box ticking compliance and moving beyond compliance, so beyond that box sticking compliance, and that’s exactly what the law does. In fact, both the psychosocial hazards codes of practice, and in particular the Respect at Work laws, have turned my greatly named ‘beyond compliance framework’ into an actual compliance framework. So it’s a bit of a name I’ve had to ditch.

TIP: So Fay’s just mentioned the positive obligation imposed on employers under the new Respect at Work amendments. Introduced in the Anti-Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation Amendment (Respect at Work) Act 2022 (Cth), the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) now includes a positive duty for employers and persons conducting a business or undertaking – PCBU is a term that some of us will be familiar with from work health and safety legislation going back almost 10 years now. 

This duty requires them to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate, as far as possible, certain discriminatory behaviours prohibited under the Sex Discrimination Act, like sex discrimination, sexual harassment, conduct creating a hostile work environment based on sex and specific acts of victimisation and that positive duty applies to the employer or PCBU themselves, but also their employees and workers, and agents acting on their behalf. In certain cases, the positive duty can even extend to managing the behaviour of third parties, like customers, clients, suppliers, and visitors, when they engage in prohibited conduct towards employees and workers, like sexual harassment. 

The positive duty stands in sharp contrast to the previous negative duty to refrain from creating this sort of environment or refrain from engaging in this sort of conduct. The positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act also operates alongside existing and long standing workplace health and safety laws, which already, and for some time, have required employers and PCBUs to maintain a safe working environment.

You’re quite right. I often, in training with leaders, try and get them to identify other things that when they walk in a room might be evident, or when they are reviewing a board pack might be evident of a broader issue. And of course there is a risk management matrix and framework you can put behind this, but things like high absenteeism, high turnover – high turnover within a short period of time, like I’ve asked people to look at turnover within the first 12 months in particular, where there has been patterns, particular hotspots in organisations. So you’ve got your broader engagement surveys or your broader data in relation to turnover, absenteeism, complaints, etc. Is there a particular part of the organisation that’s a red hotspot? And I also say it’s a real problem when people say nothing. If you run a survey and you get a very low response rate, or you get a response rate and it’s all very straight down the middle, and there’s no additional comments or you run focus groups and everybody’s silent and just nodding, I personally think that is one of the indicators that there is a lot of fear and a lack of trust in the organisation, and you need to dig deeper because, to quote a song, “they say it best when they say nothing at all.” Sometimes, yeah.

00:14:38DT:That’s so true, and it’s dangerous how those reporting frameworks or those fact finding tools can be co-opted in a toxic workplace. Like I’m thinking about earlier this year, an associate died at the Bank of America in circumstances where there was an internal policy to ensure that associates weren’t working unreasonable overtime and were required to report if they were working outside of the hours allowed by the policy. One employee reported that when they did that, they were called by their manager who said, “when you submit those reports, you have to make sure you submit the permitted hours, right? It’s not allowed for you to make sure that you’re submitting a report that shows that you’re working the hours allowed by the policy” in brackets and in smaller font, the subtext being, make sure that you don’t truthfully report when you’re not working those hours and you’re working much harder. So I think you’ve touched on it there. It’s not just about having those surveys in place, but yeah, if you’re getting low response rates, if you’re getting suspiciously uniform responses, it’s time to dig a little deeper.
00:15:41FC:That’s a really interesting point that you raise in a really sad situation, but I do think that it does raise the fear factor between a supervisor and an employee, which often exists and that’s evidently there, and so it should be in terms of what was said but more broadly within the organisation, what’s happening? Why is there an attempt to override the system? The system’s obviously been put in place, but to demonstrate compliance with the law and to ensure that there are alarms raised if they’re outside the parameters – and I’m speaking broadly rather than specifically about this case – but when people try to override systems, it’s often there’s been some work around work health and safety more broadly, where if you start to put in requirements and KPIs and say, “you must meet this,” people will conceal the data or fudge the data to make sure that they’ve met that because they’re feeling precarious about their employment and what the consequences of not meeting it will be. And so the CEO has got to report to the board that it’s got this many injuries, or that the lost time data is a certain amount, and they fudge the data to make sure that it works. And it’s like no, well, you’ve got to go back to, “why are we doing this? And let’s have a shared accountability for the safety culture that we’re trying to build and some trust around the systems.” Because if you make people fearful about non-compliance with the systems, then you’re going to get that undertone of not only non-compliance, but concealing the non-compliance, which is the most dangerous.
00:17:17DT:You get those perverse outcomes where what you’ve incentivised is to reduce reporting rather than to actually uplift people. And I think we’ve talked on the show before about practices in the aviation industry where it’s not about blame at all. If there’s a deviation from protocol, it’s not about finding out who did that. It’s just about really understanding how it happened and making sure it doesn’t happen again.
00:17:37FC:That’s exactly right.
00:17:38DT:You’ve worked in a lot of organisations, both law firms themselves and going into other organisations to help them manage their work health and safety practices. We’ve known about the Respect at Work amendments for a little while. We’ve known they’ve been coming, and so we’ve known that there’s been a need to manage psychosocial hazards, and I think there’s been an argument even before the Act that these are sorts of hazards that arguably fall under the auspices of work health and safety law that employers should be managing. What trends have you seen over your career in the way these hazards are managed both in your client organisations, but I’m actually particularly interested in how they’re managed in law firms.
00:18:17FC:We really have gone to a place where we are finally putting a fence at the top of the hill rather than an ambulance at the bottom. I mean, that’s the most important thing to note in terms of the developments with Respect at Work laws. And we should probably clarify what they are. It’s the duty that persons conducting business or undertaking, have to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate unlawful conduct, which is broadly defined to include sexual harassment, sex discrimination and victimisation – which has always been unlawful – but now also sex based harassment and conduct that creates a workplace that is hostile on the grounds of sex. That’s an important point to raise because it’s shifted the focus that was traditionally on a complainant, or a victim survivor, to come forward and to make a report, sometimes in writing was the requirement, about what had happened to them and what they wanted to happen because of it. And yes, for many years, in fact, I was involved in matters advising companies where often those people moved on and there were deals done, there were payments made, there were deeds signed, and the perpetrator, sadly, stayed and the victim moved on or they had to trot on off to court and in a very complaint focused system, make a complaint to a tribunal or the Australian Human Rights Commission, and at the moment, the wait times are up to 12 months still, but wait a long time for that to come on. And then if that didn’t resolve at that stage, put their money where their mouth is and go to either the Federal Circuit Court or the Federal Court in the Federal jurisdiction to bring a claim where they bear cost consequences if they lose. And more to the point, if they reacted stoically and went on to get another job and mitigated their economic loss, traditionally general damages were not very high. So it could get to a point where it’s a hollow victory. You’ve got to the end and your damages are less than your actual costs. So what incentive is there for an organisation to fix that, you know? It wasn’t there. Although I did always say, and I was pretty strong with my clients in clarifying or notifying them that these sexual harassment, and particularly as we cross into some of the more serious matters, have always had police cases in the background as well, depending on when they crossed into criminal territory.
00:21:10DT:Yeah but that’s a great point that you make. And I like that analogy of the fence at the top of the hill, not the ambulance at the bottom, because this isn’t a wholly new category of regulated behaviour, right? It’s not that there was never a legal or regulatory response to this kind of conduct on the part of employees or organisations. It’s just that the interventions available under the law were categorically failing to address that challenge in toxic workplaces. Because as you said, the incentives were just all wrong, right? It imposed the cost and risk of responding to those incidents on the employee suffering them. Whereas what we’ve got now is a positive duty to address those things before they cause an incident like that. I think you make a very good point, which is that from a certain point of view, and I think it’s a persuasive argument, there has been a positive duty for some time under work health and safety legislation to prevent these kinds of risks to work health and safety, recognising that not all WHS risks are merely physical risks. They can be psychosocial risks also, but this really puts that beyond doubt as a totally discreet cause of action from work health and safety legislation. So, I guess that means that in terms of the timeline, we’ve got pre 2013, pre Work Health and Safety Act conduct and practices, and then 2013 to 2024 conduct and practices, and maybe in the early 2020s, and awareness of this legislation being on the horizon, some changing culture, some changing practices and now today, what are the sort of trends you’ve seen in the way organisations manage, or respond to, or prepare to respond to psychosocial hazards?
00:22:49FC:You’re absolutely right that it’s been a few years in the making in terms of the change in behaviour and the increased appetite of boards and leaders to act and to act quite proactively in relation to incidents of sexual harassment and to ensure that they are taking steps to avoid incidents of sexual harassment, more importantly – and I’ve used the term sexual harassment broadly, obviously. It wasn’t necessarily about the Respect at Work report or the findings year on year of the Australian Human Rights Commission in terms of how pervasive these issues were in our workplaces, or in the case of law firms, the Us Too Report, IBA report, it was the Me Too movement. And I use the term “Me Too movement” broadly to encompass the transparency and accountability that the megaphone, that is the media and social media, drove in bringing these things to the community’s attention and putting on the front page of papers, not only the organisation logos, but also the names and faces at times of the board of directors or senior leaders within organisations who let this happen on their watch. That’s where I, from a more positive perspective, tried to bring out the “#NotOnMyWatch” conversation online to say, “let’s have a more positive conversation where leaders say, ‘I will not tolerate this happening on my watch,’ and come out more proactively and say that, ‘you won’t be that next case.’”
00:24:31DT:Yeah, absolutely. And it’s tricky because we’ve talked about how you require more than process, more than systems to identify and manage these risks. So I guess, as you said, we’ve historically had a complaints driven framework that’s unsatisfactory for victim survivors for a whole range of reasons, which you outlined. Now we’ve got a proactive obligation. We have to aim to eliminate, mitigate these psychosocial risks before they occur. Again, I’m thinking about the context of a law firm where we have seen in the past, instances of the sorts of evils that the Respect at Work amendments are trying to address like sexual harassment and toxic workplaces and other psychosocial risks that might be WHS issues, like burnout. What are some of the proactive steps? What are some of the proactive tools that employers, especially law firms can be using?
00:25:21FC:First and foremost, we need to start having better conversations with our people on the ground because they know what they do day to day in their roles, and they know the hazards that they are subject to. So we need to have that trust based system where we are communicating not just about complaints or when things go wrong, but about the things that can go wrong. And so if you look at our environment, I think the third party risk is a really big one, and one that many of my clients are grappling with, but as lawyers and as partners in law firms, we are responsible for obviously our conduct, for the conduct of our other partners and other managers in the organisation, but also in terms of sexual harassment, or the broader instances of unlawful conduct that can occur like sex based harassment, which is not sexual in nature, more nebulous to identify. That includes people like barristers that we brief, or accountants that we might work with, or experts that we bring into matters. And we have a duty to eliminate that behaviour, which is more broadly defined, not just in the parameters of our workplace, but by third parties that we don’t necessarily have a contract with, and that we don’t necessarily have the ability to control, and the conduct may not always be visible to us. So it’s only by having open channels of communication with our people that we’ll be able to assess the risks, particularly with third parties, but more broadly across our workplaces and have that ongoing consultation so that we can then take steps, first, to eliminate those risks but if we can’t eliminate them, obviously control them. A good example of management of third party conduct, or a good campaign, is the Virgin campaign. They’ve got, as you check into the terminal, it says, “carry on luggage? Yes. Carry on behaviour? No.”
00:27:20DT:I love that, that’s great.
00:27:21FC:That’s when you’re dealing with members of the public, they are putting their brand, and their purpose, and their values, into that campaign to eliminate disrespectful behaviour in their workplace. We can do that in our law firms. Pre-events, we should have notices that go out that give those cautions to attendees. We can have signs up in workplaces. We can have things up at our reception desks but we can also not brief barristers that are disrespectful to our people, and the onus is on us to ensure that our people are safe at work, and we work too hard to manage those risks within our firms to compromise the health and safety of our people at the hands of third parties.
00:28:10DT:That gives me a lot of context for something I see in a lot of retailers and a lot of offices as well now.
00:28:16FC:At the McDonald’s drive thru.
00:28:17DT:Yeah. I didn’t actually make the connection that these things were related. You see signs in stores, in offices, “abusive behaviour towards our employees won’t be tolerated.” And I say, “oh, that’s interesting.” I had thought, “oh, maybe that’s come from all of this atrocious behaviour we saw during COVID where stress was running high.”
00:28:35FC:Yeah, that’s true. And it did. Well, aspects of it certainly did. The poor things were not only battling the physical hazards of the pandemic and the virus, but also, yeah, the behaviour associated with it.
00:28:46DT:Yeah – people just desperate to hoard more toilet paper. This third party risk idea, especially when it comes to law practices, is really interesting to me because clients is one thing, events is one thing, but so much of this behaviour and so much of our professional relationships occur in private settings, and there are some really unusual power dynamics, I think, at play in legal practice. The example of barristers is an interesting one. We know that the Bar has its own challenges with gender equity. I want to give a hypothetical. You’re instructed by a client in a litigation matter. The matter is set for trial, the trial starting in a week or two. Counsel’s been briefed and has been briefed for some time. Trial prep’s underway, and a junior lawyer in your team confides in you – because you’ve got the frameworks in place, you’ve had that conversation and regular consultation with your team to make it clear that it’s safe to talk about this – but a junior lawyer in your team confides in you that the barrister who’s been briefed is making comments that make her or him feel unsafe and is creating what, in your view, would be an environment that’s unacceptable under the respect of work amendments. How do you respond to that situation?
00:30:00FC:Interesting one. The fact that it’s late in the day to drop the barrister or to obviously make the choice not to.
00:30:06DT:I’ve made this intentionally challenging.
00:30:07FC:Yeah, I know. No, no, you have. You have. What I will not do is send my staff member to court. I will go. And I’ve done it. I’ve had people visit me before, not just with barristers, but with clients as well. If you’re not in a position to step in and separate entirely, I will shield. And not just me, I know my partners have done similar things as well. We won’t send our people to the wolves. And I think we all have to get better at that. Historically, we don’t currently have examples because that’s been addressed over time. We’ve got terrific barristers that we brief now. And in fact, we had most of the New South Wales Bar at our office last night at an event with Tracy Spicers for an equitable briefing event with our D&I team. So we do have great barristers that we use but I have in the past stepped in and shielded. And I think it’s not just to put ourselves in the firing line. I find that there is a bit of a ceasefire when the leader gets involved. And I know this is a long answer to your question, forgive me, but you hit the nail on the head in terms of power and gender equity, and they of course are the systemic drivers that sit behind a lot of these Respect at Work laws and that were very clearly identified by the Respect at Work report as being the underpinnings of the unlawful behaviour and our most vulnerable workers, and our most vulnerable and diverse groups within the community, including our Indigenous, including our culturally diverse, including people from a lower social class or in precarious employment, they are most at risk. So that is a power play.
00:31:51DT:Given that relationship between power structures and the presence of some of this conduct, do you think that the sorts of risks and harms that the Respect at Work amendments are intended to address are more likely to appear in highly hierarchical and stratified workplaces?
00:32:11FC:Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s why if you have to have a hierarchical structure as a matter of whatever it is, industries, the need that you have to maintain that tradition, it’s important that it’s also not an autocratic structure, or your approach – that you still have compassionate leadership, that you still have open communication, that you still most fundamentally support. And I think, just to come back to the book and not deliberately, but that’s the one thing that comes out in the book – the ‘Broken’ side of the book, spoiler alert in the closing, the red side of the book, which is all the things that can and will go wrong, and break workplaces and humans in them – the neuroscience behind all of it is fear.  And on the green side – the ‘Safe’ side of the book and how to address a lot of these issues and these compliance issues, but also things that are more insidious and create toxic workplace cultures and burnout – it’s trust, and the level of psychological safety and interpersonal trust people need to have in order to both proactively address these issues, but also to trust you as a leader and to trust the system to come forward when something does go wrong. Because at some point, it will.
00:33:33DT:Yeah, absolutely. That’s a good point, because I think we’ve been talking about this proactive duty as almost an obligation to prevent anything from happening before it occurs, which is, as you said, inevitable, right? It’s not going to be possible to prevent every instance of this behaviour. It’s about taking a proactive approach to addressing that, which is not necessarily 100% prevention.
00:33:55FC:Exactly.
00:33:55DT:I want to come back to a concept from your book in a moment, but before we do, I just quickly wanted to ask – because this proactive approach is relatively new in terms of the legislative obligation, certainly if not in its practice – have you seen any proactive interventions that are less effective, ineffective, maybe even backfire?
00:34:14FC:Yes, I wouldn’t say they’re proactive interventions, but I know that where you have policies and procedures in place, and values driven conversations around encouraging bystander action or encouraging reporting, and you then don’t act. So for example, you say, “one of our values is respect and we live it,” but say you were a workplace where you said, “we respect respect, and we will not tolerate…” and then something happens, and either that happens and the partner is one of the highest billers in the team, or the client is CEO of one of our most important or highest billing clients or whatever the case may be, and someone’s complaint or disclosure or bystander intervention is minimalised or undermined, or they try to not address it because this person is so important. That, I think is the thing that breaks most workplaces, and it will break that human. They will never ever forget that you did that. In the words of Maya Angelou, “they will forget what you say, they’ll forget what you do, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” And in those cases, that trust is destroyed to the point that it is very, very difficult for those parties involved to ever regain it.
00:35:42DT:Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s trite to say that “you’ve got to walk the walk,” but you do have to follow through without exception, even when it might be inconvenient, on the values that you claim to espouse, right?

TIP: Now Faye and I were just talking about how sometimes positive workplace discrimination initiatives might have the opposite effect or a chilling effect. DEI initiatives can backfire when their efforts to improve representation inadvertently worsen outcomes, like reducing target group representation or increasing prejudice in the workplace. That can be caused by misaligned practices, stereotyping, or perceptions of unfairness. For instance, mandatory diversity training might provoke resistance, and affirmative action can stigmatise the beneficiaries of it. Misrepresentation in recruitment undermines credibility, while rigid control over hiring can alienate managers, reducing support for DEI initiatives. 

In fact, way back in 2016, the Harvard Business Review published an article titled Why Diversity Programs Fail, talking about the limitations and limited returns on compulsory diversity training. It found that, and I’m quoting here, while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. That article examined a number of studies on the topic, which found that three of the most popular interventions to improve diversity in workplaces, mandatory diversity training, job tests, and grievance systems, can actually make firms less diverse, not more, because managers resist being strongarmed by HR. 

To prevent this sort of backfire, organisations should adopt evidence based strategies. They should broaden targeted recruitment by promoting realistic job previews and engaging management in that to foster trust and fairness. They should also integrate diversity training into broader programs, focus on voluntary and learner centric approaches to reduce defensiveness and ensure relevance. Finally, they should establish some accountability structures like management support from the top and grievance systems to monitor and address issues.

So in ‘Broken to Safe’, you talk about a framework that you use called “SAFE”, an acronym. Walk us through how that framework works and how you could apply it in the context of the Respect at Work amendments and especially again in a law firm where some of our listeners might be trying to do some of this stuff for themselves.

00:37:56FC:This is exactly what I was talking about at the top end in terms of demystifying it, and SAFE is a very stripped back way to look at the workplace holistically and to take a more proactive approach to compliance. And so ‘S’ stands for “start with baseline compliance.” You know, you were saying box sticking compliance, but it is more than that. It is looking at risk management and consultation, your policies and procedures, training your leaders. In our case, it’s partners and management, but I also say it’s imperative to train your operations people. So anyone that’s got a supervisory role. They’re your front line. They make or break you. They make or break your policies and this is where I say,, “your culture will eat compliance for breakfast.” And not necessarily in law firms, but certainly across the broader businesses that I work with, line managers can really undermine all the hard work that you do in putting these frameworks together. The second letter is ‘A’, which is “align with purpose, values, and trust.” Purpose is imperative. People need to know why this is so much more than box ticking compliance. This is what we’re trying to achieve, and this is why it’s important that we have, for example, equitable workplaces. This is why it’s important that we have respectful, inclusive, collaborative workplaces. You bring in your values to the conversation in terms of, “the law says you can’t sexually harass someone, but how are you being respectful? How are we being better together, or collaborative or teamwork, making the dream work?” Whatever their values are, if we’re doing that, you integrate the law into the conversations about your values and then what you’re trying to achieve as an organisation, and you build trust in the systems and you build engagement and buy-in. It’s this intrinsic motivation rather than carrot and stick. Stick based, traditionally, is how we get compliance with policies. The world has changed and we really need to make sure people are doing the right thing when no one is watching, and intrinsic motivation is how we get there. We then go to ‘F’ which is “flourish with inclusion and flexibility,” and that then is where the magic happens. I mean we know inclusive workplaces are more innovative, employees are more satisfied, there’s better returns to shareholders, they’re less likely to leave. They’re also five times less likely to bring a discrimination and harassment claim. So we’re achieving legal compliance but we’re actually working in a workplace where people are more satisfied, they’re not leaving, and we have more satisfied customers, and in turn, better return to the partners or shareholders. And then finally, the bit that we spoke about just a little bit earlier, and it seems to be hitting the mark with everyone, which is you got to ‘E’ for “enforce your policies.” You have to exit jerks. There can be no compromises. We need to be indiscriminate in the way that we insist on compliance, not just with our policies, but with our values, because if you don’t do that, you actually undermine that trust, and you undermine everything that you’re trying to create, both from a compliance point of view and from a positive workplace culture point of view.
00:41:22DT:Yeah, and I suppose in challenging economic times, it’s so common to see that compromise, right? I think everyone, especially in law, everyone starts their practice saying, “well, we’ve got a no [redacted] policy here, and that applies to both employees and partners and clients.” But when there’s that one really difficult client who you feel that you need the work, people make compromises, right?
00:41:46FC:They do, but I do challenge that. I’ve often challenged this in boardrooms. I mean, there might be a good top line, but what’s the bottom line? How many people have you lost? What’s the absenteeism? What’s the risk to your reputation if it comes out? You’re on notice. You can’t unsee that. What does that do to your firm’s brand, to your brand as a leader, as a practitioner in our case? So I think there is the top line and I don’t want to minimize this. I’ve been a business owner for over a decade now, so I do appreciate the economic realities. I’m not sitting before you as Pollyanna, but I also have seen these things go very wrong, and I can tell you when the regulators get involved and names splashed on the front page of the paper with the benefit of hindsight, I always hear, “we should have done something sooner.”
00:42:39DT:Yeah. Look, it seems gauche to put it in completely economic or financial terms, but generally speaking, I think lawyers often spend a bit too much time looking at the top line in their business performance and too little time thinking about expenses, their margin, how they can improve performance, and if you think about the kind of liabilities that working with a client like that might introduce to your business in the short term or the long term, then yeah, it starts to make a lot more economic sense to find that revenue elsewhere.
00:43:07FC:And look, I do often have to go to economics with business leaders and the economics are there. If there’s something to take out of this podcast, it’s that this is not a zero sum game. This isn’t, “we comply with the law and we do the right thing by our people, or we make money.” This is absolutely a win-win and the data tells us this year after year. You look at the Diversity Council of Australia, Inclusion at Work Index every year, it tells us what the returns are of inclusive teams. In the book I go further to look at – so if we talk about ‘diversity’; being invited to the party, ‘inclusion’; being asked to dance, and ‘belonging’; being dancing like no one’s watching. Belonging is where the magic happens. It’s where your inclusion initiatives flourish. And the data in the book – 2019 data – says there’s a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% reduction in income in turnover, a 75% reduction in absenteeism and double the pay increases and 18 times more promotions, which wouldn’t happen in an underperforming environment. So if you can harness the benefits of inclusion – which you can’t achieve in an environment where there is fear and toxicity, because trust and fear can’t coexist – if you can harness the benefits of inclusion, that’s where you’re going to get improved performance, bottom and top line.
00:44:48DT:Yeah, absolutely. And we talked about this on the show recently in the context of ESG about the flow of investment capital into ESG targeted funds and high performing ESG businesses. That investment capital is not flowing into those businesses out of the goodness of investors’ hearts, it’s flowing into those businesses because they outperform the market, right? So there’s really tangible performance benefits to making these changes. You just said a moment ago that one of the challenges with addressing some of these behaviours, and changing behaviour, and having that alignment with purpose, trust, and values, is that so much of this is about conduct that we can’t see, and that might be true for many reasons because it’s done in private or it’s done in a digital setting, but also I imagine a contributor to that is our increased, and I think permanently increased, mode of working flexibly.
00:45:41FC:Yep.
00:45:41DT:Some notable exceptions aside, like Amazon deciding that all of its employees are to return to work five days a week, most workplaces still have workforces that work from home a couple of days a week and I expect that to continue into the future. How does that influence, for good or for ill, these Respect at Work obligations?
00:46:00FC:Look, it means that there are broader parameters within which we are operating. The parameters of the workplace have been expanding for the purpose of sex discrimination laws for some time in terms of encompassing out of work events and looking at connections to the workplace. So, yes, we need to be cognisant of the fact that when we are talking about these laws, it includes people working from home and working flexibly or working at other clients sites, but I don’t think that’s necessarily new and definitely the Respect at Work laws should not be a detractor from flexible working. I mean, you know, I’m a big advocate for flexible working. It just means that we need to ensure that people do the right thing when no one is watching, and the only way we can cut through is by having that engagement and making sure that we do have a positive workplace culture that is founded on trust, and that people will let us know when something does go wrong or if something does go wrong, but also bringing it back to our values and as an organisation, what we’re trying to do to achieve and the fact that these things happening, or these things not being reported, are going to compromise us all as teams and within the workplace.
00:47:16DT:A pretty common psychosocial hazard in law firms is burnout. I can see on the one hand how flexible working arrangements can be a remedy for that, that we have more time with our families, less pressure to try and fit obligations outside of home around a traditional work day. At the same time, some of the data from the pandemic, when we were all working from home, suggests that we work a lot longer hours and have a much harder time drawing a line between work and home when we are working remotely for extended periods. So talk to me a bit about the relationship between flexible work and remote work, and burnout.
00:47:58FC:Great question. Always advocated pre-pandemic, many years now, almost 15, I think, for flexible work as a structural cultural change we need for inclusive workplaces, and I maintain that despite some of that pandemic data. Reason being, that pandemic data was very unique in terms of the environments and situations we were navigating at the time. Things like homeschooling are not business as usual situations. We had people isolated from family, friends, support networks. We had unusual spikes in sort of pressures on businesses, in our case professional services, trying to get across rulings and – what were they called? Public health orders?
00:48:42DT:Weekly changes to the law, yeah.
00:48:44FC:Like sending out an advice, refreshing the screen and realising, you know, the public health order has updated, like it was honestly one of the hardest times in my career. I can say that personally, and I understand how people burnt out in that time, and they did. However, we also learned a lot during that time, and we also pivoted to a model where it was a great equaliser in the sense that it wasn’t just women with children that were working from home, or people with disabilities, or people that had elderly parents to look after, or people with chronic health conditions, which is starting to be the case again. Now I think we need to recognise that people from diverse backgrounds and have these vulnerabilities that can request flexible work as a matter of law. So, flexible work can be the difference between them staying or leaving. The workforce or being able to maintain the balance and energy they need to sustain, particularly a career like ours, in law.

TIP: Now, Faye just mentioned the link between remote work and employee burnout coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. This relationship has been extensively studied and there’s a few insights that we can draw from it. Remote work, especially when enforced during the pandemic, heightened job demands and created feelings of isolation, job insecurity and diminished autonomy. These factors collectively escalated burnout, emotional exhaustion and workplace dissatisfaction. Employees often struggled with work life balance because they were online all the time and they experienced increased stress and disruptions to their mental wellbeing. Burnout was further exacerbated by a lack of supportive structures like clear communication, social connectedness and effective leadership. 

Studies show that the absence of workplace social support contributed to disengagement and low morale among remote workers. Employees reported feeling undervalued, unsupported, and disconnected from their organisation. This detachment, coupled with the increased workload and job strain, negatively affected productivity and satisfaction, and that led to burnout and high turnover followed. 

Now, efforts like workplace flexibility, leadership engagement, time management. These are potential strategies for reducing stress and burnout, but if they’re inconsistently implemented, these measures leave many employees vulnerable to emotional strain.

Overall, the research highlights that remote work environments, while offering flexibility, need robust organisational support to prevent burnout. Without these adequate protections like enhancing communication, managing workloads, and prioritising employee well being, remote work risks exacerbating psychological stress and undermining efficacy. These findings really underscore the importance of prioritising employee support in remote work environments to sustain both performance for the company and mental health for the worker. 

Some of the conversations that I had with experts in the book, one of the most interesting ones in terms of where it landed, was with Catherine Fox around flexible working. And we all know how important flexible working is for working parents, but at the other end, she raised a really important point around women between 45 and 55 exiting workplaces. And, you know, I know you’re a relatively young gentleman, but I am going to tell you that there is this whole concept of menopause coming in, in those years. And we are seeing women exit in drones during that time. We are seeing, 46% of women leave between 45 to 55 years old because of psychosocial or psychological issues, or physical injuries or conditions. And we also know that they are almost twice as likely than men of the equivalent age to have a stress related condition, and that was data coming out of AIA insurance, I think it was. So the reason I raised that is because this goes back to this systemic issue. We’ve got these drivers in terms of women in particular, we know carry the lion’s share of caring responsibilities when they have children of school age. So that continues for 18 years or whatever it is, and then we know they do extra care for elderly parents. And then they’re getting to the point in their careers when they’re about to enter into those CEO, executive board roles, and if they burn out at that point, we lose them. And what does that do to our gender pay gap? What does that do to our equity in the boardroom? If flexible work is just one piece of a complex puzzle that will keep those women at work, then my gosh, we have to support it.

00:53:22DT:Well said. And an interesting sort of recontextualisation, I think, of flexible work – because we so often think about flexible workers, maybe it’s my own personal experience as a parent of young children –  but we often make that connection very quickly between flexible work and parents of young children.
00:53:36FC:Of course we do. The other interesting point, and I asked leaders to reflect on it in the book, is that 75% of millennials, so that’s people in our work places under 43, said they would reconsider their career options or their workplace, if they were required to return to the office full time.
00:53:59DT:Wow. That high?
00:53:59FC:Deloitte Millennial Survey, I think it was last year or just as the book was being finished, so very recent data. So I said, “stop and reflect on that.” Look, I don’t know if that will change, but this isn’t a phase. This data has been around for a decade where I’ve been writing about the next generation expecting flexibility and they want these things as well. So it’s an intergenerational issue. And absolutely, we also have a lot of grads showing up to the office because they want to socialise and they are in share homes and all of that, but it’s about choice and agency, and I don’t think our humans in our workplaces are ready to give up on that.
00:54:43DT:Yeah, absolutely. Okay, we’re nearly out of time, but before I let you go – normally I finish the episode with a question for our listeners who have either just started their careers in law or are about to, and I usually ask about how they could get into the line of work that you’re in – but I want to take a slightly different approach today and ask, for those legal professionals who have just started their first job in the law – maybe they’re at law school and they’re about to finish and they’re about to join the legal workforce. I know some of them will have heard some alarming things about the psychosocial safety of law firms. They will have heard about the long hours and the vicarious trauma and the high pressure situations and the difficult personalities. What’s something that these young lawyers can do going into these law firms to contribute to making them healthier workplace environments?
00:55:38FC:I love that question, and I love how you framed that. That’s terrific. The law is a marathon, not a sprint. So that’s first and foremost, I think we need to pace ourselves, burnout and that exhaustion phase that burnout represents, which is a serious work health and safety issue comes from us running too hard for too long. So I think the most important thing to start with is, we can’t give 110% to everything all the time. We have to take a leaf out of the book of high performance athletes, both as individuals and I think also as organisations and leaders, to realise that high performance athletes have peak periods of performance where they train very hard and then they have recovery sessions, rest sessions, and then they peak again. We need to do that better as individuals and not put so much pressure on ourselves to constantly be running on empty. But as leaders, we also need to be cognisant of that and make sure we are not over utilising or under utilising people. So I recognise our part in that as well. So, I think, learn earlier than I did how to master the Art of Enough, which is what I talked about in the book. The Art of Enough is critical and being able to know when to say, “right, no to that, I’ve done enough of this,” or, “I’m going to focus on this year, or this month, or this day.” Because for everything we say yes to, inadvertently there’s something we’re saying no to. I’ve learned this the hard way and I’m terrible still at saying “no,” but what I have found is that when I don’t say “no” up front, even when I’m reticent, what I end up saying “no” to is my family, my long standing clients – if it’s from a work perspective, that are necessary to service and service well, who are loyal – my health, or my children, all of those things – sleep. So you’re saying yes to something that you’re thinking, “oh, I could or I couldn’t do it,” but accidentally you’re saying “no” to a lot of the necessary things. So focus on purpose, know what your lane is, and what your why is, and try and build on that, and then be deliberate about the choices you make to conserve your energy for the marathon you have ahead of you.
00:58:07DT:Yeah, that’s such great advice, and we’re guilty of it here as well. Often the answer to the question, this last question in every interview is, we’ll take on another thing outside of work and join a committee and do this and do that. We’re often exhorting our young lawyers and law graduates to take on more, to say yes more often, and it’s a great reminder that sometimes it’s okay to say “no” and focus on some of that other stuff. Fay, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay.
00:58:32FC:Thank you so much. Loved that.
00:58:43DT: As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay the Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank my guest today, Fay Calderone, for coming on the show. Now, if you want to hear more about employment law, check out our episode with Nicola Martin, called ‘Building Back Better: Creating and Amending Workplace Policies in the New Employment Age’. That’s episode 76.

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