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A deep dive into psychosocial safety and workplace mental wellbeing

30 July 2026 | InterContinental Wellington

Managing Psychosocial Risk

Operationalising approaches to psychosocial risk.

Brightstar is delighted to bring our important annual psychosocial risk conference to Wellington for the first time.  With a specific focus on how to address psychosocial risk in practice, the conference will analyse a range critical psychosocial risks, showcasing successful approaches to the identification and assessment of psychosocial hazards and the delivery of effective mitigation interventions.

The conference will also share crucial insights around building the capability and capacity to manage psychosocial risk within leaders, teams and organisations. and its integration within strategic HR, enterprise risk and health and safety systems.

Here's why you can't miss it

Psychosocial Risk Management

 Learn to identify, assess, and control workplace hazards and risks, and understand how to redesign work to promote wellbeing.

Building a Culture of Psychological Safety

Discover strategies for managing high-stress roles, addressing trauma, and handling issues like burnout and aggression.

Data-Driven Wellbeing Strategies

Use data to measure the impact of your wellbeing initiatives and explore real-world case studies to learn from successful strategies.

KEY SPEAKERS FROM 2025

Our 2025 lineup brought together leading advisors and thought leaders across a spectrum of sector expertise. 

2026 Speakers to be announced.

Vanessa Cooper

Principal Advisor – Mentally Healthy Work

WorkSafe Mahi | Haumaru Aotearoa

Nathan Lee

Branch Manager – Legal and Framework Policy Branch

Safe Work Australia

Suzi McAlpine

Author of “Beyond Burnout”

Founder and Director

Suzi McAlpine Leadership,
 

Workshop

Move beyond theory and into action.

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Venue

The location and how you can get there

Address

InterContinental Wellington
2 Grey Street, Wellington Central 

8:30

Registration and Coffee

9:00

Welcome and opening remarks from conference chair

9:10

WorkSafe update: Supporting organisations to manage psychosocial risks

  • An overview of New Zealand’s current psychosocial risk obligations under existing WHS law and WorkSafe guidance

  • Managing psychosocial risks at work – developing New Zealand’s first good practice guidelines

  • Exploring psychosocial risk from a solution point of view – developing interventions and products to embed best practice guidance and address key workplace psychosocial hazards

  • Supporting organisations to pick the best system level interventions

  • The importance of growing maturity to develop a more sophisticated or nuanced approach to psychosocial risk management

9:50

Embedding psychosocial risk as a key organisational priority

  • Identifying the psychosocial hazards our organisations expose workers to and understanding the impact these have on employee wellbeing and enterprise risk

  • How can organisations ensure and demonstrate a strong and proportionate level of accountability for psychosocial risk?

  • Outlining the key psychological frameworks that help organisations to understand and manage their psychosocial risks

  • Bringing psychosocial risk into the critical risk conversation - how do you decide on what is a critical risk and what isn't a critical risk?

  • Examining the interventions, controls and measures that can be put in place to around critical psychosocial risks

  • Tackling the conflation of wellbeing and psychosocial risk – does this have impact on the effectiveness of interventions when wellbeing solutions are implemented as psychosocial risk controls - can they ever be any more than just sticking plasters that don’t address the core risk?

  • Exploring the competitive advantage of being recognised as an organisation that prioritises, promotes and works to achieve workplace mental wellbeing

  • Highlighting the key metrics and indicators used to measure and review the effectiveness of psychosocial health and safety interventions

Dr. Georgi Toma, Director, HeartBrain Works & Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland

10:30

Morning break

11:00

Undertaking assessment of the critical psychosocial risks within your organisation

  • Recognising that the organisation and the way it operates is the main source of its psychosocial risks

  • How do you effectively assess what's a reliable measure of psychosocial risk?

  • Analysing a range of assessment tools and mechanisms to identify psychosocial risks across your operations

  • Undertaking an analysis of your exposure to psychosocial hazard

  • What are the best mechanisms for presenting psychosocial risk assessments and using them for decision making?

  • Identifying the capabilities and skills required to undertake assessments of the critical psychosocial risks facing an organisation

  • Exploring the journey from risk assessment, through hazard identification to intervention and review

11:40

Developing the capability for leaders to address psychosocial risk

  • Recognising the role of leadership in creating a psychologically safe environment and culture

  • How do we train our leaders and managers to understand and manage psychosocial risks in the workplace?

  • Delivering leadership support and training to help leaders develop the skill sets to respond to psychosocial risks within the business

  • Developing the capability to have meaningful conversations with your people and develop the relationships required to understand the needs of your teams

12:20

Case study: Achieving organisational and leadership buy-in to psychosocial risk and wellbeing

  • How can we ensure that psychosocial risk is a top table conversation?

  • How can we better connect the frontline experience of employees and the impact of this on their mental wellbeing with leaderships strategic vision and the priorities of the organisation?

  • Understanding both the impacts of business strategy on frontline wellbeing and the threats to the delivery of strategy that unaddressed psychosocial risks represent for an organisation

  • Integrating psychosocial risks into operational risk management and enterprise risk strategy

12:50

Lunch

1:50

Case study: Developing a psychosocially safe organisational culture

  • Addressing issues around culture and attitudes related to workplace mental wellbeing and psychosocial risk

  • Identifying ways to break down traditional mindsets of what mental health and workplace mental well-being and psychosocial risk are

  • Exploring strategies to build a supportive culture that prioritises mental wellbeing and enables the effective management of psychosocial risk

  • Tackling ‘harden up’ culture and addressing intergenerational and cultural attitudes linked to concepts of stoicism that are often deeply ingrained within Kiwi organisations and reflected in leadership behaviours

  • Identifying allies and influencers that can help make psychosocial risk a part of the conversation in your workforce and drive culture change

  • How do organisations demonstrate their commitment to managing the psychosocial risks to the employees?

  • Identifying your organisational cultures protective factors

2:20

Panel discussion: Everybody’s business - coordinating the role of different teams in the management and prevention of psychosocial risk

  • Assessing current levels of organisational maturity around psychosocial risk

  • Exploring the practical interaction between leaders, HR teams, operational management, risk managers. health & safety practitioners and wellbeing teams around psychosocial risk

  • Where does responsibility lie for psychosocial risk and how do we avoid everyone thinking it’s someone else issue?

  • Understanding how different teams from across an organisation can come together and present an integrated front in managing psychosocial risks

  • How can organisations better operationalise mentally healthy work and communicate psychosocial risks in language that resonates and connects with operational leaders

  • Building the capability and the capacity of frontline teams to manage psychosocial risk

  • Developing HR processes that take a risk management-based approach to managing psychosocial risk

3.00

Afternoon break

3:20

Reducing psychosocial risk by tackling workplace stress and burnout

  • Exploring how human beings respond to stress – why do some people burn out and not others?

  • Identifying the workplace psychosocial factors that can act as predictors of burnout

  • Recognising stressors - How to design solutions to address stressors and reduce potential psychosocial risk employees

  • Understanding the relationship between workload and burnout – exploring potential controls

  • Assessing the role and limitations of staff resilience programmes

  • Applying a mental well-being by design approach to redesigning work in order reduce stress eliminate burnout and improve wellbeing

Sarah McGuinness, Founder and Specialist in Leadership, Burnout Prevention & Sustainable Performance, Revolutionaries of Wellbeing

4:00

Better Work by Design: How to design mentally healthy work

  • Exploring how the Better Work by Design (BWBD) process allows organisations to meet their obligations to identify and manage work-related psychosocial risks and an opportunity to design work so that people thrive and organisations succeed

  • Examining the 5-stage BWBD process that enables the identification and management of work-related factors that either harm or are protective of mental health and wellbeing

  • Analysing the tools available to identify both psychosocial risks and protective factors

  • Engaging workers doing similar work to provide a work-as-done as opposed to a work-as-imagined view of their current work in relation to factors that are harmful to, as well as protective of, their wellbeing

  • Understanding how BWBD acknowledges workers as the experts in their work and its impacts

Dr Hillary Bennett, Partner, Leading Safety Ltd

4:30

Tackling bullying, racism, and sexual harassment

  • Exploring the organisations role is creating safe and respectful workplaces that are free of bullying, racism, and sexual harassment

  • Delivering proactive management of the psychosocial risks associated of harassment and bullying

  • How do you apply that in practice? – analysing a range of practical interventions to address psychosocial harm from bullying and harassment

5:00

Chair's summary remarks and end of conference followed by networking reception

Speakers

Sarah McGuinness

Founder and Specialist in Leadership, Burnout Prevention & Sustainable Performance
Revolutionaries of Wellbeing
I’m the founder of ROW and I’m determined to break burnout culture. I share big ideas, upskill leaders and champions, and guide businesses on how to improve the workplace – for good. I openly share my burnout journey to help others avoid the same experience. I’m still learning to take my own advice (!) so I bring lived experience to this,  alongside my professional expertise. Join the revolution with me.

Dr. Georgi Toma

Director, HeartBrain Works &
Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland
Dr Georgi Toma is a recognised expert in psychosocial risk, workplace wellbeing, and organisational mental health. She is the Director of Heart Brain Works, a consultancy that supports organisations across Australia and New Zealand to manage psychosocial hazards and create mentally healthy workplaces through evidence-based, people-centred strategies. She is also an honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland where she conducts research on occupational stress, burnout, workplace mental health, and psychosocial risk factors — including high workload, poor leadership, emotional demands, and bullying. Georgi’s expertise lies in bridging the gap between research and practice. Over the past decade, Georgi has helped public and private sector clients — including Uber, RMIT University, Hitachi Energy, and Environment Canterbury — to assess psychosocial risks, design targeted interventions, build leadership capability, and strengthen safety culture. She is the creator of the Psychosocial Risk Maturity Scale™, a diagnostic tool that enables organisations to benchmark their systems and practices and plan meaningful improvements. She also developed the Wellbeing Protocol — the only scientifically validated mental health training program in Australia and New Zealand proven to reduce stress and burnout. Research studies conducted by the University of Auckland with teachers and nurses found the Wellbeing Protocol can help reduce stress by up to 58%, burnout by up to 60%, and improve mental wellbeing by up to 103%. Georgi’s approach is anchored in systems thinking, the hierarchy of controls, and current legal frameworks such as ISO 45003 and national WHS legislation. She works closely with WHS, HR, and executive teams to ensure risk management processes are not just compliant, but embedded into how work is designed and led. Known for her clarity, warmth, and deep subject-matter expertise, Georgi is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advisor. Her work is guided by the belief that mentally healthy work isn’t just possible — it’s essential for long-term organisational success, psychological safety, and human dignity.

Dr Hillary Bennett

Partner
Leading Safety Ltd
Hillary has worked as both an internal and external health and safety consultant to a wide range of private, government, and non-government organisations across many sectors in New Zealand and Australia. In 2011, she established Leading Safety with Philip Voss. Hillary has a strong focus on designing mentally healthy work. She developed the Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum guides Mental Health and Wellbeing at Work and Protecting Mental Wellbeing at Work. Both sense-making frameworks have been used extensively in government agencies and private organisations. Hillary is a regular presenter at national and international health and safety forums. In 2019, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the New Zealand Workplace Health and Safety Award

Sponsors

Exhibitors

Geneva Wellbeing

Umbrella Wellbeing

Heart and Brain Works

Clearhead

Supporting Organisation

HASANZ

Umbrella Wellbeing

Umbrella Wellbeing

Umbrella Wellbeing

Umbrella Wellbeing

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DOUBLE PASS

PRICE PER PERSON
$ 1100 + gst Per Person
  • Must be from the same organisation & book at the same time. For valid tickets, payment by 30 July, 2026.

SUPER SAVER

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$1699
$ 1299 + gst
  • For valid ticket, payment by 12 June, 2026.

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$1499
$ 1099 + gst
  • For valid ticket, payment by 12 June, 2026.

DOUBLE PASS

PRICE PER PERSON
$ 1100 + gst Per Person
  • Must be from the same organisation & book at the same time. For valid tickets, payment by 30 July, 2026.

SUPER SAVER

STANDARD
$1699
$ 1299 + gst
  • For valid ticket, payment by 12 June, 2026.

EARLY BIRD

STANDARD
$1699
$ 1499 + gst
  • For valid ticket, payment by 30 June, 2026.

LAST MINUTE

STANDARD
$ 1699 + gst
  • For valid ticket, payment by 30 July, 2026.

Local, Central Govt, NGO & Māori Trusts rate

DOUBLE PASS

PRICE PER PERSON
$ 1100 + gst Per Person
  • Must be from the same organisation & book at the same time. For valid tickets, payment by 30 July, 2026.

SUPER SAVER

LOCAL, CENTRAL GOVT, NGO RATE
$1499
$ 1099 + gst
  • For valid ticket, payment by 12 June, 2026.

EARLY BIRD

LOCAL, CENTRAL GOVT, NGO RATE
$1499
$ 1299 + gst
  • For valid ticket, payment by 30 June, 2026.

LAST MINUTE

LOCAL, CENTRAL GOVT, NGO RATE
$ 1499 + gst
  • For valid ticket, payment by 30 July, 2026.
Registration Conditions

Ticket Terms
All prices are in New Zealand dollars ($NZD)
A surcharge of 2.5% + GST applies to credit card payments on top of the total amount.
Pre-Sale Tickets are valid only for the specific event for which they were purchased and cannot be transferred to other events. To remain valid, Super Saver and Early Bird tickets must be paid by date quoted.
Group ticket options are valid for registrations from the same organisation, booked at the same time.
By selecting any special pricing offer for classes of organisation, sector, or individuals or using any promotion code, you are asserting to the organiser your right to claim any such pricing offer, and acknowledge the organiser’s right to audit such claim and, if in the opinion of the organiser using its sole discretion the conditions for special pricing are not met, reject any registration.

For full terms & conditions, please visit https://www.brightstar.co.nz/terms-and-conditions

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