When did running a business become a compliance job?

One in twenty. That's how many had heard of it.

I was standing in a room full of tradies and SME business owners recently when I asked a simple question: Has anyone heard about the new psychological safety obligations for their workplace?

One hand went up.

Then I asked a second question. As business owners, how many different things are you expected to be across right now, just to keep the doors open?

The room laughed. Not because it was funny, because everyone felt it.

Because this is what running a business actually looks like. 

• Paying wages. 

• Keeping staff and clients happy. 

• Finding work. 

• Delivering quality. 

• Managing tax, super, licensing, safety, insurance and compliance. 

• Then trying to carve out enough time to still enjoy the thing you built in the first place.

Most business owners are already carrying more than one person reasonably can.

And as of last December, there’s another responsibility on the pile.

Victorian employers now have a legal duty to proactively manage psychological safety in the workplace, including risks like bullying, harassment, aggression and unsustainable workloads. It now sits within workplace safety obligations alongside physical hazards.

To support employers, WorkSafe Victoria released a compliance guide. It runs to 112 pages.

Nineteen of the twenty business owners in that room had no idea it existed. Not because they were careless. Because they were busy being good operators.

That’s the part worth saying plainly: the obligations of running a business only ever increase. Nothing gets taken off the list. Every year there’s more to understand, more to document and more to prove.

And some of the very things businesses are now required to manage, like high job demands, poor support, role overload and unreasonable work pressures, are often the same pressures business owners themselves are living under.

The irony is hard to ignore.

Owners are being asked to identify, document and reduce psychosocial risks for their teams while often carrying enormous personal pressure with very little structured support of their own.

Which raises a fair question. Who is looking after the business owner? What support do they have in place? A network, family, peers, advisors, systems, professional support, time away from the business or even just someone who understands the weight of the responsibility?

We’ve quietly built a system that expects business owners to also be compliance officers, HR managers and workplace safety specialists. Most never signed up for any of those jobs. They signed up to build something valuable and do good work.

Which means you can genuinely care about your staff, run a responsible business and still miss something.

Not through negligence. Through capacity.

That is exactly where management liability insurance matters. 

A well-structured policy exists for the gap between doing your best and a rulebook that keeps changing. Depending on the cover, it may respond to statutory liability matters, employment practices claims and the legal defence costs that can come with investigations or alleged breaches.

And those defence costs alone can place enormous pressure on a small business long before any wrongdoing is established.

It’s also important to be realistic about what management liability insurance is and isn’t.

It does not cover deliberate or reckless conduct, nor should it. It is designed for inadvertent mistakes, misunderstandings and situations where a business owner simply didn’t know something had changed. Cover also varies significantly between insurers, which makes policy wording far more important than the brochure.

The new psychological safety obligations are just the latest example of how quickly the landscape shifts. The requirements themselves are reasonable and well-intentioned. But they still arrived in a room full of capable business owners where only one person knew they existed.

And there will be another change after this. There always is.

And this is not theoretical. WorkSafe Victoria has already prosecuted matters involving workplace bullying and psychological health risks. In one example, a signage company and its director were convicted and fined over the long-term bullying of a subcontractor, with the court hearing the company’s bullying procedures were inadequate and workers had not been properly trained. These are the types of matters that can move quickly from a workplace issue to an investigation, hearing, legal defence cost and serious financial pressure. 

The pile only grows.

No business owner can realistically keep up with every obligation while also running the business itself. The smarter approach is not pretending otherwise. It’s making sure that when something inevitably slips through, the consequences don’t fall entirely on you and the business you’ve spent years building.

That is what protecting a business really looks like.

Not perfect compliance with an ever-expanding rulebook, but building resilience for the reality of running a business in the modern world.

If you’re unsure whether your current cover would respond to a situation like this, including the legal defence costs that can come with OHS investigations, hearings or employment-related claims, it’s a conversation worth having before you need the answer, not after.

Jasmin Gabrielli
Director, Sage Insurance

Source: WorkSafe Victoria, Psychological Health Compliance Code (Edition 1, September 2025); OHS (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025, effective 1 December 2025.