In my 11 years with New Zealand Police and Victoria Police, there was an unofficial rule that everyone understood: you don't talk about how the job affects you. You just get on with it.
The same culture existed when Abbie was working as a paramedic. You attend a distressing incident, you restock the truck, and you take the next call. There was no space for the idea that the work itself might be causing harm, because admitting that felt like admitting you couldn't do the job.
This is what 'toughen up' culture looks like in practice. And it's not unique to emergency services. We see it in every industry we work in.
What 'toughen up' actually does
When an organization, through its leadership, its culture, or its silence, communicates that psychological distress is a personal weakness rather than a workplace issue, three things happen.
Workers stop reporting. They don't raise concerns about workload, conflict, bullying, or emotional demands because they've learned that doing so will be held against them. In policing, raising a psychological concern could affect your operational status. In paramedicine, it could mean being pulled off the road. In both cases, the cost of speaking up was higher than the cost of staying silent, at least in the short term.
Hazards stay invisible. If no one reports, the organisation has no data. If there's no data, there's no risk assessment. If there's no risk assessment, there's no obligation to act. This is how organisations end up in a cycle where they are technically compliant while the actual risk is growing unchecked.
Harm accumulates. Psychosocial hazards don't resolve themselves through silence. A worker dealing with high job demands doesn't become less at risk because they stopped talking about it. A worker being bullied doesn't become safer because they've learned not to report it. The hazard is still there. The only thing that's changed is that the employer can no longer see it.
What I saw as a WorkSafe inspector
When I moved from policing to WorkSafe Victoria as a psychosocial inspector, I expected to see these dynamics mainly in high-risk industries. Emergency services. Construction. Corrections.
I saw them everywhere.
I saw them in professional services firms where junior staff were working 60-hour weeks and treating burnout as a rite of passage. In healthcare settings where nurses were told the emotional toll of patient deaths was 'part of the job.' In local government agencies where bullying by senior managers was an open secret that nobody reported because the complaints process was run by the same people responsible for the behaviour.
The language varied. In policing, it's 'harden up.' In corporate environments, it might be 'that's just how [name] is' or 'you need thicker skin for this industry.' The function is the same: it relocates responsibility from the system to the individual, and it discourages the reporting that would otherwise trigger an employer's obligation to act.
What the law actually requires
Under Australian legislation, employers are required to identify and control psychosocial hazards regardless of whether workers report them. The duty is proactive, not reactive.
You cannot rely on a complaints process as your primary method of hazard identification. If the culture discourages reporting, your complaints process is not measuring risk, it's measuring willingness to speak up, and those are two different things.
Employers are now required to identify psychosocial hazards, assess the risks they create, and implement controls. This means looking at work design, workload, management behaviour, interpersonal conflict, support structures, and all 18 recognised hazard categories, not waiting for someone to be brave enough to fill out a form.
Breaking the cycle
Organisations that genuinely want to manage psychosocial risk need to do three things.
First, create reporting channels that workers trust. This means separation between the complaints process and the people who are often the subject of complaints. It means confidentiality that is real, not theoretical. And it means demonstrated consequences when hazards are identified, workers will not report to a process that they've seen produce no results.
Second, actively look for hazards rather than waiting for them to be reported. Use psychosocial risk assessments, worker consultation, exit interviews, absenteeism data, and turnover patterns. The information is usually there, it's just not being collected or interpreted as psychosocial risk data.
Third, lead differently. The tone is set from the top. If senior leaders treat psychosocial hazards as a real workplace risk, with the same seriousness as a physical safety hazard, the rest of the organisation will follow. If leaders dismiss concerns, minimise distress, or respond to reports with scepticism, that message will carry further than any policy document.
Emergency services have spent decades learning this lesson the hard way. The parliamentary inquiries, the coronial investigations, the compensation data — all of it points to the same conclusion: 'toughen up' is not a control. It is a failure of systems, and it has predictable consequences.
Your workplace doesn't have to repeat that lesson.
Clear Boundaries helps organisations build psychosocial safety systems that work. Contact us if you want to talk about where your organisation stands.