Health and safety professionals are often told that our job is to “speak up,” “raise concerns,” and “challenge unsafe practice.” It’s written into our role descriptions, our professional codes, and our legislation. In New Zealand, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) expects us to influence, advise, and help PCBUs understand their duties. But here’s the part no one says out loud:

Speaking up can come with consequences – real ones.
Not just awkward conversations.
Not just tension.
But retaliation, exclusion, hostility, and psychological harm.

And it happens far more often than the industry admits.

Why Speaking Up Is So Hard – Even When It’s the Right Thing to Do

Research shows that “speaking up” is universally recognised as essential for safety, yet it is also poorly defined, inconsistently supported, and often punished in practice. A 2023 systematic review found that although speaking up is promoted as a safety behaviour, professionals frequently hesitate due to fear of negative consequences, unclear expectations, and organisational culture barriers.

Another review identified four categories of factors that influence whether people speak up: individual, relational, contextual, and organisational. These include fear of damaging relationships, lack of psychological safety, power dynamics, and leadership behaviour.

In other words:
It’s not a personal failing when speaking up feels risky. It’s a systems issue.

Retaliation Is Real – And It’s Not Always Loud

Retaliation doesn’t always look like yelling or formal warnings.
More often, it looks like:

• Being excluded from conversations
• Being labelled “difficult” or “negative”
• Leaders avoiding you
• Colleagues withdrawing
• Subtle undermining
• Being overloaded with work
• Being shut out of decision‑making

These behaviours are well‑documented in international research on “safety voice” and workplace speaking‑up dynamics. Studies show that when leadership is passive or transactional, workers are more likely to experience hostile responses to safety concerns, which suppresses future speaking up and harms wellbeing.

The NZ Context: A Culture of ‘She’ll Be Right’ Meets HSWA

New Zealand’s safety landscape is unique.
We have:

• A strong legislative framework
• A cultural tendency toward avoiding conflict
• High‑risk industries
• Tight‑knit workplaces where relationships matter deeply

This creates a tension:
HSWA expects clarity and courage, but Kiwi culture often rewards quiet compliance.

When H&S professionals challenge unsafe norms, they can quickly become “the problem,” even when they’re trying to solve one.

What We Are Actually Responsible For

As H&S professionals, our responsibility is to:

• Identify and communicate risks
• Provide competent advice
• Influence leaders
• Support worker engagement
• Advocate for safer systems
• Escalate when necessary

But we are not responsible for:

• Forcing leaders to care
• Absorbing organisational dysfunction
• Sacrificing our wellbeing
• Staying in environments that punish integrity

This distinction matters.

When Speaking Up Becomes Unsafe for You

There is a point where the moral duty to speak up collides with the psychological harm of staying in a toxic environment.

Research on Freedom to Speak Up Guardians in the UK shows that even trained professionals tasked with supporting speaking up experience emotional strain, burnout, and distress when organisations fail to respond constructively to concerns.

If the system is punishing you for doing your job, the problem is not you.
It’s the system.

How to Know It’s Time to Walk Away

Here are the signs:

• You’re being isolated or undermined
• Your concerns are consistently dismissed
• You’re losing sleep or dreading work
• You’re being pressured to stay silent
• You’re experiencing anxiety, burnout, or moral injury
• You no longer feel psychologically safe

When the cost of staying outweighs the impact you can make, leaving is not failure – it’s self‑preservation.

Practice What We Preach

We tell workers to speak up.
We tell leaders to listen.
But we rarely talk about what happens when the people responsible for safety are punished for doing exactly what the system expects of them.

So here it is, said plainly:

You cannot save an organisation that does not want to be saved.
And you should never sacrifice your mental wellbeing for a workplace that retaliates against integrity.

Your duty is to safety – including your own.

Additional Reading

Noort, Reader & Gillespie (2019) — Safety Voice Systematic Review https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753518306130

O’Donovan & McAuliffe (2020) — Psychological Safety & Speaking Up Interventions https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7011517/

Van Dongen et al. (2024) — Influencing Factors in Speaking Up https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-024-11390-4

Pandolfo, Reader & Gillespie (2024) — Safety Listening Review https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20413866241245276  

Noort, Reader & Gillespie (2019) — Additional Access Point https://colab.ws/articles/10.1016/j.ssci.2019.04.039