Australian workers stressed and lacking leadership
A 2026 survey of 5600 managers, executives and frontline workers in six countries found that 46 per cent of Australian workers surveyed disagreed that leaders understood their (workers’) challenges. This result put Australia at the top of the six countries surveyed – that is, Australia had the worst result.
The survey, conducted by human resources company Dayforce, records that just 38 per cent of Australian frontline workers surveyed believe company leaders understand the challenges their employees face. This figure is substantially down from the 73 per cent recorded in 2024. That is a substantial decrease. This result shows there may be a growing gap between management perception and frontline reality.
Almost nine in 10 frontline workers surveyed, along with 93 per cent of managers, said shift-level issues had negatively affected their wellbeing. Some two-thirds of workers and 77 per cent of managers said they had considered leaving their job as a result of the negative impact on their wellbeing.
Dayforce, in analysing the results of the survey, concluded Australia’s frontline workers were near “breaking point” identifying that hidden workplace disruptions drove rising costs, risk and workforce strain.
Dayforce found that frontline operations were increasingly dependent on manual workarounds, last-minute adjustments and “in-the-moment” decisions to keep work moving, driving higher costs, increasing compliance risk, and placing “unsustainable pressure” on workers.
Based on a survey of 759 Australian managers, executives and frontline workers, three-quarters of executives and 62 per cent of managers said shift-level disruptions were having at least a moderate impact on financial or operational performance, with 45 per cent of frontline managers reporting these drove the need for overtime.
Some 75 per cent of frontline workers said they relied on manual workarounds sometimes. Also, 63 per cent of executives and managers said they spent at least three hours a week responding to issues instead of improving operations.
“I think the headline is that frontline operations are breaking at the shift level,” said Katerina Hanna, Dayforce’s vice-president of customer success. “In the AI age, disruption is no longer occasional for frontline operations. It’s constant and it’s not contained.”
“What we’re seeing across industries such as retail, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics, for example, is frontline teams keep daily operations running, serving customers, producing goods, delivering services in real time, and most organisations are still managing frontline work with systems and processes that were not built for this kind of real time conditions, or AI-supported decision-making.”
“As a result, what we see happen at the shift level is driving costs up, it’s increasing risk and it’s straining the workforce.”
Stress and lack of leadership an incubator for insider threat
This is a timely report and analysis given the context of stressors on Australia’s workforce in 2026. Worker and manager behaviours are subject to significant drivers from the Commonwealth Government, domestic economic conditions, social fracture, and geopolitical events. None of these drivers look likely to abate any time soon and, Pentagram assesses, are likely to adversely affect Australia for many years.
Pentagram Advisory believes that the incidence of insider threat is increasing in line with the abundance of stress drivers that have shaped Australia from the COVID period to today. The ‘witches brew’ of Australia of domestic drivers – inflation, falling living standards, poor productivity, antisemitism, social fracture, and divisive ineffectual political leadership – and the uncontrollable geopolitical drivers including wars in Europe and the Middle East, oil shock, United States foreign policies, an aggressive China, and a shrivelled Western Europe ultimately impact all workers in Australia.
This scenario of adverse drivers and lack of leadership – at government, company, and manager level – breeds worker disgruntlement and that inevitably leads to a growing risk of insider threat.
The findings also suggest a weakening feedback loop between organisational leadership and frontline workers. Where employees believe leaders do not understand operational realities, workforce pressures, or employee concerns, trust can begin to erode. Over time, diminished trust may reduce employee engagement, willingness to report issues, confidence in leadership decision-making, and broader adherence to organisational values and security culture.
Insider threat should not be viewed solely as a cybersecurity issue. It is fundamentally a human risk and organisational resilience issue.
Importantly, not all insider threats originate from malicious intent. In many cases, stressed, disengaged, financially pressured, or psychologically vulnerable workers become more susceptible to mistakes, manipulation, coercion, or exploitation by criminal actors.
Insider threat can be intentional. Workers subject to the drivers described might decide to harm the company. They might steal a laptop to sell because they need money to pay the mortgage or they might damage a critical item or process to cause harm because they did not win a promotion.
Insider threat can be unintentional. The worker might be overly tired – working overtime because of operational disruption, staffing shortages, or increased administrative burden created by poorly integrated technologies and AI-enabled systems – or they might be disgruntled and so not complete a software patching task because they are determined to finish work at programmed ‘knock-off’ time, or they just may not care enough to follow normal security protocols after clicking on a likely phishing email. They might talk about confidential work issues, such as security weaknesses, at the pub after work and that is overheard by local criminals who then plan the break-in.
Over time, workforce strain can erode security culture. Employees under persistent operational pressure are less likely to follow security procedures consistently, more likely to bypass controls to “get the job done”, and less likely to report suspicious behaviour or security concerns.
Mitigating insider threat starts at the top.
For critical infrastructure entities, these workforce pressures can have consequences extending beyond business disruption, potentially affecting essential services, supply chains, and national resilience.
Leaders need to understand the context of their operating environment, understand how geopolitical and domestic events can impact their workforce and suppliers, formally assess threat and risk, and come to understand that insider threat at some level exists in their workplace. Leaders then need to decide what to do, what action to take, to understand their workforce and design workplace culture and security programs that will best mitigate insider threat and respond to it should the insider-linked risks be realised.
Organisations should consider:
- assessing insider threat as part of enterprise security risk management
- identifying workforce stress indicators and operational pressure points
- improving manager awareness of behavioural and wellbeing indicators
- strengthening reporting cultures and psychological safety
- reviewing workforce screening and ongoing suitability processes
- integrating insider threat considerations into broader CIRMP and security governance frameworks.
Organisations that treat insider threat solely as a malicious actor problem may miss the broader issue emerging across modern workplaces. Workforce strain, operational disruption, disengagement, and declining trust can all contribute to increased human risk exposure. Understanding and addressing these conditions early is becoming an essential component of organisational resilience and security governance.
Insider threat mitigation starts with your people.
