The ten seconds after something racist happens at work
Someone says someting in a meeting. It lands badly. The room goes guiet, and the moment passes.
Those ten seconds come up in nearly every conversation we have about racism at work. People remember the silence more clearly than they remember the comment.
Racism at work is now a safety question, not just a values one
Safe Work Australia treats racism as a psychosocial hazard. Under work health and safety law, that puts a duty on an employer to do what’s reasonably practicable about it, the same as any other risk on site.
In Victoria, the positive duty under the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 already covers race. A positive duty means acting before someone complains, not just responding after.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework, released in November 2024, recommends the same duty apply federally.
For a People and Culture team, this changes what you need to be able to show. Most organisations can already point to their values statement. What’s harder to put in front of a board, a regulator, or someone who’s just made a complaint is a reasonable step you actually took. A training day on its own doesn’t answer that. Something that changes what people do afterwards, with data behind it, gives you something real to point at.
What Australian workers actually report
Diversity Council Australia (DCA) surveyed 1,547 workers for its Racism at Work report.
“43% of racially marginalised workers said racism was common or very common in their workplace. Among racially privileged workers, describing the same workplaces, the figure was 18%.”- Diversity Council Australia, Racism at Work, 2022
Same offices. Both groups answering honestly. The answers don’t match, and the gap is where this whole things starts.
The part of this market nobody publishes
Anti-racism as a category is barely tested. A systematic review covering studies published between 2000 and 2022 found 8 peer-reviewed evaluations. Two of those followed anyone up afterwards.
We’re not going to call this whole category evidence-based. That would be a bigger claim than the research supports.
What does hold up is confrontation as a skill people can learn, and practising it out loud as the way they build it. That’s the part we’ve built on.
Speak Up, and where it sits in something bigger
We're piloting a half-day session called Speak Up, built around those ten seconds. It's practice-based: people run real workplace situations out loud, get them wrong, and go again, then put a real request to someone who can act on it before they leave the room.
Speak Up isn't the whole answer to racism at work, and we don't sell it as one. It's the first piece of a longer program we're building, one that eventually works on three things:
what people say to each other in the moment;
how one real decision actually gets made inside the organisation;
and whether any of that is still holding a year later.
Speak Up is the piece we built first because it's the one that stands on its own without the rest of the program existing yet. It teaches one skill, well, to the point people can use it under pressure. It doesn't touch how decisions get made higher up, and it won't fix a workplace on its own. That's the next layer, and it's further down the road, built once this first piece is proven with real cohorts.
We think that order matters. A lot of anti-racism work starts by trying to change how everyone thinks before anyone's practised what to say out loud. We're starting with the second one, because it's the one people can actually rehearse.
Where we're at
The design is ready. It hasn't been run with real people in a real room yet. That's the reason we're inviting a small number of organisations to pilot it with us, at a reduced rate, with the measurement built in from day one rather than added later.
The full detail, what the session covers, what we're asking of a pilot partner, and how to register interest, is on the Anti-Racism at Work page.
FAQs
Does WHS law actually require anti-racism training specifically?
No. The duty is to manage racism as a psychosocial hazard using whatever's reasonably practicable, and training is one control among several, not a legal checkbox on its own. What a session like this gives you is a documented, outcome-measured step inside that broader process, not the whole process.
Is there good evidence that anti-racism training works?
Not much, and we'd rather say that than oversell it. The category has very few peer-reviewed evaluations with follow-up data. What's better evidenced is the specific skill of interpersonal confrontation, and rehearsal as the way to build it, which is why we've built this pilot around that rather than a broader awareness day.
What does "reasonably practicable" actually look like for racism?
Safe Work Australia sets out practical examples on its own site. A workplace culture where racism visibly isn't tolerated, backed by policies applied consistently rather than case by case. Clear reporting channels, including an anonymous one, with staff trained to actually receive a report and respond to it. Protection from retaliation for the person who reports. And regular review of whether any of that is working, with the ones that aren't replaced rather than left in place. It’s the same process you'd run for any other workplace hazard, applied here.
Building this with us
We’re looking for a small number of organisations to run the first Speak Up sessions with us, at a reduced rate, with the measurement built from day one.
