Motivation Foundation

Motivation Foundation was established as a charity to equip young Australians with the skills and qualifications needed to gain employment in the Civil Construction and Mining sectors. Since 2008, the Foundation has successfully transitioned students into the workforce, fostering the skills and behaviours essential for industry success. Each year, the Foundation educates and supports hundreds of 16 to 19-year-olds through its Civil and Mining academies.

With the introduction of new legislation requiring enhanced psychosocial hazard risk assessments, Motivation Foundation faced the need to update their risk management strategies. The Foundation, which works with young students often classified as ‘youth at risk’, sought to ensure that their trainers and staff were equipped with the necessary tools to engage effectively and maintain a safe and supportive learning environment.

Future Institute facilitated a collaborative session with key stakeholders from Motivation Foundation to identify key challenges related to psychosocial hazards in their organisation. The focus was on understanding the specific needs of their trainers, administration, and management teams.

Our team then developed a tailored training course that addressed these unique challenges, incorporating relevant scenarios, photos, and logos from Motivation Foundation to ensure the content was relatable and engaging. By customising the materials in this way, we ensured that the content resonated with their team, promoting both buy-in and active participation.

The customised course content was specifically designed to help Motivation Foundation’s staff better understand and address the psychosocial hazards they encounter. The course covered:

• Communication Adaptation: Strategies for staff and trainers to adapt their communication styles when engaging with the youth-at-risk demographic.
• Risk Management: Introduction to risk management principles with a focus on identifying and addressing psychosocial hazards in their day-to-day work.

By the end of the workshop:

• Draft Risk Management Plans: The participants had begun drafting a Risk Management Plan as a group, to address the specific psychosocial hazards within their work environment.
• Individual Action Plans: Every participant developed an Individual Action Plan outlining how they would apply the insights from the workshop in their roles, ensuring ongoing focus on safety, communication and engagement.

This tailored, hands-on approach provided Motivation Foundation with the tools to align with the new legislation and foster a safer, more responsive and respectful learning environment for their students.

Motivation Foundation recently partnered with Future Institute of Australia when they facilitated a psychosocial hazards risk assessment workshop at their training centre in Vic Park. The team at Future Institute worked closely with us to fully customise the training session, incorporating our company logo, relevant photos and industry-specific scenarios.

The workshop provided an invaluable opportunity for our entire team to come together for an open and honest conversation about psychological safety and psychosocial hazards in our workplace. Through a series of group activities and discussions, we were able to identify our work-related psychosocial hazards and conduct a thorough risk assessment.

The highlight of the program was the engagement from all levels of our organisation, ensuring everyone understood the legislative requirements and the necessary steps to implement effective changes. By the end of the workshop, we had developed a draft Risk Management Plan focused on reducing psychosocial hazards.

Tim Hunter

CEO, Motivation Foundation