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WISE Workplace WISE Workplace has been providing investigations and advise on workplace misconduct since 2002.

We only employ experienced professionals who are all leaders in their respective fields through expertise and their industry contributions. WISE Workplace provides specialist lawyers, mediators, HR consultants and investigators to manage the task of investigating and resolving workplace complaints, conduct disciplinary investigations and mediations. With a highly skilled workforce the company also provides nationally recognised training programs across Australia on conducting workplace investigations and managing complaints. Following a merger with LKA Group in 2014 WISE Workplace now offers its services in Victoria, Tasmania, WA, Queensland, NSW, SA and the ACT becoming the only specialist firm to offer locally serviced workplace investigations on a national basis. Vince Scopelliti, our Managing Director is a practicing solicitor who has specialised in the investigations industry for the past 25 years. Vince has expertise in Australia and internationally in fraud, corruption and the management of serious misconduct and managing large investigations teams. Our combined network of specialist workplace investigators across the country enables our business to ensure you have access to a more diverse highly experienced and qualified practitioners in your specialist industry nationally. Our practitioner include:

• Investigators
• Lawyers
• Mediators
• HR Consultants

Our offices are located in Sydney, ACT, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart & Perth

Specialties
Workplace Investigations, Mediations, Bullying, Harassment and Discrimination, Child Protection, Fraud, Corruption and Whistleblowing, Ethical Conduct, Investigation Training

Did you know that most mental health risk never shows up in your claims data?Sedgwick's 2026 Mental Health Absence guide...
14/10/2026

Did you know that most mental health risk never shows up in your claims data?

Sedgwick's 2026 Mental Health Absence guide, reported by HRD this week, found mental health-related absences across its Australian client organisations rose 35% year-on-year. Short-term absences make up roughly 90% of cases. These are the quiet sick days that rarely become a workers' compensation claim but steadily erode productivity.

The leading cause is bullying and harassment, at 33%, ahead of work pressure at 24%.

That matters. By the time a psychological injury claim is lodged, the median cost is around $67,000 and median time off is roughly 35.7 weeks. In NSW, the psychosocial hazards code is now legally enforceable, so failing to act carries prosecution risk.

If culture is the problem, absence data will tell you something is wrong, but not what.

That's where an independent cultural review earns its place. WISE Workplace's Cultural Reviews are designed to pinpoint the issues behind a loss of trust, give employees a genuine voice, and deliver practical recommendations to restore a healthy culture. As specialists in workplace behaviour and investigations, they bring the independence these issues demand.

Don't wait for the claim. Find out what's driving the absence.

https://loom.ly/ykGLx2w

New absence data reveals the bulk of mental health risk is accumulating well before a formal claim is lodged – and most of it never shows up in claims reporting at all

22/09/2026

The Fair Work Commission has launched a Workplace Sexual Harassment Complaint Options Tool, developed with the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Australian Human Rights Commission.

It asks simple yes/no and multiple-choice questions — about criminal conduct, timeframes, the kind of help someone is after — then sets out the available pathways in plain language. Because in most circumstances a person can only choose one pathway, and each has different rules, time limits and outcomes, that clarity matters.

It arrives alongside reports of a widening gap between WSH claims received and finalised. If matters are taking longer to resolve externally, the case for strong internal resolution capability only gets stronger.

Dealing with workplace sexual harassment can be complicated, involve challenging conflicts of interest, power differentials, and psychosocial hazards. In many circumstances, organisations require external support, independent investigations and expert advice. If your organisation needs assistance, get WISE!

https://loom.ly/aCAzKY0

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21/09/2026

The Queensland Industrial Relations Commission has upheld a hospital's decision to suspend an employee without pay while he faces criminal charges over an alleged workplace assault.

The facts as reported set out that in late March 2024, Central West Hospital and Health Service received reports that a registered graduate nurse had allegedly sexually assaulted a colleague in nurses' accommodation at Barcaldine Hospital. The employer initially suspended him with pay. After Queensland Police charged him on four counts, it issued a show cause notice on moving to suspension without pay.

The employee's position was that the charges were unproven and untested. Commissioner Peter O'Neill found that beyond that denial, the employee had provided no information (having exercised his right to silence) that would shift the employer's reasonable belief that he might be liable to discipline.

The right to silence in a criminal matter is absolute and properly exercised. But it doesn't pause the employer's own risk assessment. The two processes run on different standards, different evidence and different clocks.

The intersection between criminal and employment law matters can be complex. Dealing with challenging workplace matters? Get WISE!

https://loom.ly/p6EaoLg

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16/09/2026

VCAT has ordered a Melbourne franchising company and its CEO to pay more than $70,000 in damages to a young former employee, in a decision that should worry any organisation without a reporting pathway independent of its executive.

The facts are stark. She was 22 and worked there for about three months in 2022; he was around 62. Tribunal Member Stuart Webb described the conduct as of a "predatory and grooming" nature. The tribunal found he had sought to influence her with promises of benefits and monetary bonuses, and had isolated her from colleagues by requiring one-on-one meetings in his office that could have been held remotely.

But the finding HR practitioners should sit with is structural. There was no independent human resources person or process available to receive a complaint. The only person senior enough to act was the person the complaint was about.
Under Victoria's Equal Opportunity Act, an employer is vicariously liable for harassment by its people unless it proves it took reasonable precautions to prevent it. Here there was no evidence of any.

How the matter was then run compounded the harm. The company failed to comply with tribunal directions for almost three years, and VCAT found the delays worsened the former employee's anxiety.

The lessons?

Grooming behaviour is visible before it is provable. Patterns associated with grooming may be observable before an organisation has sufficient evidence to establish misconduct; escalating one-on-one meetings without business rationale, unexplained preferential treatment, isolation from peers. These are observable patterns, not private matters.
A reporting line that terminates at the alleged perpetrator is not a reporting line. Every organisation needs a pathway that bypasses the executive entirely.

Need assistance dealing with complaints, concerns or allegations about executive leadership? Get WISE!

https://loom.ly/sY_uXlI

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Worker sacking unrelated In a decision handed down on 26 August 2026, the Court dismissed a probationary employee's clai...
14/09/2026

Worker sacking unrelated In a decision handed down on 26 August 2026, the Court dismissed a probationary employee's claim that she was unlawfully sacked by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. She had raised grievances about a senior colleague, described the treatment as bullying, and asked HR how to lodge a stop-bullying claim with the Fair Work Commission before her dismissal in August 2024.

The sequence decided it. The court found her supervisor had resolved to end the probation by around 12.30pm on 26 July 2024, and set out her reasons in an email to an HR colleague and a senior manager that same lunchtime. The worker's stop-bullying email was sent at 9.36pm that night, and the supervisor did not learn of it until 29 July. A decision already made could not have been driven by something the decision-maker had not yet seen. The judge described that lunchtime email as "powerful contemporaneous evidence" of the real reasons.

This is what discharging the reverse onus looks like. In a general protections claim, once a protected reason is raised, the employer must prove it played no part in the decision. The agency did not get everything right — its termination letter contained a factual error about the worker's conduct, which the court accepted was an honest mistake. Because the remaining concerns were genuine, it did not undo the decision.

Whether you're dealing with grievances, allegations of bullying or unfair dismissals, it is essential to have the right team by your side. Get WISE!

https://loom.ly/rRW62ZQ

A lunchtime email captured the decision hours before the stop-bullying request

When employee surveys show low trust in leadership, the instinctive response is to communicate more. More town halls, mo...
14/09/2026

When employee surveys show low trust in leadership, the instinctive response is to communicate more. More town halls, more updates, more visibility. It rarely moves the number.

Trust in leadership is built on whether people believe what they raise will be acted on. Workers form that judgment from evidence — what happened the last time someone spoke up about a difficult manager, whether the complaint went anywhere, whether anything visibly changed. If the answer has been "nothing," no amount of messaging will shift it.
This is why trust deficits so often surface first in unrelated data: turnover in one team, a spike in personal leave, complaints that arrive already escalated. By the time it appears in an engagement survey, it has usually been visible elsewhere for a while.

The organisations that repair it tend to do the unglamorous thing first. They look honestly at what their own processes have taught people to expect, and they close the gap between stated values and lived experience — starting with the cases they got wrong.
That work is hard to do from inside, because the people best placed to assess it are part of what's being assessed.
Wise Workplace is a leading provider of workplace cultural reviews nationwide. Is your organisation seeking to understand and address trust and culture issues in their workforce? Get WISE!

If your engagement data is showing low trust, the survey result is often only the starting point. A well-designed culture review can help identify what employees have learned from their actual experience of speaking up and what needs to change. Get Wise!

https://loom.ly/VqphTJI

New report urges leaders to be transparent on changes

This month, seven men were arrested as Victoria Police investigate alleged fraudulent conduct involving Greater Sheppart...
22/07/2026

This month, seven men were arrested as Victoria Police investigate alleged fraudulent conduct involving Greater Shepparton City Council and a local business between 2022 and 2026. Detectives executed search warrants in mid-June; parties were interviewed and released pending further inquiries. No charges have been laid, and the allegations remain untested.

But for anyone responsible for governance, the most instructive detail isn't the arrests; it's how the matter surfaced. The council's own internal governance and financial processes identified concerns in 2025. The council then referred the matter to Victoria Police itself, with its CEO describing the referral as consistent with its obligations and commitment to accountability.

The sequence of detecting internally, investigating properly and referring appropriately, is exactly how these matters should unfold. Consider the alternative: alleged conduct spanning four years coming to light through a whistleblower, an auditor, or the media instead. The reputational and financial difference between an organisation that found it and an organisation that missed it is enormous.

Fraud and corruption rarely announce themselves. They surface as anomalies - things like procurement patterns, invoice irregularities, conflicts nobody declared. Once identified, how organisations respond becomes critical. . Engaging Wise Workplace immediately ensures independence, preserved evidence, procedural fairness and defensible outcomes. Dealing with red flags that indicate fraud or corruption in your workplace? Get WISE!

https://loom.ly/tpMhOxY

The men were arrested by detectives as part of an ongoing investigation after a council in Victoria's north says it referred alleged fraud involving council employees to police.

Earlier this month, the Fair Work Commission handed employers a reminder that contract drafting does real work. Three cl...
21/07/2026

Earlier this month, the Fair Work Commission handed employers a reminder that contract drafting does real work. Three cleaners engaged by the ACT's Education Directorate argued that when their contracts expired in January 2026, they had effectively been dismissed. They'd been hired as a temporary "surge" workforce to cover permanent staff clearing a leave backlog, then extended once when the program ran long. They argued the rolling extensions, the ongoing nature of the work, and the fact that colleagues on identical contracts were offered permanency gave them a reasonable expectation of continuing employment.

The Commission disagreed. Under the Fair Work Act, there is no dismissal where employment for a specified period ends at the close of that period. The contracts were explicit: titled temporary, clear end dates, an express statement that employment ended at term, and language ruling out any expectation of ongoing work. The workers never claimed they didn't understand those terms. The general protections applications failed at the jurisdictional gate, as such, the fairness arguments were never reached.

The lesson cuts both ways. Clear fixed-term drafting held up even after an extension. But strip out those express terms, or undermine them with casual "we'll probably keep you on" conversations, and the reasonable-expectation argument becomes far harder to defeat. What your managers say between contracts matters as much as what the contracts say.

Managing fixed-term arrangements, extensions and endings well takes deliberate process. Wise Workplace can help you get it right.

https://loom.ly/4qFRgd4

Three cleaners argued rolling contracts gave them a right to stay. The Commission tested that claim

20/07/2026

A recent Fair Work Commission decision is a timely warning for every employer who has ever watched an upset employee walk out the door.

The case involved a pick packer who complained after being required to take annual leave — and found herself accused of misconduct for raising it. Distressed, she left the workplace. Before she had even arrived home, her employer emailed to "accept her resignation." When she replied disputing that she had ever resigned, the employer simply disregarded it.

The Commission described the employer's conduct as "remarkable" — and not as a compliment. Deputy President Cross found the employer had effectively dismissed her, rejecting arguments that she had voluntarily resigned.

The principle is well established: a resignation given in the heat of the moment, or in genuine distress, may not be a resignation at all. An employer who rushes to lock it in risks converting an ambiguous exit into an unfair dismissal at their own initiative.

The safer path is the opposite instinct: pause, allow a cooling-off period, and confirm the employee's true intention once emotions have settled. Document the process, not just the outcome.

Unclear or disputed resignations sit at the intersection of procedure, evidence and human distress; exactly where employers most often get it wrong. If you're navigating one, Wise Workplace can help you get the process right before it becomes a claim.

Contested or unclear resignations? Get WISE!

https://loom.ly/FfVDUf4

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Carlton, VIC
3053

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Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

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