For most of the past decade, contact centre leaders have lived and died by the same familiar numbers, including handle time, adherence, conversion and cost per contact. Those measures still matter and they are not going away, but they are no longer the whole conversation. Regulators, boards, and the public are now also asking a harder question; is the workload itself sustainable for the people doing it. That question is starting to carry as much weight as any productivity number.
In Australia, the law has caught up, and more importantly, so has enforcement. As of this year, every Australian jurisdiction has explicit psychosocial risk regulation in force. The Commonwealth Code of Practise on managing psychosocial hazards took effect in late 2024, and Comcare has named the area an enforcement priority for the current period. This will see regulators across the country stepping up activity in 2026 as they are now using the powers they have been given.
The hazards named in those laws will feel familiar to anyone who's spent time in the contact centre, taking in high job demands, emotional labour, low job control, intrusive monitoring, customer aggression, fatigue and poorly managed change. A lot of what the industry has long described as "part of the job" is now classified as a foreseeable workplace hazard that organisations are legally required to identify, assess, and control.
Why the board is paying attention now
Regulation is one reason, reputational stakes are the other, and they are arguably the louder of the two.
When something goes seriously wrong in an Australian workplace today, it does not stay behind closed doors. It becomes a regulator review, a media headline, a parliamentary question and an investor concern. Recent tragedies in Australian corporate life have made very clear that the distance between an employee wellbeing failure and a full-blown brand crisis is short, and boards have taken note.
The potential for reputational and financial damage has reframed the contact centre risk profile. Once you accept that the operating model itself can create foreseeable harm, the things that used to sit on a CX scorecard, including queue length, occupancy, monitoring intensity and KPI design, suddenly belong on the risk register as well.
Why support programs alone will not satisfy a regulator
When wellbeing becomes a compliance question, the instinct is usually to do more of what already exists. That tends to mean another round of training, more promotion of the Employee Assistance Programme, perhaps a mental health awareness week.
These remain necessary steps, but they are no longer enough on their own. Australian regulators have been clear that the expectation is to fix the work itself, not just support the worker through it. A safety regulator looking at a centre with high attrition and rising stress claims will want to know what changed in the design of the work, not how many people downloaded the wellbeing app.
That is a real shift for an industry whose operating logic for twenty years has been built around efficiency. Efficiency still counts, but now it must coexist with safety, and the operating model has to demonstrate both.
Melissa Sutton, a contact centre, CX and operations executive, who recently led a customer experience centre at a large Australian insurer, has seen this play out repeatedly, "The biggest misconception I see is that awareness training moves the needle on psychological safety in a contact centre. It doesn't, not at scale. Awareness training has its place, but it is one piece of a much larger puzzle. What actually shifts the dial is operating model design, how work flows and queues are managed, how much genuine autonomy agents have over their day. Control and visibility are the architecture of a psychologically safe environment. Without them, everything else is just policy."
What redesigning the work actually looks like
The good news for leaders is that the technologies that drove the efficiency era can also be turned to making the work itself more sustainable for the people doing it, and three shifts in particular are making a real difference.
The first is making stress visible at scale. For decades, leaders have known agents were under pressure but had no consistent way to see it in real time. As Sutton observes, "I've seen well-resourced, well-meaning leadership teams be completely disconnected from what agents were actually experiencing on a Monday afternoon at peak queue time. That disconnect is the risk."
Now, AI-driven analysis of acoustic properties in voice interactions can detect emotional intensity, customer aggression and friction in the moment, on both sides of the conversation. Verint's CX/EX Scoring Bot, for example, gives a supervisor the ability to reach out to an agent after a particularly heavy call, offer a few minutes to reset and acknowledge that the work is hard. Five minutes is not a long time, but as an intervention, it can be the difference between an agent finishing the day and not.
The second is reducing cognitive load. A contact centre agent handling a complex customer conversation is also navigating regulatory prompts, product information, security checks and case history. Real-time guidance that surfaces the right knowledge at the right moment shares that mental load. It improves performance, yes, but more importantly it reduces the constant low-level pressure of having to remember everything, all the time, while staying composed for the customer.
The third is giving agents some control. Lack of control is one of the most consistently identified drivers of workplace stress, and contact centres have historically offered very little of it. According to Verint's 2026 State of Agent Experience report, nine out of 10 agents say schedule flexibility directly impacts job satisfaction. Letting agents move a shift, finish early or accommodate something at home without a negotiation has a measurable impact on wellbeing, and in our experience of deploying Verint's TimeFlex Bot, it actually improves schedule adherence rather than damaging it.
Human sustainability is the new operating model
All three shifts come back to the same idea. What a customer experiences during an interaction with a contact centre is shaped, moment by moment, by what the agent is experiencing. That makes wellbeing a design problem, and design problems are the ones organisations actually know how to solve.
The organisations that will lead in CX over the next decade will not be the ones that squeezed the most output from their people. They will be the ones that worked out how to use human effort sustainably, at scale, in a way that holds up under regulatory and public scrutiny and the test of time.
The industry has spent twenty years getting better and better at one half of that equation. The work ahead is to become just as good at the other.