Dr Tracy Westerman’s 

MANAGING CULTURAL LOAD, CULTURAL STRESS IN THE WORKPLACE – AN INDIGENOUS WORKER RETENTION PROGRAM

DARWIN – March 18th & 19th, 2025, PERTH – April 3rd & 4th, 2025, BRISBANE – May 13th & 14th, 2025,

TOWNSVILLE – May 15th & 16th, 2025, MELBOURNE – May 28th & 29th, 2025, SYDNEY – June 3rd & 4th, 2025,

ADELAIDE – June 19th & 20th, 2025

$2,500 per person

$2,200 per person early bird

5% discount for group bookings

With words like cultural safety, cultural security, and cultural load get thrown around so much but what do they mean for Aboriginal people in the workplace. With up to 42% of Aboriginal workers experiencing racism in the workplace and racism costing Australia up to $45B each year through productivity loss, this program goes beyond awareness. It ensures that workers have the essential skills to understand how to navigate cultural load created not only by managing workplaces but also external family and community demands, and cultural obligations.  Dr Tracy Westerman AM, one of Australia’s leading psychologists unpacks the evidence on what causes cultural load and takes a unique psycho-educative approach for participants to develop vital skills to ensure safety and security in the workplace but also at home and community.

As a multi-award-winning psychologist who has accumulated over 25 years of practice with high-risk Aboriginal clients – Dr Westerman’s approach is about strategies that work. It is about ensuring that participants walk away with increased insight into the stressors in their workplaces but also how to address these issues at an individual and organisational level.  This is what separates Dr Westerman’s work from the rest of the field. As a psychologist, she understands the complex and challenging process of behavioural change. As an Aboriginal person, she understands the layers to cultural stress that exist and which contribute to burnout, that keep individuals and organisations stuck in behaviours that lead to continued poor outcomes.

This training is psycho-educative: it is about behavioural change.  You will:

• Complete the Cultural Needs Scale (CNS) that provides an individual plan to manage workforce cultural stress and load
• Understand the issues that contribute to cultural load and cultural stress and develop insight into when I am moving into the ‘danger zone’ of stress
• Strategies to manage cultural stress. Dealing with humbugging and how my individual coping mechanisms are identified as blockers to change
• Managing my mood and identifying culturally related depression; anxiety (nerves) and how community demands on my work are managed
• Managing cultural dilemmas-what happens when my work role conflicts with my cultural role
• How cultural identity impacts – how do mainstream work environment create an additional layer of stress
• Practical strategies on how to ensure health and wellbeing at work and home. This also includes information on how to monitor your health and wellbeing and a comprehensive self-care plan.
• Participants will be provided with strategies to cope more effectively with these situations.
• How to increase retention of Aboriginal people in the workplace.
• Learn why current recruitment practice fail to correctly talent identify due to cultural bias