Generative AI is transforming work through increased productivity, enhanced learning, and greater innovation. Beyond these benefits, GenAI can support workplace mental wellbeing by handling repetitive tasks, customizing wellness routines, and facilitating collaborative problem-solving. However, organizations must carefully implement this technology with clear guidelines and training to maximize benefits while minimizing negative impacts. This report examines Australian workers' experiences to help leaders deploy GenAI strategies that improve workforce mental wellbeing.

This study was the first in Australia to investigate the impact of flexible work on industrial relations. We identified the need to reset our idea of normal work to be flexible work, to restore worker wellbeing, and to reframe the flexibility value proposition to reflect an understanding of what’s important to workers.

Hybrid working 2.0 affords us more than the opportunity to optimise the comparative advantage of location-differentiated work. It opens the door to reimagining work. Through humanising the office, we can amplify collaboration, connection and belonging. Hybrid working has the potential to unlock human potential.

Analysis of the Australian workforce reveals that digital skills are a baseline competency, not a point of difference for workers in the digital economy. From collaboration, empathy and social skills to entrepreneurial skills, these social competencies are less vulnerable to being displaced by AI and automation.

With the inexorable rise of machines, to continue to dedicate people solely to routine work has diminishing returns, especially when the human competitive advantage – our ability to navigate and understand the unknown – is the organisation’s best asset. Productivity will no longer be the most valuable measure of human work. Rather, it is creativity. Creativity is a core component of value. And while innovation is the process that drives creativity, increasingly, it is also a state of the organisation.