Escalating Employee Behaviour: What Australian Organisations Get Wrong About the Warning Signs

On 5 May 2026, the Commonwealth Workplace Protection Orders scheme commences. This new legislation enables organisations to obtain court orders against individuals who make threats or engage in violence against workers. The trigger was not a single incident. It was 1,510 serious incidents at Services Australia face-to-face service centres in a single year, including a stabbing and a bladed-weapon assault on contractors.¹

The legislation is a signal. Threatening behaviour directed at employees has reached a scale that has forced Parliament to act. But for most mid-market Australian organisations, the more immediate problem is not external actors. It is the employee whose behaviour is changing, whose grievance is building, and whose trajectory nobody has formally assessed.

Workplace violence and aggression claims in Australia rose 56% over five years to 2021-22, more than triple the growth rate of overall workers' compensation claims.² In 2023, at least six workers died from assault, equalling the total from the preceding five years combined. Claims by women for physical violence rose 73% over a decade.

Against this backdrop, the Fair Work Commission is under extraordinary strain. The FWC received 44,075 applications in 2024-25, with the first quarter of 2025-26 running 45% above the three-year average.³ AI-generated unfair dismissal claims, drafted in under ten minutes, are compounding the volume. The system designed to resolve employment grievances is itself a pressure point.

Two recent FWC decisions illustrate the complexity facing organisations. In one case, a worker sent his former employer over 1,800 pages of emails within eleven days following termination, including a statement that read: "If you step against Me, you better finish the job. Because when I shoot, it's a double tap to the head."⁴ His application was dismissed. In another, a worker who verbally threatened a colleague during a toolbox meeting, with a clean sixteen-year record, was ordered reinstated with backpay, the Commission citing a severe personal crisis as significant mitigation.⁵

These two cases, read together, reveal the central problem: threatening behaviour exists on a spectrum, and responses calibrated only to the most extreme expressions will routinely miss the situations that matter most.

The first case (1,800 pages, death threats, photographs of staff) is recognisable as serious. Most organisations would escalate it. The second is harder: a sixteen-year employee, a single incident, a grieving father under documented personal strain. The FWC found valid reason for dismissal but ordered reinstatement anyway. The organisation faced both a genuine threat to a colleague and a legal outcome it likely did not anticipate.

What connects both situations is the absence of structured assessment at the point where behaviour began to change. In the first case, the escalation trajectory (volume of contact, content of communications, inclusion of photographs) indicates a pattern that structured analysis would have identified well before legal proceedings. In the second, the sudden behavioural change in an otherwise stable employee indicates personal crisis rather than established threat pattern. This distinction matters significantly for response calibration.

The common failure is treating threatening behaviour as an HR matter to be managed through policy rather than a threat to be assessed through analysis. Policy tells you what to do after a threshold is crossed. Assessment tells you whether the threshold is approaching, what it indicates about the actor, and how the situation is likely to develop.

The AI-generated claims surge adds a further dimension. Volume of post-termination contact (emails, applications, complaints) is itself a signal. When that volume escalates or the content shifts in character, it warrants assessment rather than administrative processing.

Three trajectories are worth considering for organisations currently managing a concerning employee situation.

Most likely: The behaviour remains at its current level or subsides following separation or HR intervention. This is the most common outcome. It does not mean the situation was low-risk. It means the trajectory did not escalate. Assessment at this stage establishes a documented baseline and informs the response approach.

Possible: Grievance solidifies following separation. Contact volume increases, content becomes more specific, or behaviour extends to third parties: colleagues, leadership, the organisation's clients or reputation. This trajectory is more likely where the individual perceives the outcome as unjust and has limited social or occupational support. The AI-generated claims environment may lower the barrier to sustained institutional engagement.

Less likely but material: Behaviour escalates to direct threat or action. The indicators (specific targeting, surveillance-like behaviour, communications referencing harm) are identifiable in advance. Organisations that have not established a baseline assessment are less able to recognise these signals when they appear.

For HR Directors and General Counsel managing a current situation, the practical question is not whether the behaviour is "serious enough" to warrant external assessment. That framing inverts the logic. Assessment is most valuable before the threshold is crossed, when the trajectory is still forming and response options remain open.

The Commonwealth Workplace Protection Orders scheme, commencing 5 May, provides a new legal mechanism for organisations facing persistent threatening behaviour from external actors. But the scheme applies to Commonwealth entities in the first instance. For mid-market organisations in the private sector, the protection framework remains internal. That places the burden of assessment squarely on the organisation itself.

The FWC's reinstatement decision in the Essential Energy case is also a practical warning: organisations that respond to threatening behaviour without a structured assessment of the underlying drivers may find their response legally challenged and operationally reversed.

Escalating employee behaviour is not self-evident. The organisations that manage it well are not those with the most comprehensive disciplinary policies. They are those that assess what is actually forming before they decide how to respond. When behaviour changes, when contact volume increases, when the tone of communications shifts, those are signals. The question is whether your organisation has a framework to read them.

¹ Department of Home Affairs, Commonwealth Workplace Protection Orders scheme: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/criminal-justice/commonwealth-workplace-protection-orders-scheme; Employment Law Handbook, 5 March 2026: https://www.employmentlawhandbook.com.au/bulletin/new-safeguards-for-commonwealth-public-servants-against-workplace-violence/

² Safe Work Australia, Work-Related Violence and Aggression in Australia: https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/report/work-related-violence-aggression-australia

³ SmartCompany, AI-generated unfair dismissal claims swamp Fair Work Commission: https://www.smartcompany.com.au/artificial-intelligence/ai-generated-unfair-dismissal-claims-swamp-fair-work-commission/; Information Age: https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/ai-floods-fair-work-claims.html

⁴ Lawyers Weekly, Kha v Glenbourne Investments: https://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/biglaw/43141-case-tossed-over-threatening-nonsensical-statements-to-solicitor

⁵ HRD Australia, Lewis v Essential Energy, February 2026: https://www.hcamag.com/au/specialisation/employment-law/fair-work-orders-essential-energy-to-reinstate-worker-who-threatened-colleague/564611