In Short
- Identify psychosocial hazards: These arise from work design, environment, or interactions and can cause psychological harm.
- Legal obligations: Businesses must identify, minimise, and manage these hazards to protect employees’ mental health.
- Risk management: Implement control measures to address identified hazards and regularly review their effectiveness.
Tips for Businesses
To minimise psychosocial hazards, assess risks based on exposure time, frequency, and severity. Implement practical control measures like ensuring manageable workloads, addressing anti-social behaviour immediately, and providing strong management support. Regularly consult with employees to address individual needs and maintain psychological well-being.
As a business owner, it is increasingly important to understand your obligations around your workers’ health and safety. Recently, there has been a significant focus on the psychological well-being of employees and how work can negatively impact their mental health. Therefore, businesses need to understand how they can support their employees and protect their psychological well-being. This article will step through the relevant laws that apply to your business and, specifically, how to identify and manage psychosocial hazards in the workplace.
What Laws Apply to Psychosocial Hazards?
While Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws differ from state to state, the general obligations of businesses remain relatively consistent across the country. A business owner is primarily responsible for reasonably ensuring the health and safety of their employees. In order to comply with this duty of care, you are responsible for:
- identifying workplace hazards that may create health and safety risks;
- eliminating or minimising these risks as much as possible; and
- implementing, maintaining and revising appropriate control measures.
Therefore, when considering your WHS obligations, the first step is to actively identify any psychosocial hazards for employees.
Further, an officer of the company, such as a director, will have the responsibility of ensuring that the company is complying with the above obligations. This will include making sure that the company has appropriate processes in place for identifying and managing psychosocial hazards and minimising any risks for employees.
What is a Psychosocial Hazard?
The first step in managing your business’ WHS obligations is identifying psychosocial hazards. A psychosocial hazard can arise from the:
- design or management of work;
- working environment; or
- workplace interactions and behaviours.
It is very common for workers to be exposed to some kind of psychosocial hazard in the course of performing their duties. However, it is your obligation as a business owner to minimise hazards as much as possible.
Psychosocial hazards will vary quite significantly in their severity and some may be constantly present, whereas others only arise on occasion. Examples of psychosocial hazards include:
- job demands creating excessive or unreasonable time pressures;
- workers having low control over how and when work is performed;
- workers having minimal technical or emotional support when performing duties;
- working in complete isolation;
- harassment, including sexual harassment; and
- poor workplace relationships and conflict with colleagues.
These hazards can create significant stress and result in the risk of psychological harm. Some workers may be at greater risk from these psychosocial hazards than others, such as:
- inexperienced or young employees;
- employees with language barriers; or
- employees with previous exposure to similar hazards.
It is important that you understand each individual worker’s needs and manage any increased risks appropriately. You can achieve this by consulting with your workers on their psychological needs and how the company intends to reduce any psychosocial risks.
As an employer, understand your essential employment obligations with this free LegalVision factsheet.
How to Minimise Psychosocial Hazards?
Once you identify a psychosocial hazard, your company needs to assess what risks arise from the hazard and how to minimise them. It is important to first assess the level of risk associated with each hazard that is present in the workplace. This will involve considering:
- the length of time the employee will be exposed to the hazard;
- how often the employee will be exposed to the hazard; and
- how severe the exposure will be.
After assessing the risk, your company will need to consider the possibility of eliminating this risk. Ultimately, psychosocial risks can be extremely difficult to entirely eliminate, and, more often than not, it is easier to implement appropriate control measures to reduce the risk as much as possible. Managing psychosocial risks will often include putting processes in place to ensure:
- employees have a manageable workload;
- any aggressive behaviour or other anti-social behaviour is addressed immediately and not tolerated;
- employees feel supported by their managers and, where employees work from home, they have more regular check-ins.
When considering what measures are reasonably practicable, you should consider the:
- cost of implementing the relevant control measure;
- severity of the risk;
- size of the business; and
- likelihood that the risk will arise.
Key Takeaways
Employers have an obligation to protect their workers from psychological harm as much as possible. The first steps are understanding what psychosocial hazards are and then identifying them within your business. A psychosocial hazard is any circumstance arising in your workplace that may cause psychological harm to your workers.
Where you identify a psychosocial hazard, you should implement the following process:
- assess the level of risk associated with the hazard and any other hazards that an employee may be exposed to;
- implement control measures to eliminate or minimise risks; and
- maintain and regularly review control measures put in place.
For more information, our experienced employment lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents. Call us today on 1300 544 755 or visit our membership page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Psychosocial hazards are factors in the workplace that can cause psychological harm, arising from the design or management of work, the work environment, or workplace interactions and behaviors.
Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws vary by state, but business owners must ensure employees’ psychological safety by identifying, minimising, and controlling risks related to psychosocial hazards.
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