Managing psychosocial hazards: Identify and assess
Psychosocial hazards create a risk of harm to psychological (mental) health at work, e.g. exposure to traumatic events, excessive demands or poor support. Identifying these hazards and assessing the risk they create are the first steps in protecting workers.
Part of the Identify and manage mental health risk module.
The model work health and safety laws require persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs), such as employers, to eliminate or minimise the risk from psychosocial hazards so far as is reasonably practicable.
This can be done by following the risk management process:
- Step 1: Identify hazards
- Step 2: Assess the risks (if not already known)
- Step 3: Control the risk
- Step 4: Review control measures.
This page covers steps 1 and 2. Steps 3 and 4 are covered on the next page.
Step 1: Identify psychosocial hazards
Thinking back to the common psychosocial hazards, this first step involves finding things and situations that that could harm people. You can do this by:
- consulting your workers
- observing work and behaviours
- inspecting your workplace
- taking note of how your workers interact
- reviewing available information (e.g. reports and records)
- using surveys to gather information from staff
- having a reporting mechanism and encouraging reporting.
The Model Code of Practice: How to manage work health and safety risks provides more information about how to identify hazards.
When consulting about psychosocial hazards, it is important to consider how your organisation is creating safe spaces or processes for potentially distressing topics.
Step 2: Assess psychosocial hazards
Assessing the risk will help you work out what is reasonably practicable to control it. To assess the risk of harm, you must consider the workers affected and the duration, frequency and severity of their exposure to the hazard.
Duration – How long is the worker exposed to the hazards or risks?
Frequency – How often is the worker exposed to the hazards or risks?
Severity – How severe are the hazards and the workers’ exposures?
For example, you should consider which workers face high workloads, how long those workloads last, how often they experience high workloads and how excessive the workloads are.
You must think about all the psychosocial hazards a worker may be exposed to and how they may interact, rather than assessing each risk in isolation.
A range of free reliable and valid risk assessment tools and resources is available, such as the People at Work psychosocial risk assessment tool. You may also need help from experts in some situations.
This summary was adapted from content created by Safe Work Australia with permission.