Apr 1, 2024
Recent changes to WHS legislation have significantly expanded the responsibilities of leaders and boards to include not just physical but multiple dimensions of wellness at work, otherwise known as psychosocial safety. In light of continuous legislative updates, organisations need to not only comprehend their legal obligations but implement/enact proper/thorough due diligence and preventative management as a duty of care.
To enable this, Precision Sourcing have partnered with Leading Well, renowned leadership experts.
What is psychosocial safety?
Work Health and Safety regulations define a psychosocial hazard as something that may cause psychological harm arising from the design or management of work, the work environment itself, workplace interactions, and behaviours. Organisations need to now demonstrate that they are eliminating or minimising these risks as far as is reasonably practical.
Some of these risks are likely to be an inherent feature of your current environment, and people will be exposed to these factors. For example, traumatic content in the social services sector is going to be a daily occurrence. Where there is a high severity of risk like that, it’s not a matter of unrealistically removing it from a workers’ experience. It’s a matter of resourcing staff appropriately and managing risks soundly and continuously to demonstrate that risk mitigation is in place.
What is the difference between a hazard and a risk?
Hazards will arise from the risks. If we know there are psychosocial risks and we don’t manage them, they are going to become hazards. This is where we need to appreciate the significance of leading versus trailing indicators. By the time they are hazards, there is pressure to demonstrate an instant response, and we can only be reactive at that point. The Leading Well approach is trying to enable organisations to be proactive with this.
Why do we need to understand psychosocial safety?
First and foremost, to ensure a sound working environment it is important to understand these risk factors and make proactive decisions and now of course this is important due to litigation risk. The WorkSafe Act published by WorkSafe Australia is now being taken up by various state jurisdictions, and those jurisdictions are implementing this into policy. That’s coming into effect with different timings on different state jurisdictions, but it’s now required of employers that they be monitoring and assessing these risks so they can actively demonstrate that their people are safe at work. Whereas we have had previous exposure to physical risks and we’re all very familiar with those. Some psychosocial risks like sexual harassment, bullying, and harassment are not new, but the scope of the risk factors has been considerably expanded now.
Can you give us examples of how some of the new psychosocial risks are playing out in the workplace?
Some of the newer risks are things that may not have been on the radar at all for many CEOs as they were not previously classified as potential psychosocial hazards. If you take something like low job control or low work demand, many CEOs are saying, “What?”
Yes, that’s a psychosocial risk. High job demand, poor change management, organisational justice are also risks. Remote or isolated work, poor support, and lack of role clarity are all now identified as psychosocial risks that organisations need to take responsibility for and demonstrate a duty of care.
What can organisations do to protect employees from these risks?
Employers are responsible for identifying, assessing, controlling, and reviewing these risks. First and foremost, what are the obvious risks that would feature from this expanded definition of psychosocial hazards in your workplace? That’s a conversation obviously for the leadership team in the organisation, as well as the WHS team to look at.
Leaders need to consider, how long have our workers been exposed to this? What’s the frequency? Consider both frequency and severity with these risks as you might have something that’s very low frequency but a very high severity, or the other way around.
It’s important to take a systematic approach though and not just go with the known risks. Ideally, assessing all the risks and being able to prove in the case of, say, an audit that could be triggered, that you have already been proactively measuring the known and the unknown risks in your environment.
Then, it’s important to manage the risks that you identified and have ongoing monitoring, review, and control measures in place.
What is NOT an employer’s responsibility?
This is a really good question because many employers are going into a state of overwhelm when they open the book on these changes. We have been pointing out to our clients that with your staff, for example, their wellbeing outside of work is not your responsibility, but that’s obviously going to overlap with their wellbeing at work. It’s not an employer’s responsibility to be a mental health professional because managers are not mental health professionals. Yes, many of them have now done mental health first aid, but that doesn’t make you an expert.
To really hold this well, we’ve been reminding managers and leaders that you are NOT responsible for the personal wellbeing of your staff in its entirety, that you are responsible for the work environment and the ways of working and the ways of leading that are likely to impact staff wellbeing. If I was to put that in a nutshell, you are NOT responsible in entirety for your staff’s wellbeing, but you are responsible for creating a work environment and experience that supports positive wellbeing.
Can you provide some tips to uncover high risk areas?
It all starts with your known risk factors because if they’re known, there’s a good chance that they are already on your radar. It’s important though to add the new legislated hazards onto your current radar. It’s not enough just to be anecdotal. There needs to be the demonstration of a systematic approach to make sure that you are across the various layers of your staff, locations of your staff, and what their psychosocial experience is in the organisation. There needs to be regular monitoring and measurement. And then, obviously, where risks are identified, demonstrating that steps are being taken to mitigate those risks, to reduce those risks, and ongoing monitor and control of those risks.
Can you tell us how Leading Well can help?
What we are doing with our clients is creating a manageable pathway while aiming to minimise the chance of creating false positive findings in your risk reporting. It all comes back to reminding leaders that these psychosocial risk factors are nothing but trailing indicators of deeper systemic issues inside your organisation. It’s never good to govern your strategy by trailing indicators. What we’re doing, in helping organisations measure this, is looking at the source indicators. For example, low job control might be featuring in many organisations right now. Rather than taking that right down to an individual role level and implementing a new system or a new process, it’s vitally important to zoom out and consider something more systemic like, “Is the fact that we know we have silos, because our executive team is not yet united and leading collectively across our organisation, a contributing factor to low job control?”
This is actually a wonderful opportunity to address what will create more cohesion and better leadership throughout the entire organisation. Rather than looking at the psychosocial risk factors in isolation, we’re actually looking at them and measuring them alongside some of the more systemic leadership factors that we know will be your leading indicators. Because even if you rate really well on psychosocial risk hazards, if you are not leading soundly across the organisation and addressing some of these source issues, they might show up down the track, but you can act on them now before they do.
What tools are you using to do this?
We are helping our clients to take a data-driven approach and to demonstrate very early diligence and duty of care so they can be more confident that they are across the experience their staff are having at work. We have designed an assessment (survey) tool that will measure not just the trailing indicators, the psychosocial hazards themselves, but also the leading indicators which tap into system dynamics and what constitutes sound system-wide leadership to contribute to a cohesive, productive, but also healthy environment at work. It’s more than the usual ‘staff engagement’ factors. It’s a more system-wide leadership presence that will create a reliably sound place to work.
How can organisations use this data?
Once we survey employees, we support the leaders to analyse that data, to look at the trailing and the leading indicators side by side. What we are doing is coming in and supporting clients to respond where there’s already known evidence of psychosocial hazards and risks at play, but also to get on the front foot with this and use it as an opportunity to strengthen the dynamics across the organisation.
In our recent survey, CEOs, company directors, and board members were asked about their leadership priorities for 2024. According to the results, 33% of participants identified navigating shifting system dynamics as one of their major leadership challenges.
We know leaders are concerned and so we are helping them to build healthy dynamics across the system.
by Vanessa Fudge,
CEO & Founder
