Opinion: Beyond the survey — what psychosocial risk management is becoming

The Australian conversation about psychosocial risk has changed. From 1 July, businesses in NSW have been operating under an enforceable Code of Practice for managing psychosocial hazards, and the underlying duty to identify, assess, control and review psychosocial risk applies nationally under model work health and safety laws. In October, the free government-backed workplace assessment platform that around 5000 Australian organisations have used since 2020 will permanently close.

Those two shifts, arriving within months of each other, expose something that has been true for a long time and that the availability of a familiar tool has helped many organisations avoid noticing. A once-a-year survey was never really what the law was asking for. It was a starting point that many organisations mistook for the whole answer.

What regulators are now looking for is not a score. It is a system.

The signal that gets misread

I spend a lot of my professional life sitting with executives and boards who genuinely want to do the right thing on workplace psychological health. When those conversations don’t land well, it is very rarely a matter of bad faith. It is almost always a matter of misreading the signal in front of them.

My own peer-reviewed field research — most recently an eight-month study of a large NSW public sector organisation, involving 74 interviews across six organisational levels — found something that is uncomfortable but consistent. Well-intentioned organisations tend to respond to the visible symptoms of psychosocial risk with the wrong instrument. Exhaustion is interpreted as a motivation problem and answered with an engagement program. Rising errors are interpreted as a capability gap and answered with training. Falling morale is interpreted as a culture problem and answered with values workshops.

None of those responses are wrong in isolation. They are simply wrong in relation to what the evidence in front of the organisation is actually saying. In the case I studied, the underlying hazard was not motivation, capability or values. It was workload and working conditions that had drifted well past what the organisation had been designed for. The people working under those conditions were doing their best. What they needed was not another engagement initiative. They needed the cultural pressure taken out of the system.

That is a difficult conclusion for organisations to arrive at without a structured way of looking. To be clear, a single, organisation-wide annual survey is not that structure. It is a temperature reading. It tells you that something is warmer than usual. It does not tell you where the fire is.

Where the risk actually lives

One of the consistent findings in my research is that psychosocial risk does not distribute itself evenly across an organisation. It accumulates.

It accumulates in particular teams, under particular leaders, at particular interfaces between functions, and in the gap between what an organisation formally says it values and what it actually rewards in practice. Two teams reporting into the same executive can have very different psychosocial risk profiles. One can be running at a healthy pace while the team next to it is quietly disintegrating. An organisation-wide engagement score will average those two experiences into a number that is not really true of either.

The consequence of that averaging is that the risk becomes invisible until it does not. It surfaces as an unusual pattern of unplanned leave, an unusual rate of turnover in a particular team, a complaint that turns out not to be isolated, or, in the worst cases, a psychological injury claim that the organisation was not expecting.

The regulators are not asking whether an organisation can produce an annual score. They are asking whether an organisation can identify where its psychosocial hazards are, decide what to do about them, do it, review whether it worked, and evidence the whole loop.

What ‘assessment’ is becoming

If a single survey is not the answer, what is?

The answer is not another tool. It is a different way of thinking about the work.

The Code of Practice and the underlying regulations describe a hazard-management process that would be familiar to anyone who has worked in physical safety. You identify the hazard, you assess the risk it poses, you put controls in place, you review whether those controls are working, and you keep records of your decisions.

The novelty is not the process. The novelty is applying it seriously to hazards like unreasonably high job demands, low job control, poor support, poor workplace relationships, poor organisational change management, poor recognition and reward, poor role clarity, poor organisational justice, and exposure to traumatic events, violence and aggression. Those are the hazards listed by regulators, and every one of them is capable of causing serious psychological injury.

A serious approach to those hazards has three features that a single annual survey does not.

1. It is local. It examines the shared culture of an organisation, the subcultures inside it, and the microcultures at team level, because those are the layers at which psychosocial cultural pressure actually accumulates.
2. It is hazard-specific. It asks about the hazards that regulators have named, in language that reflects those hazards, rather than translating them into generic engagement questions.
3. It is ongoing. It treats the identification and control of psychosocial hazards as a continuing part of organisational cultural governance, not an annual event that produces a document.

The boardroom question

The other shift that the last 12 months has produced, in my experience with clients, is that psychosocial risk is now a genuine boardroom conversation. It has moved from human resources into enterprise risk. Directors are asking their executives three questions that were rarely asked in this form even two years ago.

Where does psychosocial risk exist in our organisation, and how do we know?

What are we doing about it, and how do we know it is working?

If a regulator asked us to demonstrate what we have done, what would we show them?

Organisations that can answer those three questions with confidence — with local, hazard-specific, ongoing evidence rather than a single score — are in a very different position from organisations that cannot. That is not a matter of documentation for its own sake. It is what good governance of a real risk has come to look like.

A chapter ending

The retirement of the widely used PAW assessment platform is being read in some quarters as bad news. I think it is more usefully read as the end of a chapter. The chapter that is closing is one in which many organisations sincerely believed a well-run annual survey discharged their psychosocial risk obligations. That was a defensible position five years ago. It is not a defensible position now.

The chapter that is opening asks organisations to do something harder and more useful. It asks them to see the risk where it actually lives, to act on what they see, and to be able to show the working.

That is not a bureaucratic burden. In every organisation I have worked with where it has been done well, it has also been the point at which the workplace stopped feeling as though it was quietly running its people into the ground.

*Dr Anna Kiaos is an organisational culture researcher, consultant and founder and Director of Mind Culture Life Australia. She holds a PhD in Management and qualifications in psychology and is affiliated with UNSW Sydney’s Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health. Kiaos advises boards, risk and assurance functions, and people-and-culture leaders across nearly every sector, including government, financial services, health, professional services and hospitality. Her advice is grounded in peer-reviewed field research into organisational culture, psychosocial risk and mental health, including published studies on workplace burnout in the NSW public sector. She is a regular speaker on organisational culture, psychosocial safety and Australia’s evolving workplace health and safety landscape.

Top image credit: iStock.com/Patamaporn Umnahanant. Stock image used is for illustrative purposes only.