Psychosocial hazards in the workplace
Learn how psychosocial risk has become a core workplace safety concern, not just a human resources issue.
Join our experts as they share proven strategies for identifying key Psychosocial hazards in the workplace and the positive steps to identify and prevent them.
What You'll Learn
In this webinar, you’ll gain a clear understanding of the new expectations around managing psychosocial risks in the workplace, and why they represent one of the biggest shifts in employment law and organisational culture in recent years. You’ll learn how these changes connect to issues like bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, and what practical steps organisations are taking to meet their legal and ethical duties.
We’ll explore how leaders, HR professionals, and safety teams can move from reactive compliance to proactive prevention, building systems that identify, mitigate, and monitor risks before they escalate. By the end, you’ll have actionable insights to strengthen your workplace culture, improve employee wellbeing, and ensure your organisation is ready for the future of work.
Key Topics Covered
- Discover the “tectonic shift” reshaping how organisations manage workplace behaviour, and why traditional misconduct investigations are no longer enough.
- Learn how psychosocial risk has become a core workplace safety concern, not just a human resources issue.
- Find out what the new positive duty to prevent sexual harassment means for employers and leaders, and why reporting is now step six, not one.
- Explore the common threads across new workplace legislation, from risk assessment to trauma-informed practice.
- Hear practical steps leading organisations are taking to identify, prevent, and manage psychosocial hazards, before they become complaints.
- Understand how culture, leadership, and transparency create safer, more resilient workplaces that thrive under modern compliance expectations.
Full Transcript
[00:00:04] Introduction & The Shift from Reactive to Proactive Approaches
Jodie Fox: All right. Welcome everybody to Work Logic’s webinar on managing psychosocial risk. My name’s Jodie Fox. This is my fellow director, Jason Clark. Jason, before we start, I wanted to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we’re all meeting today. I’m here in Wurundjeri Land, and I wanted to extend my respects to the elders of the people in the Kulin nation and respects to elders in all of the places where we are meeting across the country today.
So just a little bit about Work Logic, for those of you who don’t know us. Work Logic is a boutique consultancy firm. There’s about 30, 32 of us across Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney. We conduct workplace investigations, mediations, workplace reviews, coaching and training around workplace conflict. That makes our lives rather interesting, but it also means that we get a really good insight into the kinds of workplace conflicts, the kinds of ways in which organisations are dealing with complaints arising from workplace conflicts of bullying, harassment, sexual discrimination, but also what they’re doing to prevent those kinds of workplace power abuses.
So we’re going to go through the psychosocial hazards code of practice. Jason will take you through what that is, what that means, and the kinds of areas that that touches on. We’ll talk about the connection between the psychosocial code of practice and bullying, discrimination, and the positive duty to prevent sexual harassment. We’ll discuss the common principles arising from those pieces of legislation and that guidance that we are getting from Safe Work, and then what sort of steps organisations are taking to meet those obligations.
Traditionally, our day job is made up primarily – at least over 50% – of investigating allegations of workplace misconduct. Lots of allegations of bullying, of sexual harassment, of discrimination, of victimisation. Traditionally that’s been a really linear process. Someone makes a complaint to human resources. Human resources has a quick look at it, determines it’s a serious breach, brings in a workplace investigator. We conduct the investigation, make findings on the balance of probabilities, and if allegations are substantiated, the employer disciplines or terminates the employee. A very linear process of dealing with workplace power abuses.
What has happened over the last three to five years is there have been a number of pieces of legislation that have been influenced by workplace health and safety legislation. There’s been a real tectonic shift, a real change in the way in which organisations are expected to deal with workplace behaviour. Employers are expected to attempt to understand and to mitigate risks before they happen. This idea of importing a workplace health and safety approach to dealing with bullying, sexual harassment, victimisation, and discrimination means that employers are expected to understand what are the drivers to sexual harassment, what are the drivers for bullying, and to put in place systems and processes that prevent them before they occur.
[00:06:08] Understanding Psychosocial Risk & Legislative Requirements
Jason Clark: Psychosocial risk includes any hazards arising or relating to the design or management of work and the work environment, which might cause psychological or physical harm. This doesn’t just restrict itself to the workplace. With the hybrid way of working, there’s also things to consider around those people that do work remotely as well. The different types of psychosocial risks will vary depending upon the type of organisation and the workplace scenarios—things around unachievable tasks, deadlines, unreasonable management action, demands on a person’s role, remote work, inadequate support, poor leadership, poor or no policies, isolated work, lack of role clarity.
There is legislative requirement around this now. A lot of the harmonisation of the work health and safety legislation now enshrines this. In New South Wales, we have a code of practice around managing psychosocial hazards at work that’s been around since 2021. It’s very much aligned to how you would normally run a risk management sort of assessment matrix into a physical hazard in the workplace. It’s broken down into identifying what the psychosocial hazard looks like, assessing the risk of harm arising and considering the severity, duration and frequency, implementing those controls, and then monitoring and reviewing.
Jodie: All states have a code except for Victoria, where it still remains a draft code. Poor behaviour at work – power abuses at work, bullying, sexual harassment, victimisation, discrimination – are both a result of and a cause of psychosocial risk. They’re risk factors in and of themselves. But those other risks, like lack of role clarity or micromanagement or poor management or leadership, can then lead to power abuses at work. Professor Michelle Tuckey at the University of South Australia has done some really interesting work looking at those factors and finding correlations between their presence in the workplace and rates of bullying.
The legislative framework, the Safe Work code of practice across the country, prescribes that cyclical response. The positive duty to prevent sexual harassment at work prescribes a cyclical approach for employers to put in place measures to prevent sexual harassment at work, not just to respond. The guidelines from the Human Rights Commission that came out in August of last year spell out the steps for employers. It’s quite a significant change that I don’t think has been fully grasped, even though we’re more than a year down the track.
[00:14:11] The Positive Duty & Seven Standards for Prevention
Jason: Even this morning on the radio, I heard that members of the Electrical Trades Union still don’t quite understand what sexual harassment looks like, how to prevent it, even the basics of the definition. There’s still a lot of confusion out there. People are still grappling with: is this sexual harassment? Is it bullying? Does it straddle both?
Jodie: The expectations that the legislation sets out include that employers need to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate, as far as possible, discrimination on the grounds of sex, sex harassment in connection with work – not just at work, but in connection with work—sex-based harassment in connection with work, conducting a workplace that is hostile on the grounds of sex, and related acts of victimization.
The Human Rights Commission expects employers to act on seven standards: leadership, culture, knowledge, risk management, support, reporting and response, and monitoring, evaluation and transparency. Reporting and response is only one tiny piece of the puzzle. Our normal linear response of disciplining or terminating someone who’s behaved badly is just one small part of the picture in the new framework.
The guiding principles include consultation, gender equality, intersectionality, person-centered, and trauma-informed approaches. Intersectionality and person-centered—and frankly, trauma-informed—mean the same thing: we treat the person as we find them in front of us. You need to consider their particular background, their migration status, their disability, their trauma history, their gender. You need to put together systems that mean you are able to be flexible enough to deal with the particular person in front of you. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, not a cookie-cutter approach.
The commonalities between the psychosocial code of practice and the guidelines around prevention of sexual harassment include understanding that power-based abuses at work are the result of systemic failures and not just a bad apple. It’s a requirement on people conducting a business or undertaking to identify what those risks are for their employees and put in place a prevention and mitigation approach. There needs to be an understanding of individual risk, what your particular business is facing. Recording and acting on data is key. We are moving into evidence-based human resource practice. It’s an iterative approach, and there’s importance in consultation with workers in both schemes.
[00:23:08] Practical Steps: Culture, Leadership & Risk Management
Jason: Culture. It’s not just a bad apple, there’s a systemic issue here. Having that solid workplace culture platform will assist with preventing and managing psychosocial risks, and it goes beyond just policies and the once-a-year annual training. HR has a key role fostering that positive culture, but so do senior leaders. Everyone’s responsibility, but definitely the focus is on that conversation.
Regular checks and benchmarking and actually doing something with that information is important. We’ll get asked to look at successive engagement surveys and clients will say, “We’ve got a bit of a trend here where there’s poor workplace culture. What should we be doing?” What they should have probably done was two or three years ago when this became an issue – do a cultural check on it.
Jodie: If you’re getting negative results or particular problems in particular areas, those can often be written off as “we’ve just had a change in that area” or “we’ve just had a new manager come in.” But these are likely to be statistically significant – it’s like the tip of the iceberg. You know you’ve got a problem there, but what that problem looks like is underneath the surface. You don’t know unless you go looking and have conversations with your staff about what that means.
Jason: HR gathers all this data, but leadership buy-in is really essential. We’ll have conversations with clients where HR gets information from cultural reviews or engagement surveys, but leadership says, “It could be just one or two people that are disgruntled, nothing to see here.” Getting leadership understanding what their responsibilities are in this framework is really key, because ultimately they are responsible as the PCBU. They need to be walking the walk. We hear about rainmakers in big corporate organisations, “That’s just him, we’ve had successive issues.” Under the new framework, we really do need to deal with these people.
That can take quite a lot of negotiation and can be costly in some cases. But you’ve only got to think about that Federal Court decision a couple months back—$400,000 awarded for effectively not managing psychosocial risk. The courts are pretty prepared to provide fairly significant compensation, particularly around cases of sexual harassment. That should get the attention of leaders in organisations if nothing else does.
You have to think about what the risks are particular to your organisation – mining versus banking versus councils versus government. What is the likelihood or the risk of exposure to trauma? Do we have an environment that creates the opportunity for these risks to occur? Think about mining, the fly-in, fly-out lifestyle, the accommodations on the mine site. What sort of trauma can our people be exposed to? What are our clients like? For organisations that deal in caring scenarios, who is it you’re bringing into contract with the organisation? These all bring their own level of risk.
[00:31:43] Building Knowledge, Support Systems & Response Frameworks
Jodie: That third party risk is one of the things that a lot of our clients are really struggling to deal with – in caring environments where people are caring for people in their own homes or dealing with family members coming on site, or in retail with people coming into your shop and dealing with your staff. You’ll see different ways employers are trying to approach that, managing expectations with signs like “we treat our staff with respect, we expect that you do the same.” But you also need to train your on-the-ground managers on what to do, particularly in circumstances where you’ve trained them that the customer is always right. You need to train them to de-escalate conflict and to be able to call it and say, “You can’t continue to treat me or my staff this way.”
Jason: What are the risks of power-based abuses? What do they look like, what are their definitions, what drives those types of psychosocial risks? Investing in training around promoting an upstander culture as opposed to a bystander culture. There are psychological reasons why people don’t intervene, but giving them training and some options around that is quite useful. It’s important to train people to have difficult conversations. Sometimes it’s not pleasant, but some of the problems we face, particularly those lower-level bullying matters, probably could have been avoided if there were some full and frank and appropriate conversations had in the early stages.
You need to make it very clear to people what supports the organisation has available for someone who has been a victim of or witnessed some form of power abuse or inappropriate conduct. Who can workers speak to about those experiences—contact officers, HR, their manager, someone outside the organisation like a whistleblower service? What support services look like—EAP, internal ombudsman, whatever it might be. Make sure your managers and employees know about these supports. One of the biggest flags we see in cultural reviews: when we ask “do you know how to make a complaint?” people say “no, I think I’ll probably just go to HR”—they don’t think about all the other options.
Jodie: Having those other options available and providing that choice to people is important. One of the principles of trauma-informed practice is providing choice and transparency. It’s important that they have an option to go somewhere other than directly to HR, because sometimes that’s not appropriate or sometimes people might not think that’s where they want to go. Having another area like a contact officer network or an independent hotline is a really useful tool to make sure you’re getting some of those behaviours early.
Jason: There needs to be clarity for people around whether there are both informal and formal options for them to report and how they can report those abuses. Also how the organisation’s going to respond in certain circumstances. Not everyone makes a complaint at work, and most people won’t in their employment history, but for those that do, they need to understand how the organisation is gonna respond or what happens when they go to HR and say they have a concern.
Jodie: A consequence management framework is about ensuring that all the different pathways you have available – whether it’s your risk management software, an independent behavioural hotline, your managers, HR – all talk to each other and are harmonised across the organisation. It doesn’t matter where you make your concern known, it will all filter through to the same place and be dealt with in the same way. You don’t want one particular pathway that doesn’t talk to the others. Making sure everything harmonises is a really important part of the risk mitigation process. Also making sure that no matter which way you report misconduct, it ends up being dealt with in the same way.
[00:42:06] Monitoring, Evaluation & Creating Lasting Change
Jason: Are you collecting relevant data and using that data to prevent psychosocial hazards from recurring? That could be coming from a cultural review, exit surveys, engagement surveys. Are you being upfront with your workers about the presence of any psychosocial risk that might exist? Larger organisations like KPMG now report quarterly about what issues they’ve faced from a psychosocial risk perspective. Employees should know about this because it makes sense if there’s continuity of the whole process—we did have these issues, this is how it was dealt with in a confidential manner, and how it was addressed. That monitoring: we’ve done some training, we’ve revitalised our policies, we’ve put in place a consistent approach – is it working? What’s the data telling us?
Jodie: You don’t know if you don’t collect the data. You really do need to set up your system so that you have a systematic way of collecting data around attitudes prior and post-training, the number of complaints coming out of an area prior and post particular interventions. Doing that evidence base is super important in ensuring you’re actually getting effective interventions and effective tools that are going to help improve the situation over time.
Jason: This includes after there’s been a risk realised and you’ve implemented some intervention—whether an investigation, disciplinary process, or mediation—going back two, three months down the track and asking: did what we do work? Are there still simmering issues we need to deal with? When we deal with investigations and the respondent is retained despite substantiated findings, it’s not set and forget. Those two people are still having to work together. You need to make sure that relationship has been restored, can be, and is monitored.
Jodie: It’s really counterintuitive because after an investigation’s been completed, the last thing anyone wants to do is revisit that area. People are wanting to move on and go on to more positive things. But not wasting that crisis and going back and determining what went wrong, what could we have done better, what could have prevented this in the first place, and what can we do to intervene so this doesn’t happen again—that’s really valuable work that really should be done.
Jason, are you optimistic that this is going to create a big change in Australian workplaces and make things better overall?
Jason: I am optimistic, even though I operate in the dark corner of the employee relationship as a workplace investigator. But it’s gonna take some work, time, attention and vigilance. Having an ex-military background, spending 23 years in Navy, I saw successive attempts to improve culture over time – there was always this uptick on implementation and then it drops and then another problem and another review. But I don’t think people deliberately go out of their way to create unsafe workplaces. There’s a lot of moving parts here that takes everything, including HR but not just HR, to make sure these risks are managed. But yes, I am optimistic.
Jodie: I am as well. If you look at the history of workplace health and safety and the changes we’ve made around workplace deaths, it used to be a cost of doing business that people’s lives were at risk, and that has improved significantly over the last 50 or so years. Because we are getting a much better understanding of the kinds of things that contribute to psychosocial risk and the kinds of things we can do to prevent it, there’s optimism there as well. But as you said, a lot of work to do.
Thank you all. We’re running out of time. If anyone has any questions, we can answer them. Jason and I are always really happy to have these conversations with you individually. Happy for you to send us an email if you’ve got thoughts. Really would love to hear what you and your organisation are doing to mitigate psychosocial risk in your organisation. We will speak to you later. Thank you all. Take care.
Additional Resources
FAQs
Who is this video for?
In this webinar, you’ll gain a clear understanding of the new expectations around managing psychosocial risks in the workplace, and why they represent one of the biggest shifts in employment law and organisational culture in recent years. You’ll learn how these changes connect to issues like bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, and what practical steps organisations are taking to meet their legal and ethical duties.
We’ll explore how leaders, HR professionals, and safety teams can move from reactive compliance to proactive prevention, building systems that identify, mitigate, and monitor risks before they escalate. By the end, you’ll have actionable insights to strengthen your workplace culture, improve employee wellbeing, and ensure your organisation is ready for the future of work.