Glad You Asked #2 - How do we actually identify and control psychosocial risks?
The regulator who stopped a restructure
SafeWork NSW recently ordered a Sydney university to pause a restructure affecting around 800 staff. Not because of unsafe machinery or a site incident. Because of the psychosocial risk the change process itself created for workers.
Sit with that for a second. A safety regulator halted a business decision, mid-flight, over psychological risk. Regulators across the country are now issuing improvement and prohibition notices and running prosecutions over psychosocial hazards in ways we simply haven't seen before. This is not a warm-up. It's enforcement.
Not a new duty, but a new reality
Protecting workers' psychological health has always been part of your duty of care. What's changed is that regulations now in force in every state and territory spell out how you're expected to manage psychosocial risks, and regulators are enforcing them. In Queensland and NSW, the Codes of Practice are mandatory. This applies to every business, whatever your size or makeup.
The shortcut we keep seeing
A business opens the Code of Practice, copies out the list of hazards, maps their existing processes against each one, and files it away. It looks like compliance. It's a desktop exercise. It tells you what the Code says. It doesn't tell you what's happening in your workplace.
The law requires you to consult with your workers when identifying psychosocial hazards, and again when deciding how to control the risks. Your people know where the pressure points are: the workloads that don't let up, the role nobody can quite define, the behaviour everyone works around. You can't find that in a document. And when a regulator asks who you spoke to, "we mapped the Code" is not an answer.
"But won't that open Pandora's box?"
We hear this from senior leaders all the time. Consultation means asking your workers where they see the hazards, what risks they create day to day, and what they think would actually control them. The fear is that asking those questions unleashes a flood you can't handle.
We get it. But consultation is a legal obligation, not an optional extra. Not asking doesn't make the risks go away. It just means you don't know about them. In almost every enforcement action so far, the hazards were well known to the workers. The organisation either didn't know or didn't act.
There is a way to do this well. We're working with businesses of all sectors and sizes to manage the process end to end: engage the workforce, identify the real hazards and risks, land on controls their people helped shape. Built around their business, not a generic one.
So how do you actually identify and control psychosocial risks? You ask the people who live with them every day. The Code gives you the categories. Your workers give you the answers.