Employers are responsible for developing and implementing strategies to prevent mental health injuries at work.
One way to do this is by proactively identifying and managing psychosocial risks and hazards.
Our mental health, relationships and work environment affect our behaviour and wellbeing.
We use the term psychosocial to refer to the combination of psychological and social factors that impact our mental health at work.
Psychosocial hazards are things or situations that can cause stress, harm or injury to your mental and physical health.
A hazard is anything that poses a risk to the health and safety of people in the workplace.
Some common psychosocial hazards include:
Your role as an employee
If you see or experience a psychosocial hazard or concern, you can discuss it with your:
You can also:
Like all other employees, HSRs can help identify psychosocial hazards but are not responsible for managing them.
As an HSR your role is to:
Managers and senior leaders have more influence and responsibility in preventing, identifying and managing psychosocial hazards.
As a manager or senior leader, you should use a risk management approach to address psychosocial hazards that could cause harm or injury.
Risk management involves thinking about what could happen and how likely it is to happen.
At each step of the risk management process, you must consult employees and your health and safety representatives.
For practical guidance and best practice advice on managing health and safety risks you can check out the:
Risk control measures for job demands should focus on good work design, including job design. Good work design considers the organisation’s needs, context and work environment.
Good work design can transform the workplace to benefit everyone. Good work design can eliminate and minimise hazards and risks at the source.
You can use these resources to help you understand and design good and safe work:
You can use these resources to help you understand, reduce and manage job demands:
Negative behaviours can include a range of poor communication and behaviour issues that are inappropriate. They can have an immediate and long-term negative impact on those involved, including those who witness them.
Negative behaviours can include:
In Victoria, employers are obligated to take reasonable steps to eliminate certain negative behaviours under the Equal Opportunity Act 2010. These include:
Treating someone unfavourably because of a protected characteristic such as race, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion or other personal attributes. This can occur in various forms and can be direct or indirect.
Unwanted or unwelcome sexual behaviour that makes a person feel offended, humiliated or intimidated. This includes verbal, non-verbal and physical conduct of a sexual nature.
Treating someone unfairly because they have made a complaint, intend to make a complaint, or have assisted someone else in making a complaint about discrimination or harassment.
You can use these resources to help you understand, prevent and manage negative behaviours:
Trauma is an event that someone experiences as harmful or life-threatening.
It can negatively affect mental, physical, emotional, social, or spiritual well-being.
Trauma is usually a response to an incident or event, but it can also come from:
These resources can help you understand, reduce and mange trauma:
Employers and senior leaders can follow this risk management process or use their own to help manage risks associated with psychosocial hazards.
The key steps are:
Identifying psychosocial hazards early will help your team and organisation maintain a mentally healthy work environment.
You can proactively identify and monitor psychosocial hazards by analysing the data and information your organisation collects. You should regularly monitor and review your annual work plans so you can make adjustments as needed.
For example, you can collect and analyse information from:
Once you've identified the hazards, you need to assess the risk based on:
Psychosocial hazards often interact and compound each other. This increases the overall risk of harm or injury.
For example, if an employee is exposed to an aggressive customer and is dealing with a high workload and has limited support, the combined stress can increase their risk of harm or injury.
Once you've assessed the hazards' likelihood, frequency and severity, categorise the risks as low, medium or high.
For example:
You can learn more about preventing mental injuries in the WorkWell toolkit.
Next, you'll need to prioritise the risks to focus on the most significant issues first.
As an employer, you must take reasonable steps to eliminate or reduce occupational health and safety (OHS) risks.
You can use the hierarchy of control method to help you fulfill your OHS responsibilities.
The hierarchy of control is a step-by-step approach to eliminating or reducing risks. It ranks risk control measures from the highest level of protection (removing the hazard) to the lowest and least reliable (providing support tools or resources).
Example of the hierarchy of control measures for work-related stress:
Regularly monitor and review the effectiveness of your risk control measures. You can do this through:
Adjust your risk controls and strategies to improve based on ongoing assessment and feedback.