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Psychosocial risk check.

Ten questions on how your organisation identifies and controls psychosocial hazards. Two minutes, no signup, and your answers never leave this page unless you choose to email them.

1. We have identified which psychosocial hazards are present for each work group, not just organisation-wide.

Different teams face genuinely different hazards. An organisation-wide average hides the one team in trouble, which is usually the team the regulator asks about.

2. We consulted workers directly when identifying them.

Consultation is a duty in its own right, not a nice-to-have. An assessment written in a manager's office is also usually wrong about what the work is like.

3. Remote or isolated work is assessed as a psychosocial hazard, not only a physical one.

Working alone, away from support and with limited means to summon help, is one of the commonly named psychosocial hazards. Most organisations only assess it for physical risk.

4. Exposure to violence and aggression is recorded and reviewed, including verbal abuse and threats.

Harm from repeated verbal aggression accumulates without any physical incident. If only assaults get recorded, the data will say the problem does not exist.

5. Our controls change the work itself: workload, rosters, staffing, caseload or layout.

This is the question regulators actually test. Training and counselling sit at the bottom of the hierarchy because they leave the work unchanged.

6. Workers can raise a concern without it affecting how they are treated.

If reporting carries a cost, your incident data measures willingness to report rather than what is happening.

7. After a traumatic incident there is a defined response, not an ad hoc one.

Who checks in, when, and what support is offered should be decided before the incident. Deciding in the moment produces inconsistency, which is itself a psychosocial hazard.

8. Workload and staffing are reviewed against what the work actually requires.

High job demands and low job control are two of the most commonly cited hazards, and both are set by decisions made well above the affected team.

9. We track evidence such as turnover, absence, incidents and complaints, rather than relying on impressions.

Psychosocial hazards are easy to argue about and hard to deny with data. These figures are uncomfortable, which is exactly why they are the reliable signal.

10. The assessment is reviewed on a schedule, and after any restructure or significant change.

A change in rosters, staffing or reporting lines can create a hazard overnight. An assessment reviewed only annually will miss it for most of a year.

Why this one is worth doing now

Australian WHS law treats psychological harm the way it treats physical harm: as a hazard that must be identified and controlled. Two of the commonly named psychosocial hazards, remote or isolated work and exposure to violence and aggression, are the same two risks lone worker safety exists to address, so most organisations are already part of the way there without having written it down.

The gap is usually not awareness. It is that the controls on paper are all individual-level: training, resilience programs, an employee assistance line. Those are the last layer, not the answer. What the duty asks about is the work.

Psychosocial hazards guide · Assessment template · Lone worker risk check · The complete guide

Isolation and aggression are two of the named hazards. Both have a control.

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