Safe Work Australia has published a model Code of practice on how to manage psychosocial hazards at work. Legislative and regulatory changes are afoot across Australia to make it clear to employers what they are expected to do to manage psychological risks. 

This is Part 2 of a 2-part article that summarises a presentation by Professor Angela Martin at the 2022 Workplace Mental Health Symposium. Part 1 dealt with the ‘what’ about how organisations can prevent harm to people's mental health at work’. This part looks at the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.

The why 

The momentum and rationale for regulating this area have been building for many years. Legislation has required employers to consider workers’ psychological health as much as physical health for some time. But there's been very little awareness of it and very little enforcement of it. 

The research

There is a huge amount of medical research and evidence from other fields that show how stress affects our health. One model looks at allostatic load — the cumulative wear and tear on the body and mind due to prolonged exposure to stressors. It represents the physiological and psychological toll that chronic stress can have on various systems in the body, potentially leading to negative health outcomes.

Other research shows that these psychosocial work factors are related to a whole range of health problems, not just mental health-related injuries like depression and anxiety. For example, they are linked to musculoskeletal disorders and physical injuries, cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. 

Internationally

A lot of work is being done in this area internationally. One example is the international standard — the ISO 45,003 guidelines — that has recently been released. It helps organisations manage psychosocial risk, prevent work-related injury and ill health and promote well-being at work. World Health Organisation guidelines are coming soon too. 

In Australia

There have also been some major developments in Australia:

• The Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance was established in 2013 — organisations from the business, union, community and government sectors aim to lead change to promote mentally healthy workplaces. 
• The Boland Review — identified that psychological health was neglected in the model WHS Regulations and the model Codes of Practice and recommended ways to identify and manage psychosocial risks in the workplace.
• Chapter 7 of the Productivity Commission's report in 2020 goes into detail about the ‘why’ these changes are needed. 
• And the Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work. 

In an effort towards harmonisation, Safe Work Australia is encouraging states and territories to adopt the model code of practice and model regulations as a foundation for their own. But they are all able to develop their own versions.

And coming soon — the National Workplace Initiative is an online portal with a whole lot of resources to be a one-stop-shop for information that helps organisations build mentally healthy workplaces.   

The platform is being user-tested and will be fine-tuned the platform based on feedback we receive from users. You can see it now here.

The how

There are a lot of tools, supports, surveys and resources available:

• National Workplace Initiative 
• Beyond Blue’s Heads up program
• People at work 
• The APHIRM toolkit 
• Copenhagen psychosocial questionnaire
• European Working Conditions survey
• Guarding Minds at Work
• Safe Work Australia and the other regulators have resources
• Commercial providers — but it’s important to make sure they use an evidence-based approach.

But Professor Martin says all employers need to do is follow the code of practice if they feel overwhelmed. And consultation with workers is absolutely critical. You can't devise strategies to control risk factors without consulting your workers.

What does developing controls mean?

This involves working out if you can eliminate the problem, just mitigate it or soften the impact of it on people. Consultation with workers is absolutely critical. You can't devise strategies to control risk factors without consulting your workers.

What you do will depend on what sizes of sector you're in and how mature your organisation is in this area. 

You then have an action planning and monitoring phase. And if this is the first time your organisation has been through a process like this it’s important to consider what supports you're going to need?

The 4 C’s for the future

Professor Martin says finishes her presentation by canvassing the 4 C’s that organsiations need to consider:

Complexity

In the psychosocial model 14 different risk factors are all interacting at the same time. So you might, for example, have a background level of stress and then you experience a traumatic event and you ‘fall over’. 

You need to think about the diversity of workers in your organization and analyse the risks properly. Some will experience certain risks and not others. You’ll need to analyse your data to see if it is different for women and men, for people who are from non-English speaking backgrounds? Does it differ by seniority or location? 

Some of those stressors are what we would call an acute problem — there’s an incident or an event. But we can also experience the ‘slow boiling frog’, which is a more chronic exposure to work-related stressors that can build up over a long period of time and wear us down.

So it's complex.

Collaboration 

Internally, all of the functions in a business need to coordinate and collaborate in order to be able to do this. Human Resources, Workplace Safety, Diversity and Inclusion, Organisational Learning and Development and the Board all need to work together. 

The evidence on these organisational interventions is still developing and Professor Martin encourages
collaboration with specialists and researchers to evaluate what works in this area. 

Capability 

Professor Martin suggest we also ask these questions: What's the capability level in organisations around risk management and governance? What about the attitudes of leaders? Are we still dealing with the idea that ‘if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen’? 

Do you have the right management skills and systems to track and manage risks? Do regulators and inspectorates have the skills and capabilities to investigate these issues? 

Culpability

And finally, Professor Martin says it will be interesting to see what happens with prosecutions through regulators and to keep an eye on civil law cases where employees may receive large amounts of compensation and organisations may suffer reputational damage as a result of not managing psychosocial hazards properly.

There’s a lot to come. Watch this space.