Consulting your workers about psychosocial hazards and risks

Read about common psychosocial hazards in the Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work.

Read Appendix A of the Code for examples of how psychosocial hazards may occur in workplaces.

Research how each hazard may occur in your industry, so you have a better understanding of what to look for in your workplace.

Share this information with your workers when you begin consulting.

Review information you already have and use it to guide your consultation.

Information you probably have includes leave/turnover patterns, grievances and incident data. See the Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work for a full list of relevant information and records you could review.

This information may help you find sources of workplace stress. This can help you choose what to focus on in your consultations.

If you’re not sure what to look for in your existing information, try and find answers to these questions:

• What psychosocial hazards and risks do certain tasks expose workers and the team to?
• What are we currently doing to ensure workers’ health and safety?
• How did we identify work health and safety issues in the past? Who was consulted and how? How could we do it better?
• What control measures have we tried that did not work well? Why didn’t they work?
• How successful have we been at preventing psychological incidents and injuries?
• What psychological incidents and injuries have already occurred?
• What is the impact of psychosocial hazards and risks on our organisation’s performance? For example, poorer quality service delivery because staff are stressed and making mistakes, or higher recruitment and training costs because staff are leaving.

If you don’t know the answers to all these questions, you may want to use your consultation process to find out what workers think.

Create an environment where workers can participate in consultations and feel safe to do so. This is called psychological safety.

Ways you can do this include:

• Encourage workers to speak up about work health and safety issues, and model speaking up yourself
• Tell workers you value their input, even if they tell you some things are not going well
• Focus on finding out what did or did not prevent harm, rather than who is to blame
• Treat honest mistakes as an opportunity to learn and improve.

Set up ways for workers to raise issues that may be sensitive. These could include:

• Talking one-on-one with their manager or another senior colleague
• Reporting their concerns to a health and safety representative
• Anonymous surveys or suggestion boxes.

The workers involved should  provide consent before you share their information. Ask the worker/s involved how they would be comfortable with you addressing their concerns and document their response.

Decide how you will keep the information you gather private and secure. Tell your workers about these ways and measures.

Remember: It is important that you consider and comply with any relevant laws concerning the handling of private, sensitive, and/or confidential information.

Choose a format: The way you consult workers should meet your organisation’s needs and your workers’ reasonable needs and expectations. It could be formally or informally, as a team or individually – whatever you think works best for everyone. You can use many of the same methods and approaches you use to ask workers about risks to their physical health and safety. For example, make psychological health and safety a standing item at team meetings, a regular part of toolbox talks, and part of performance reviews.

Connect to support: Before you begin consultations, find out how to connect workers to support if they need it. Support services could include your workplace’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP), a mental health support line, their doctor or someone else they trust. Share this information with all workers at the start of consultations.

Having conversations with distressed staff can be tiring and stressful. Find out what support services are available to you and use them if you need to.

Start the conversation:

• Start by telling workers how you will protect everyone’s privacy, so they feel safe to share sensitive information.
• If your organisation has made promises in the past and not kept them, acknowledge this. Say you are here now and listening and will do your best to let the management team know about the workplace issues that are leading to stress.
• Ask open-ended questions. For example, ‘What more could the business do to support you?’
• Give team members enough time to think about and respond to questions.
• Listen carefully to what workers say, even if you think it might be wrong. It is important you understand what workers perceive is happening for them.
• Stay polite and respectful, and gently remind people you expect the same in return.
• If the conversation gets heated, ask them if they need time to take a break. If you need to, make another time to continue the conversation.

Remember, the important thing is to start ongoing consultation and planning on how you will manage psychosocial hazards.

Refer to the conversation guide at the end of this fact sheet for tips on how to discuss specific hazards.