In this section

• How to identify and assess psychosocial risks to inform work design solutions
  • Use systems thinking
  • Consider who designs work in the organisation
• Common work design approaches and tools
  • Effective systems thinking approaches

PCBUs are responsible for making sure psychosocial risks are systematically and appropriately managed.

The Code of Practice describes a recommended systematic process PCBUs can use to manage these risks, as shown in Figure 1: Psychosocial risk management cycle.

The steps of the psychosocial risk management cycle are:

1. identify hazards (and their sources)
2. assess risks
3. control risks (through the better design of work, systems of work and other approaches)
4. review and monitor the effectiveness of control measures including any work designs.

The Code of Practice also clearly outlines some essential elements of an effective risk management process including:

• leadership and management commitment
• consulting workers and those in the duty holder’s supply chains at every step
• adequate planning and preparations (see pages 15-16 of the Code of Practice).

How to identify and assess psychosocial risks to inform work design solutions

Use systems thinking

Systems thinking is an approach used in work design to help identify and better understand the dynamic relationships between key parts of the work system. It considers how these parts and relationships may create psychosocial hazards and risks, and support or erode the effectiveness of workplace controls. These insights can then be used to design out the underlying causes and to design in solutions.

This big picture approach considers the whole work system and how the five elements that make up the work system overlap, as illustrated in Figure 2: Work Systems. The five elements include:

• organisational culture, processes and practices – the management structure, team arrangements, operating and safety processes and procedures
• equipment, tools and resources – machinery, technology, information and IT systems
• human system – people’s innate characteristics, strengths, and limitations, and the values, skills and attributes of those working in the organisation
• work tasks – the psychosocial and physical demands of a task
• working environment systems – workspaces, physical conditions.

PCBUs might also want to consider external factors that can impact the work system, such as the prevailing economic conditions, operating regulations and even community norms.

Using systems thinking can also offer clues on why something that was considered an ‘effective control measure’ and ‘safe way of working’ may gradually drift towards becoming unsafe.

Consider who designs work in the organisation

To effectively identify psychosocial hazards and their causes, leaders should clearly understand who in the organisation is making decisions that directly or indirectly impacts how work is done, and how it may create psychosocial risks.

Understanding 'work as done'

It is important to have frank and open discussions with affected workers and their representatives from across your organisation to better understand how ‘work is really done’ in normal operating conditions, peak periods and during emergencies. You can then compare this to how work is ‘imagined’ and ‘prescribed’ (such as in position descriptions, operating and safety documents, and training materials). Doing this comparison should help organisations uncover the things that are going right and why, so you can support these to keep happening. Effective worker consultations can help you make sure future work and systems of work design are better at managing psychosocial risks in both normal and emergency situations.

In practice, work design is done by many different people within an organisation. Some of these people may not be very aware of how their decisions impact on work design, or the WHS duties and obligations of their employer or themselves. Some examples of how decisions made in different roles can impact psychosocial risk and influence work design include:

• organisational leaders (CEO, Officers, senior executives): setting organisational strategy, priorities, governance, and structure; monitoring performance; and allocating resources.
• project and contract managers: planning and coordinating projects; managing client and supplier relationships
• line managers: organising and allocating tasks; giving instructions; supervising individuals; setting and monitoring performance expectations; and giving practical support
• information technology: designing and purchasing software that dictates workflows and timeframes; and making sure staff know how to use the software
• engineers and architects: designing equipment, processes, structures, and site layouts
• accounting, finance: allocating budget to priorities, staff and resources; and replacing or repairing equipment
• human resources: setting recruitment processes, pay, conditions and working arrangements including rostering policies and performance management systems
• WHS: setting WHS strategy priorities; choosing WHS management systems; advising leadership on WHS matters including work design
• maintenance areas: setting processes for when and how plant/equipment is inspected, tested and serviced
• teams and individual workers: deciding how to do tasks (to the extent they have job control), providing feedback on work design options, and contributing to norms around behaviours.

Some work design decisions will also be influenced by external parties such as clients and suppliers, where clients have unrealistic expectations or suppliers are unable to meet deadlines.

To make sure work is appropriately designed and managed, duty holders should make sure:

1. Everyone is aware of how their decisions and actions impact health and safety, including those who directly and indirectly influence how work is designed and managed.
2. There is communication, consultation, coordination, and cooperation between people in your organisation around design decisions and actions.
3. You consult, cooperate, and coordinate activities with others who share a WHS duty in relation to the same matter (section 46 of the WHS Act). Others who share a duty could be, for example, a building manager, property owner or subcontractor.
4. You consult workers about matters that may affect them, either directly or through their representatives (section 47 of the WHS Act)

Psychosocial hazards and risks typically arise from underlying work design issues at many different levels within an organisational system, including design at task level, job level, team level, and organisational wide.

Organisational wide design issues impacting all staff, such as organisational and management restructures.

Team-level design issues, such as how work is organised and allocated.

Job and task design issues, such as excessive workloads, role ambiguity, or conflicting work priorities.

Duty holders, in managing risks to health and safety, must identify reasonably foreseeable hazards, including psychosocial hazards, that could give rise to risks to health and safety. This may include psychosocial hazards arising from poor work design which may create a psychosocial risk in the organisation. You should also consider how work design at each level combines and interacts to create psychosocial hazards and risks for workers. You must make changes to work design to manage these risks.

Work design can be done at different times. The effort required will vary depending on the goal.

Times when a duty holder should review existing work design and consider improvements include when:

• significant organisational or workplace changes are planned, for example introduction of new equipment, new tasks, or new workspaces
• doing major projects especially where this requires consultation, cooperation, and coordination with workers and others
• developing a new safety procedure, or prestart safety checks for known high-risk tasks
• a new psychosocial hazard or risk is identified, or you are uncertain about current risks
• a control measure appears to not adequately be minimising the risk
• consultation indicates a review is necessary or if requested by a HSR
• agreed review dates (such as annually) or audit results indicate a review is needed
• a serious incident, injury, or illness occurs arising from the psychosocial risk
• a psychological injury occurs.

Common work design approaches and tools

Most organisations may already use a range of approaches to help them identify psychosocial hazards, assess risk, and monitor risk control measures. This may include, collecting:

• job and task level data and insights from interviews with workers and their representatives, incident and near miss reports or position descriptions
• team level data and insights from team discussions, reports to Health and Safety Committees or HSRs, feedback from unions, surveys and focus groups
• organisational level data and insights from Health and Safety Committee meetings, surveys, risk registers, incident reports, illness and injury data, focus groups, grievances, complaints and existing policies or procedures
• outside/ external information from industry associations, unions and government bodies such as the police.

For more information see SafeWork NSW’s Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work and SafeWork NSW’s Guide: Measuring and Reporting WHS Information (PDF, 854.37 KB).

There are many different work design models. If you are interested in learning about some of the academic basis for these, visit the OHS Body of Knowledge.

Effective systems thinking approaches

The following section includes some suggested approaches to risk identification that organisations can use in addition to any approaches they already have in place. Most organisations should be able to apply these without the help of a specialist. In some cases, organisations might want to use an expert or a specialist to be evidence-based and minimise bias. Using external specialists may help workers feel safer to disclose sensitive information.

Apply the iceberg analogy

Duty holders should look beyond surface-level causes of a situation and seek a deeper understanding of them. Some issues are readily observable; however, it is what lies beneath that may be even more important.

It may help to ask subject matter experts and affected workers questions to better understand:

• What is the situation, issue, or event?
• How did the organisation learn about or discover the situation or issue?
• What is the duration, frequency, and severity of the exposure of workers and other persons to the psychosocial hazards?
• How may the psychosocial hazards interact or combine?

The ‘Five Why?’ discovery process

Repeatedly asking why a situation or psychosocial risk might arise is one of the simplest and most useful methods to better identify and understand why hazards or risks exist in the workplace.

To begin the process, first collect some basic information about the psychosocial hazard or risk:

• Why a psychosocial hazard or risk is present?
• How might the psychosocial hazards interact or combine to cause harm?
• What are the underlying root causes for the psychosocial hazard or risk?
• How might a chain of problems lead to harm or a control measure not working?

Once you have collected this information, ask ‘Why?’ this might have happened. This process should help give a clearer picture of the underlying issues and contributing causes. Asking a ‘why?’ question five times comes from the observation that this number is usually sufficient to reveal the main causes and factors behind an issue. To get the best results, make sure the person leading this process is competent and impartial.

Appendix 1 has some additional information to help with a ‘Five Why’ discovery process.

Complete a job or task hazard analysis

A task hazard analysis describes the overall task goals (what needs to be achieved). Then it systematically uses a top-down approach to break down the key steps of the task and describe the required actions and the relationships between each.

The technique can be used to gain insights into psychosocial hazards and risks, safety critical decisions, and dependencies (like other workers’ actions, or essential information and equipment needed if work is to be completed safely and on time and to budget).

It can also help uncover common ‘workarounds’ (both beneficial and dangerous) and noncompliance with work procedures.

Jobs can include many tasks and elements. From a WHS perspective it is helpful and more efficient to focus on those associated with the highest risk of harm, rather than do a task hazard analysis for every task that makes up a whole job.

The first step, therefore, is to look at the inherent requirements of the job. Based on that information then choose the most hazardous tasks within that job and undertake a task hazard analysis for each.

The task hazard analysis should describe the:

• goal(s) of each task – what needs to be achieved, and any other relevant information such as when the task needs to be completed
• sequential steps – some will be observable like physical actions; others will require workers to describe the processes and decisions that then result in the actions
• dependencies – equipment, activities or information from others that is needed to do the task safely and correctly within a set timeframe
• important ‘safety’ decision points – such as when a task may need to stop if a control measure is not in place, and if so, what needs to be done and who needs to know about this
• who needs to do each step – how many staff of what skill level, essential training, or qualifications
• actual and possible psychosocial and (where relevant) physical hazards and risks – such as cognitive/mental, emotional, and physical demands of the task
• how task demands may be different – for novices compared to experienced staff.

Whether or not you need to keep breaking tasks down into finer detail depends on whether this will reveal further useful information about psychosocial hazards and risks.

A task hazard analysis is best represented and understood as a flow diagram. Appendix 2 has some additional information about this process.

Look for excessive cognitive and emotional demands

All work requires cognitive and emotional effort. Many organisations may not currently pay enough attention to these important demands.

It is an important part of the task analysis to consider the cognitive task demands, such as the need for attention, perception, memory, active listening, and decision-making.

Emotional demands might include:

• the need to show empathy, compassion, respectful service and politeness even when customers are being abusive
• reading and responding to distressing content, such as legal officers reading court transcripts
• supervisors carrying out difficult management decisions around redundancies and performance management.

A cognitive and emotional task analysis builds on, or could be incorporated into, the job or task hazard analysis described above. It should provide additional information to help unpack the thought processes and decision making that underlie workers’ observable actions, including both useful ‘workarounds’ and those that may lead to errors.

This analysis is particularly important when tasks are being automated and workers may need to quickly diagnose and respond to situations that were not anticipated by engineers or designers. It’s also important in novel situations when workers might be under time pressure and/or experiencing stress.

Once organisations understand what, when and why problems might arise due to excessive cognitive and emotional demands, you can design appropriate decision support systems, including training and supervision. This includes allowing workers (where they have appropriate skills and experience) reasonable control to flexibly respond to these problems as they arise.

While duty holders may need the help of an ergonomist or organisational psychologist to do a comprehensive analysis of this type, they can start by discussing with workers the things that may influence their thought and emotional processes and responses.

Start by asking workers questions which help you understand:

• What information is the most important to do the task?
• What are you noticing and thinking about and feeling as you solve problems and make decisions?
• Why do you believe workers might sometimes make good decisions or mistakes?
• What things or situations within the organisation might be making this more or less likely?
• How do you believe this might be different for experienced versus novice workers and why might this be so?
• How do workers know an abnormal or dangerous situation is developing, and why might it be missed by you or others?
• How are workers solving problems and making decisions? Start by asking workers to describe step by step how they do the task, and if they think this is effective.
• What do you think might help you prioritise tasks better, make important information clearer, minimise distractions, and so on? It can be helpful to ask workers to tell a story of how they did the task and an occasion where things went right or wrong and why.

Use prestart or work briefings as an opportunity to identify/assess hazards and design tasks

Prestart checks (when done well) are an example of a rapid and often informal task analysis process. These are often used shortly before a task starts where residual risks remain that may rapidly change over the shift. Prestart checks can be included in safety huddles, handovers, and meetings, and so on.

Prestart checks can be part of a safe system of work if done well with adequate time and genuine worker participation, and not just as a ‘compliance tick and flick’ exercise. They can be especially useful when the process is done at ‘the point of risk’ just before workers will be experiencing the risks. Then they are more likely to reflect the ‘work as done’ rather than ‘work as imagined or hoped for.’

The prestart check can be useful for:

• raising workers’ awareness of potential residual serious hazards and risks
• improving coordination and communication about important tasks, steps, and control measures
• leading to changes in the task design as workers agree on realistic workable controls and safe workarounds to problems
• notifying and escalating to management where required that unacceptable risks remain.

Take the opportunity to consider how prestart checks are done in your organisation and if they can be better designed.

Use psychosocial risk assessment tools

Many organisations are choosing to use the free People at Work Psychosocial Risk Assessment Survey Tool. This is an online, well-validated and confidential tool that you can use to survey groups of workers (20 or more) about their experience with common psychosocial risks and some biomechanical risks. The risks the tool focuses on align with those in the Code of Practice. The tool automatically generates a results report that can be used and interpreted by experienced WHS or HR professionals.

Leaders can choose to ask staff from across their whole organisation to complete the survey. This will help you identify common psychosocial hazards and which teams are most at risk, so you can then prioritise work design for these groups. Alternatively, if you already know the teams or work areas who are more likely to be at risk of psychosocial hazards, you can survey those groups only.

The People at Work website includes numerous resources to assist Australian duty holders to design work and manage risks. While these best suit medium to large-sized organisations, the site also includes some useful tips and information for smaller organisations.

Other proprietary validated psychosocial surveys and tools are available. Most require the assistance of an experienced human factors specialist or organisational psychologist to use and interpret them.

Explore workload issues

If the task analysis, surveys, or other processes have identified that inappropriate workloads are an issue, explore this further.

You may be able to tell your workers have inappropriate workloads through evidence of long working hours; regular reports from workers of feeling rushed (excessive time pressure); conflicting work priorities; poor match of tasks with worker skills; some workers routinely missing their breaks; or reports from workers of fatigue and stress.

You can use the approaches below to learn more about workload issues in your organisation. For the best results, these are best used in conjunction with systems thinking and hazard analysis approaches.

Workload focus groups

These are a relatively straightforward way to collect information. They can supplement data and insights from surveys indicating that workloads are perceived as a serious problem. You can get further insights on problems or issues from the group, as well as work design suggestions from subject matter experts including affected workers. The People at Work website has information on how to run these focus groups. Remember to carefully choose competent and trusted people to run these sessions.

Industry specific workload tools

Some sectors like health, education, aviation, and defence have specialised workload tools and algorithms. These can help document key tasks, timelines, resources, dependencies, priorities, and allocate human and financial resources. However, they are usually based on very strict assumptions and rarely use systems thinking. They may not adequately consider how psychosocial hazards interact to generate perceptions of high workloads. If you use these tools, combine them with other data and information sources.