Dr Dougal Sutherland: Psychosocial risk assessments at work

2024 has been a tricky year for many organisations and businesses – whether it be through having to make significant changes or being affected by the current economic environment. Now is a good time to stop and take stock of how the year has impacted on your people. One great way to do this is through a psychosocial risk assessment.

What’s a psychosocial risk assessment? It looks at all the psychological and social hazards in a workplace that can potentially cause mental or physical harm to your people.

Some easy examples are:

• Bullying
• Micromanagement
• High workloads
• Less obvious examples include
• Job insecurity
• Lack of clear role description
• Physical work environment e.g., spending all your working day in the cab of a crane

Psychosocial hazards are a leading cause of mental health problems at work (e.g., stress, depression, anxiety) and also physical health problems (e.g., musculoskeletal problems, high blood pressure, heart problems). Now is a good opportunity to look at what hazards are at your place to set your people and organisation up to perform at their best in 2025.

First steps you should take:

• Make sure management is involved and supportive – you’ll hit a ceiling in how far this can go if they’re not on board. If they need any convincing, there have been a number of cases in court recently where organisations have been fined anywhere between $50k and $1.8million for not looking after the mental health of their staff
• Talk to staff to find out what things are really like at the coal face. Leaders can sometimes make the mistake of thinking they know all the ins and outs of an organisation and while they will know some of it, nothing beats talking to people who are actually doing the job
• Look at data you already have, e.g. are there areas with high levels of sick leave or with high annual leave balances – why might this be the case?

Lastly, you might need to call in the external experts, which is where organisations like ours can help out.

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