Here is what psychosocial safety often looks like in many Australian organisations: a policy, a training program, an annual engagement survey, and a report noting "no material incidents." These steps give the impression of oversight, but they rarely amount to a truly robust risk management strategy.
Here is what the law now demands: a systematic approach to identifying, assessing, controlling, and reviewing psychosocial hazards. In other words, the same careful attention given to preventing a worker from falling off a ladder must now be applied to preventing psychological harm caused by how work is organised and led.
This Is Not Soft Law
The model WHS Regulations were updated in 2022 and came into effect in April 2023. Psychosocial hazards are now explicitly regulated. The Positive Duty under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 requires organisations to actively eliminate sexual harassment and sex discrimination, not just respond after incidents occur. The Australian Human Rights Commission has been clear: cultural and structural conditions that allow harm to happen are within scope, not just individual incidents.
Regulators are taking action on this. In September 2025, SafeWork NSW issued a prohibition notice to the University of Technology Sydney, ordering it to pause its restructuring process after identifying a “serious and imminent risk of psychological harm” to employees. This followed concerns, including an anonymous complaint, about how the change process was being managed. SafeWork NSW was clear: psychosocial risks must be managed just like any other health and safety issue.
The UTS notice wasn’t an isolated case. SafeWork NSW has ramped up enforcement, including a major 2025 compliance blitz that led to over 500 non-compliance notices in high-risk workplaces. Psychosocial risks were a key focus alongside traditional safety hazards, highlighting a broader regulatory shift toward actively enforcing psychological health obligations on par with physical safety.
The question has fundamentally changed. It’s no longer just "did someone report harm?" but "did you take proactive, reasonable steps to prevent it?" Most organisations aren’t yet ready to answer yes.
How Psychosocial Hazards Are Different From Physical Hazards
When faced with a new safety obligation, most organisations instinctively apply existing frameworks: identify the hazard, document the control, review annually, done.
But this approach doesn’t work with psychosocial risks because these hazards don’t behave like physical ones.
A faulty machine is the same faulty machine for everyone who uses it. A psychosocial hazard—such as high job demands, low control, poor support, unclear role expectations, or interpersonal conflict—is experienced differently by different people, in different teams, under different managers, and at different stages of their careers. Harm builds up gradually through repeated exposure rather than a single event. And it rarely shows up clearly. Instead, it appears as disengagement, absenteeism, turnover, presenteeism, or a vague sense that something isn’t right. Organisations often misinterpret these signs as individual attitude problems or market conditions rather than as symptoms of structural work conditions.
The model Code of Practice lists seventeen psychosocial hazards. Simply ticking a box to confirm a policy exists for each tells you almost nothing about whether employees are actually being harmed. Understanding that requires something harder: genuinely grasping how work is experienced across different roles, teams, levels, and demographic groups. It means listening systematically, honestly, and creating enough psychological safety so people feel comfortable telling the truth.
Common Weaknesses
Waiting for complaints. No formal grievances doesn’t mean a healthy workplace. It usually means low psychological safety. People don’t feel safe speaking up or don’t believe it will lead to change. A culture of silence protects no one and doesn’t meet legal obligations.
Calling training a control measure. Training has its place, but it’s not a control measure under WHS. Running a respectful workplace program every two years while workloads remain unmanageable, roles unclear, change poorly managed, and support inadequate is not managing psychosocial risk—it’s managing appearances.
A 2026 Queensland Industrial Relations Commission decision made this crystal clear. An employer was found vicariously liable for repeated sexual harassment by a senior manager despite having clear policies and a training program that correctly outlined the law and the employer’s obligations. The defence failed not because the training content was wrong, but because of how it was delivered: click-through modules completed while employees were distracted, with quiz answers changeable until correct and slides skippable. The Commission noted that "genuine training cannot reasonably occur when employees are completing the training online whilst simultaneously attending to their duties." The employer also knew the manager had a prior history from 2016 and had issued a final warning but applied generic controls to a known elevated risk. No tailored training, no extra monitoring, no proportionate response to a specific hazard. The Commission found that targeted, properly delivered training would likely have deterred reoffending. This case sends a clear message: reasonable steps must be proportionate to the specific risk, not uniformly applied regardless of what you already know.
Leaving managers exposed. The biggest factor in whether employees feel psychologically safe is their relationship with their direct manager. Managers who are overworked, undertrained, and unsupported aren’t just struggling themselves—they become a psychosocial hazard for their teams. Organisational flattening has worsened this, with fewer managers managing larger teams and no matching investment in their skills or support. Data on declining manager engagement reflects this clearly.
Separating psychosocial safety from inclusion. Psychological safety isn’t experienced equally. Employees from non-majority groups, those navigating cultural or language differences, or with non-standard work arrangements consistently report lower psychological safety. Risk assessments treating the workforce as one homogeneous group miss those most exposed and the structural causes behind it. Psychosocial safety and inclusion are really two sides of the same coin.
What Genuine Compliance Actually Looks Like
Start with diagnosis, not solutions. Many organisations jump into psychosocial safety initiatives before truly understanding what’s driving harm in their context. The starting point must be honest, detailed inquiry. A survey question asking if employees feel valued isn’t enough. Employers need structured assessments of how specific psychosocial hazards affect different teams, roles, levels, and demographic groups. Combine that with leading indicators many organisations already have but don’t treat as safety data: where turnover is highest, which teams use Employee Assistance Programs most, where sick leave clusters, and what exit interviews reveal. Together, this data highlights real risks before formal complaints or workers compensation claims arise.
Treat it as a systems problem, not a people problem. Psychological harm at work stems from unmanageable workloads, unclear roles, poorly managed change, inadequate support, and cultures tolerating aggression. These are organisational issues created by how work is designed, resourced, and led. Managing individual behaviour alone while ignoring these conditions won’t solve the problem. A bullying manager is an issue, but the bigger issue is the workload pressure, lack of support, and cultural norms that let it persist unchecked. Focusing only on individuals misses the system that created them.
Invest in manager capability as a primary control measure. Since the manager relationship is the biggest factor in psychological safety, building manager skills isn’t optional. It’s the most direct way to improve safety. This means training managers on how to have difficult but fair conversations, recognise early distress signs, manage workloads and role clarity proactively, and create environments where people feel safe to speak up. It also means ensuring managers have reasonable workloads, support, and someone to consult when handling complex people issues.
Build reporting and governance structures that match the obligation. Psychosocial risk must be included in the risk register with identified hazards, assessed likelihood and consequences, documented controls, and scheduled reviews. Reporting should happen at board and executive levels with the same seriousness and frequency as physical safety and financial metrics. Leaders responsible for outcomes must be held accountable. Organisations that haven’t made this shift are behind the law.
Tailor controls to specific, known risks. Generic controls applied across the board are just a baseline, not full compliance. When an organisation already knows about specific risks—whether a manager with a prior complaint, a team with high turnover or Employee Assistance Program use, or a role with high demands—the law requires a proportionate, targeted response. The Queensland case is a clear example: the employer knew of the manager’s history but applied generic controls anyway. That was the failure. In Queensland, employers must also have a sexual harassment prevention plan reviewed after any incident. This principle applies broadly: controls must be calibrated to what you already know.
Summing Up
Meeting psychosocial safety obligations isn’t about having a policy, a training module, or ticking a checklist. It requires treating psychosocial safety with the same discipline as any serious risk: clear controls, accountability, and ongoing measurement. That means executives, leaders, and managers responsible for workplace safety need the knowledge, data, and authority to change the conditions causing harm.
Felicity Menzies is the CEO and Principal Consultant of Culture Plus Consulting, a specialist practice focused on building respectful, safe, and inclusive workplace cultures across corporate and government organisations in Australia. Culture Plus Consulting provides workplace culture diagnostics and tailored interventions to help organisations meet their psychosocial safety obligations.