By Dr Louise Deacon

The release of WorkSafe’s long-awaited guidance on managing psychosocial risks at work has marked an important milestone in Aotearoa New Zealand, signalling a more defined regulatory approach to addressing psychosocial harm in workplaces.

Aotearoa New Zealand has lagged behind Australia in developing tools relating to psychosocial risk management, despite nearly identical work health and safety (WHS) laws. WorkSafe’s long-awaited Guidance on Managing Psychosocial Risks at Work has now been released, after the draft was published in 2023.

Understanding psychosocial hazards and risks

Psychosocial hazards are widely accepted to refer to ‘those aspects of work design and the organisation and management of work, and their social and environmental contexts, which have the potential for causing psychological, social, or physical harm’. Psychosocial risk refers to the likelihood that exposure to a psychosocial hazard will cause harm.

Commonly cited psychosocial hazards include things such as long work hours, unreasonable workloads, precarious work, violence or traumatic situations and materials, poor supervision, role ambiguity, and so on. There is a well-established body of evidence demonstrating that such harm commonly manifests as mental illness, cardiovascular disease and musculoskeletal disorders. WorkSafe’s guidance focuses on the robust relationship between psychosocial risk exposure, and mental or psychological harms.

The field and practice of psychosocial risk management draws predominantly on an occupational health and safety (OH&S) perspective, which aims to understand the role that working conditions play in increasing or decreasing the risk of work-related illness and injury, so as to inform workplace prevention and control strategies. This perspective entails identifying those psychosocial hazards that are present in the work environment, evaluating the risk they pose to workers, and modifying the work environment to eliminate or minimise those risks, so far as is reasonably practicable.

WorkSafe’s Guidance on Psychosocial Risk Management

The development and release of WorkSafe’s guidelines on Managing Psychosocial Risks at Work is a good step towards providing direction and clarity for New Zealand businesses wishing to comprehensively address mental health as a work-related issue, and fulfil their legal duties.

My own research has shown that in New Zealand, many organisations do struggle to interpret the meaning of ‘mental health’ within the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA). As a result, many responses made by duty-holders miss the mark. Rather than thinking about how aspects of the design, organisation, or management of work could be modified to protect and promote workers’ mental health, businesses tend to centre their mental health and wellbeing strategy around addressing factors relating to the personal characteristics or home lives of workers.

This results in individually focused interventions that are put in place with the aim of fixing harm, rather than preventing it. While a comprehensive mental health and wellbeing strategy might address all these issues, obligations under WHS law require a more singular focus on the impact of working conditions.

What is in the guidelines?

Broadly, the guidelines help New Zealand duty-holders understand their obligations under the HSWA as it applies to the protection of workers’ mental health from risks arising from the conduct of the business. In the introduction, the guidelines helpfully point out that they take a risk-management approach, consistent with that required by the HSWA, and do not purport to cover broader wellbeing or health promotion perspectives.

Early on, the guidelines explain what psychosocial hazards and risks are, and provide examples of psychosocial hazards. It groups these under aspects of work design (e.g., long work hours, unreasonable workloads), social factors at work (e.g., lack of support, bullying and harassment), and the work environment (e.g., remote or isolated work, work in unstable conditions). It is worth noting that there are many taxonomies of psychosocial risks available in the research literature on psychosocial risk management; however, this division of three groups appears to be drawn from the International Organization for Standardization’s Psychological health and safety at work 45003 standard.

Over the next few sections, the guidelines lead duty-holders through a standard OH&S process of identifying hazards, assessing risks, developing and implementing risk controls, and monitoring and assessing the impact of controls. Importantly, the guidance highlights the need, and legal requirements for worker participation in this process, as well as the need for the support of leadership and management. This latter point is critical given that psychosocial risks often arise from management decisions about the organisation and design of work, and the allocation of organisational resources – decisions that are often made away from the ‘factory floor’.

A considerable proportion of the latter section of the guidance relates to how organisations may respond to instances of psychological harm, and how they may obtain help for workers who need psychological services or support. While this is important and generally helpful, it may have been more appropriate in the context of regulatory guidance for the guidelines to offer interpretation as to how to apply common OH&S concepts, such as the hierarchy of controls, to psychosocial risks. The hierarchy of controls aligns with the legal test of reasonable practicability, which prioritises elimination of risks first and foremost, and thus maintains the focus on the prevention of harm, rather than treatment.

Supporting organisations to implement the guidelines

WorkSafe’s guidelines achieve what regulatory guidance should do – they provide high-level interpretation of the principles of the HSWA as they apply to psychosocial risks at work. Such guidance purposefully avoids being prescriptive, because organisations must be enabled to interpret and apply the principles of risk management to the particular context of their workplace, and the risks arising from or within it. In addition, this principle-based approach allows organisations to respond with innovative and cost-effective risk control measures; however, it sometimes also means that in the absence of detailed ‘how to’ instructions, organisations may feel they need more direction.

With this point in mind, I have been involved with the development of a workshop called GoodWork, which builds the knowledge and skills in participants necessary to develop and implement a comprehensive organisational mental health and wellbeing strategy. Importantly, a large component of this workshop focuses on psychosocial risk management as the bedrock for addressing mental health as a work-related issue. GoodWork is based on internationally accepted and evidence-based models, but also strongly aligns with the approach taken in WorkSafe’s recent guidance. There are upcoming GoodWork workshops at various locations around New Zealand, or workshops can be run in-house.

WorkSafe’s Guidance on Managing Psychosocial Risks at Work can be found at www.worksafe.govt.nz/dmsdocument/70098-managing-psychosocial-risks-at-work/latest.

Visit www.goodyarn.org for more information about GoodWork.