The risk assessment of mental health and wellbeing impacts at an organisational level is useful to identify potential system weak points that need improving, but it fails to provide anywhere near the full picture of how the workers are impacted by psychosocial hazards.

The Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work Code of Practice 2022 provides guidance on this, starting with a list of 14 ‘Common Psychosocial Hazards’ to be used as part of identifying the causes or factors that need to be managed.

Hazard identification in the area of mental health and wellbeing is the easy part; the complication comes when starting to assess the risk impacts.

The Code gives neatly packaged examples with one hazard/risk impacting a worker – providing advice on what potential controls could be implemented.

But what happens if we have a scenario whereby three or more of the ‘common psychosocial hazards’ are present and potentially compounding to impact a worker or a work team?

The Code states that “… a combination of psychosocial hazards can increase the risk of harm”. That seems to be a statement of the obvious, but what is the best approach for combining the separate risks to gain a more complete profile of the combined risks?

  • Is the combination of two risks simply a linear addition?
  • Does that aggregation of four or five low-level risks exceed the threshold for a medium-level risk?
  • Or do the risks compound or magnify each other?

Consider this as part of a scenario: You’re working remotely. You’re already under the pump with high job demands, and then on top of that one of your colleagues is in a serious MVA, the cause of which appears to be fatigue after a long work week. In isolation, the remote work and the job demands were probably manageable, but now everything has crescendo-ed and you are up at the hospital checking in on Jonesy. It’s no longer straightforward to assess the mental health and wellbeing impacts like the examples that are so neatly laid out in the Code.

To properly consider the mental health and wellbeing risk(s), it’s necessary to undertake the assessment at an individual personal level, exploring the ‘context’ of that worker, their personal strengths and susceptibilities, and considering this as a total package. On top of this, there needs to be a focus on the ‘aggregation’ factor – considering the accumulation of stressors (because as we all know, nothing ever happens in isolation).

It is extremely challenging to come up with a one-size-fits-all formulated approach to quantifying the risks in the real world. Context matters when assessing risk, and individual worker context is paramount for consideration in the risk assessment of psychosocial risks. The risk impact to the worker/work teams has to be contextualised, and in this instance, the context is an individual [worker] context.

This realisation does highlight the need for a quick, dynamic assessment tool that considers the individual’s personal rating of their own susceptibility to each of the risk factor hazards, and it also highlights the need for the output of this process to indicate any ‘red flags’ when an employee’s wellbeing is starting to decline. This kind of information then provides management a basis upon which to make appropriate efforts to reduce the risk(s).

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