What is OHS and psychosocial health and safety?

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OHS stands for occupational health and safety. It deals with ensuring employees, and other people in the workplace, have their health, safety and welfare protected at work.

Health and safety of all kinds is important! Victoria’s OHS Act specifically defines health as including psychological health. This means your employer must protect your physical and mental health.

What is psychosocial health and safety?

Psychosocial hazards are any workplace factors that increase the risk of work-related stress, and can lead to mental or physical harm. These hazards are sometimes caused by – or related to – the management or design of your work, workplace or working environment.

A psychosocial hazard is anything in your workplace that impacts your mental and emotional wellbeing. The injuries caused by psychosocial hazards can have major impacts on someone’s work and personal life.

Sometimes, mental health is brushed off as not a workplace issue. This is far from the truth.

Common psychosocial hazards include workload pressure, lack of support, poor change management, bullying, harassment, unfair treatment, exposure to violent or traumatic events and insecure work.

Often, employees are exposed to multiple psychosocial hazards. Some hazards are present all the time. Others are only present occasionally. But when these hazards combine and interact, there is a greater risk of psychosocial injuries and incidents.

A person’s mental health can be influenced by a range of factors. Our work, home, family, and friends can all have an impact on our mental health. As unionists, our job is to ensure that the work influence does not cause further harm to a person’s mental health. This means ensuring that you and your colleagues have a psychologically safe working environment.

Who is responsible for health and safety in the workplace?

Every worker should be able to go to work knowing their health and safety is protected. Not just because it’s the law, but also because you deserve it.

It is your employer’s duty to provide and maintain a work environment for you that is without risks to your health and safety, as far as is reasonably practicable. When there is a risk to your health and safety at work, your employer must consider not just how they protect you, but how they eliminate the risk all together. That’s because your employer must provide you with the highest level of protection against risks to your health and safety.

Employees have duties in the workplace as well. Employees must ensure that they work with care for themselves and others. But at the end of the day, protecting the health and safety of workers is the employer’s duty.

While it is the employer’s duty to provide and maintain a safe and healthy work environment, we believe that workers are the experts in what a safe and healthy work environment is.

We must change the attitude toward psychological safety in the workplace. Psychosocial hazards are serious and can have massive impacts on workers and their communities. We believe that the go-to methods of tick the box training, “mental health” days and lunchtime yoga are a band-aid solution to underlying work design and management issues in the workplace

Workers deserve the highest level of protection

The OHS Act specifically states that employees must be given the highest level of health and safety protection that is reasonably practicable in the circumstances.

This means when there is a hazard in the workplace, your employer must attempt to eliminate the health and safety risk. If eliminating the risk is not reasonably practicable, your employer must take all reasonably practicable steps to reduce the health and safety risk. When your employer takes steps to eliminate or reduce a health and safety risk in the workplace, this action is called a ‘control’.

An easy way of determining the highest level of protection is to use a tool called the ‘Hierarchy of Hazard Controls’ or ‘Hierarchy of Controls’ for short.

The Hierarchy of Controls goes through the steps an employer must consider when trying to eliminate or, if not reasonably practicable, reduce the risk to an employee’s health and safety. Your employer must start with elimination and work their way down. This is because the OHS Act states employees must have the highest level of health and safety protection, as far as is reasonably practicable.



Elimination: Eliminate the hazards and risks
Substitution: Substitute for lesser risks
Isolation: Isolate people from the risks
Engineering controls: Implement engineering changes or change the system of work
Administrative controls: Implement administrative changes
Personal protective equipment (PPE):Provide PPE to protect people from harm

Here’s an example of using the Hierarchy of Controls in a workplace:
Bridgette works in local government in a role that has high work demands. She is regularly given large projects with only a few days to complete them without any extra help or resources. Bridgette works long hours and does not take her lunch breaks. Bridgette isn’t the only one in this boat. All Bridgette’s colleagues work long hours and barely take their breaks. Employees have tried to raise this in the past, but management have shrugged them off saying that this is just the way things are. As a result, workplace morale is getting lower and lower.

Management have noticed this. To boost morale, they introduced an Employee Assistance Program that provides 10 sessions of free counselling to employees, free lunchtime yoga, and they have displayed posters in the lunchroom about their commitment to mental health. Despite the changes, employee morale continues to decline.

Bridgette and her colleagues sit with their ASU Organiser to discuss these issues. During their discussion, they determine that they all are exposed to high job demand and low job control – both of which are psychosocial hazards.

They sit together and go through the Hierarchy of Controls and come up with a list of controls that can be implemented:

Elimination: Some people are regularly given work that is not a part of their role. They determine that in these cases, this work can be given to another person, removing that from their workload.

Substitution: Some people are given early deadlines even though the work isn’t really required until later. Pushing back deadlines, especially when people are experiencing a high workload, will alleviate some of the risk.

Isolation: Their office is open plan which is helpful for socialising and collaboration but not helpful when someone is doing a mentally demanding task. They identify an unused space in the office that can be booked out as a quiet office when required.

Engineering: They determine some of the work they do is double handled. Together, they think of ways this can be minimised, freeing up valuable time for other tasks.

Together, they present these controls to management to discuss how to create a psychosocially safer work environment.

Mentally healthy workplaces benefit everyone

For every dollar spent on creating genuinely safer workplaces employers will see a $2.30 return on investment.

A mentally healthy work environment means you will be a happier and healthier person. Your workplace culture will improve because all your colleagues will also be working in a safe environment. You will be a more productive worker which will financially benefit your employer. You will have a better worker for your clients and customers. Your relationship with family and friends will improve. You will have more time and energy to pursue activities outside of work contributing to a closer community.

When employees are unwell mentally it costs businesses in sick leave, backfilling positions, lower productivity, staff turnover, workers’ compensation claims, poor reputation for future staff and customers.

Research suggests that presenteeism (where an employee remains at work despite experiencing symptoms that result in reduced productivity levels) could be costing your business up to nine working days, per employee, every year.

When it comes to mental health, what’s good for people is good for business too. In fact, for every dollar spent on a successful mental health initiative, businesses can expect to see a $2.30 return on investment (PwC 2014).

Organising for safer workplaces

We know how to create safer workplaces – eliminate the hazard at the source. But right now, that isn’t happening. Employers prefer to implement band aid solutions instead of actually creating safer workplaces. Lunchtime yoga, free fruit bowls, and resilience training just isn’t going to cut it. Our solution is to organise for safer workplaces from the bottom up. We believe safer workplaces start when workers are empowered with knowledge around psychosocial hazards and how to fix them.

• Change our attitude toward psychosocial hazards
• Elect an HSR
• Talk to your union about organising

Talk about psychosocial hazards in the same way as you would physical hazards. Language is important and the way we talk about psychosocial hazards is important. Things like high/low workload and bullying aren’t just things that make your job suck – they’re workplace hazards and can harm your health! They are serious psychosocial hazards and should be treated as such.

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