 Diana Brown is an Assistant Director in Safe Work Australia's Psychosocial and Consultation Policy area. She joined Safe Work Australia in 2011 and is using her experience working with the Model Work Health and Safety Laws to improve the way we address psychosocial hazards. Diana coordinates Safe Work Australia's Mental Health Advisory Group, drawing on its experience and expertise from work health and safety authorities, industry bodies and unions to develop a model code of practice for managing psychosocial hazards at work. And indeed her keynote presentation will examine precisely that, psychosocial hazards at work. Would you please join with me in welcoming Diana Brown. Good afternoon everyone, thank you for having me. As said, my presentation is going to cover psychosocial hazards and how we can manage them at work. So the vision of the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy is underpinned by two key principles. The first is that all workers, regardless of their occupation or how they're engaged, have the right to a healthy and safe working environment. The second is that well designed, healthy and safe work will allow workers in Australia to have more productive working lives. We strongly believe that not only do workers have the right to be safe from psychological injuries, but that ensuring their safety is also improved productivity and can offer positive returns to businesses. Psychological injuries have a massive impact both on the worker and on the organisation. Workers' compensation data under-represents psychological injuries, we know that for a number of reasons, but it does provide us with useful information on trends and comparisons between types of injuries. Safe Work Australia compiles the national data set for compensation-based statistics. From this data we can see that the frequency rate, which is the number of claims per 100 million hours of work, for mental stress claims declined between 2003 and 2015-16 in recent years. The rate for harassment and or bullying claims, which is actually a subset of mental stress claims, has increased over that same period, reaching 17.5 claims per million hours of work in 2018-19. This is based on preliminary data, which may be updated as the claims come in a process. The graph shows national figures, including information from Victoria for the mental stress claims at top grey line. The harassment claims and the harassment bullying data, which is that lower red line, is a subset of the mental stress claims, but it excludes Victoria. Victoria doesn't code their data to that level of detail. We can also see from the data that while mental stress makes up only a small proportion of claims, the associated time lost and the costs are significantly higher. The bottom two lines of this table show the total per mental stress claims compared to the total for all claims. The bottom line, the total accepted claims, the median time lost is 0.8 of a working week, where for mental stress claims it's 12.2, so it's a massive difference there. This shows that the cost and the impact of this type of claim is much bigger for those affected. We also know that the money paid out as part of workers' compensation claims is only a fraction of the total cost of workplace injuries, and as I mentioned on the last slide, workers' compensation claims represent only a small fraction of injuries. The Australian Human Rights Commission in 2018 conducted the national survey on sexual harassment, which revealed almost two in five women, which is 39%, and just over one in four men, 26%, had experienced sexual harassment in their workplace in the preceding five years. So that statistics represents just one type of psychosocial hazard, and I think it's scarily high. So what are we doing about it? The model work health and safety laws have covered psychological health as well as physical health, since they were introduced in 2012 or 2013, depending on the state, it was 2013 in Tasmania. But the public discourse around mental health has improved, and there's better recognition that psychological injuries are preventable. I've only listed national milestones on this slide. Work health and safety regulators from across Australia have also been producing some really great resources on managing psychosocial risks, particularly in the last couple of years. SafeWork Tasmania has a great webpage which collects a range of resources on stress. In May this year, work health and safety ministers from the Commonwealth and all states and territories agreed to amend the model work health and safety regulations to specifically address psychosocial hazards. And SafeWork Australia is also developing a model code of practice which will support and complement those regulations. These aren't going to change what a business needs to do to meet their work health and safety duties, but they will provide clarity on the existing duties and guidance on how to meet them. So have a look at what that actually involves. So psychosocial hazards are anything in the way we work, sorry, in the way work or jobs are designed, organised or managed. The content of work, the tasks involved, working relationships and interactions, or the equipment or working environment that cause us stress. Stress is a term we throw around a lot. It's our body's physical and psychological response when we perceive that demands and asks exceed our ability or our resources to cope. Stress itself isn't an injury. In small amounts, it can actually be a good thing. So for example, if you've got a tight deadline or high stakes, it can help you perform better. But when stress becomes frequent, excessive or prolonged, it can do a serious harm. Common psychosocial hazards include job demands that covers working, work requiring intense or sustained, high physical, mental or emotional effort, unreasonable excessive time pressures or roll overload, violence or aggression, which is pretty self-explanatory, but it includes threats of those things. Bullying, which is repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed towards a worker or group of workers that causes a risk to health and safety. Bullying guidance has been around for a number of years, so most of you should be familiar with that definition. Harassment, including sexual harassment, conflict or full working relationships and interactions, which can be from other workers, but can also come from customers, clients, patients. Traumatic events, which are either being exposed directly or having to listen or view accounts from victims or witnesses. Low job control, for example, a call centre worker who has to follow a prescriptive script and keep a really strict time pranks for their calls. Poor support, which includes the practical assistance and emotional support you get from a manager or your colleagues, but also includes inadequate tools or resources to do your job. Remote isolated work, which goes back to that physical isolation from other workers and from resistance. Lack of role clarity, which can be uncertainty, frequent changes, conflicting roles or ambiguous responsibilities and expectations. Poor organisational change management, inadequate reward and recognition. Poor organisational justice, which includes things like inconsistent application of policies or discrimination. Decisions that don't just don't align with your normal policies. Poor physical working environments, so things like loud noises, excessive heat or exposure to physical risks. You might see these hazards grouped or described differently depending on what you're looking at. I think most people are in a furious agreement about what the hazards are, but they have different ways of how to group them and how best to describe them. So, for example, new international standard groups, traumatic events and job demands. It's useful to know what all these hazards are, and it might help you in identifying them and having common language to talk to workers about them. But if something is causing a worker stress, it doesn't need to be neatly categorised in order to control the risk. The risk management process should look really familiar to everyone. It's the same process we've been using for physical risks for years. Psychosocial risks aren't distinctly separate from physical risks. Many hazards will have both a physical and a psychological element. So, for example, isolated work or work-related violence. Treating them separately from your broader risk management process may actually create gaps. So, I'm going to run through what the risk management process looks like for psychosocial risks, but as much as possible it should be included as part of your organization's general risk management process. Addressing psychosocial hazards separately is likely to create gaps, but also could miss opportunities. You might be able to find better ways to manage and more cheaper ways to manage them when you manage them holistically. Identifying hazards is the first step in our risk management cycle. Again, these should all look really familiar. We're using similar methods to identify psychosocial hazards as we do for physical hazards. The only difference for psychosocial hazards is that there may be more of them that you can't directly observe. So, consultation with your workers becomes really important. You're unlikely to be able to identify all psychosocial hazards. All confidently say that they're not there unless you talk to workers. But open consultation isn't the only method for identification. We know that workers may not report work health and safety hazards for a range of reasons. For psychosocial hazards, this is exacerbated by the stigma around mental health and common misconceptions that if a worker is stressed by something at work, they just aren't resilient enough for the job. Workers may also have privacy concerns or worry about potential ramifications if they're reporting a risk or behaviour of another worker. I'm going to touch on that a little bit more later. Think through the tasks and identify any hazards involved in those. Review any direct reports about hazards. Businesses should have a system for reporting hazards and incidents, not just for psychosocial hazards, but generally. You need to suit the business size and circumstances and be proportional to the risks that the business faces. So, for example, a small coffee shop might be as simple as having a whiteboard up in the kitchen where workers can write up any hazards they identify. Something like a locked box for making confidential reports. The system might report into the duty manager if there's a hazard that's posing an immediate risk to health or safety. A large business is going to need something much more sophisticated. As well as considering direct reports of hazards, you should consider what the data your business collects might show you about those hazards. Records of working hours can identify workers who are regularly working overtime and might show you there's a high work demand there. Or your IT area might suddenly perceive an increase in reports of computer problems, which might show that your workers don't have the tools they enter the job, which we discussed earlier was a form of core support. You can observe the way your workers are behaving and interacting with each other. That might help you identify those hazards. But it's also important to remember that those can be assigned that other hazards are present but not adequately controlled. None of us share our best when we're feeling stressed and some workers may respond with behaviour such as being a bit short or snappy with their colleagues. It's never an appropriate response, but where we see those behaviours we should consider whether there's been another hazard present that we should consider. For larger businesses, anonymous surveys are a great tool for identifying hazards. Work Health and Safety Regulators and Safe Work Australia recently developed the People at Work Psycho-Social Risk Assessment Tool. It allows businesses with more than 20 workers to conduct an anonymous survey of their workers and analyse the results. I'll give you a bit more of an overview of people at work a little later with Psycho-Social Hazard. The first is the duration. That's how long a work is exposed for a particular hazard. A higher workload for a day or an hour will pose a much lower risk than facing that same workload for months on end. Frequency, so how often is that hazard coming up? Severity, an office worker who has a high workload is likely to experience much less stress than an air traffic controller with no interaction. So it happens to interact with each other and can create more stress. So this is really important both when we're assessing the risk but it can also help us when we're identifying control measures. If we imagine ourselves working in a call centre where you're receiving a really high volume of calls and you have low levels of control over how you handle those calls, if you have great support, so a supervisor who's there to assist you if needed and computers and systems that support your work, you might be able to cope with that high workload demand. Now imagine the same job but your supervisor is managing 100 other workers so it can't help you and a computer that keeps on freezing and your stress levels are likely to be much higher. You can see the interaction between the hazards. It does also mean that when it comes to controlling risks, if there's a particular hazard that we can't completely eliminate or can't do much about we might still be able to minimise the risk by addressing the other hazards that are present. The hierarchy of control measures should look really familiar to everyone. We can also use it for psychosocial hazards. The hierarchy is designed to help us find the most reliable and protective control measures. So we start at the top and only move down if we can't find reasonably practical control measures at that level. We must always eliminate risks if it's reasonably practical to do so. If it's not reasonably practical to eliminate them then we must minimise them as far as it's reasonably practical. This second tier is where we might need to apply a little bit more thought for psychosocial hazards. Minimising the risk can be achieved by altering systems of work, for example allocating tasks to match skills allowing sufficient time to complete tasks increasing support from supervisors and other workers altering the workplace layout altering the workplace environment or changing objects and tools used for a task. Physical risks are contributing to psychosocial risks can be minimised through the relevant substitution, isolation and engineering controls. As with physical risks, the administrative controls and personal protective equipment are the least reliable controls and provide the lowest level of health and safety protection. We should only consider these last and use them in combination with more important tasks. The interaction between controls we discussed a minute ago is really important here. There are some jobs where we may not be able to completely eliminate exposure to a hazard. For example a police officer being exposed to violence but by addressing the other hazards present we can substantially decrease the workers level of stress and therefore the risk that they're being exposed to. As to how we go about it, some controls are pretty obvious once we've identified the hazard. If you've identified low role clarity, you can go through a process of looking at the tasks in your workplace mapping them to who's responsible who they report to and the priorities and goals. Other control measures may not be as obvious or they might be specific to a workplace and this is where consultation with workers can really assist. If you think about a time when you've been stressed at work you can probably also think of something that would have helped or fixed the problem. In many cases our workers are already going to have the answers. Now a couple of principles to remember when we're controlling the risks. The first is that it's easier not to introduce a hazard in the first place than it is to deal with it later. If we have the opportunity to design our work, our systems and our workplaces so we don't introduce hazards that will be most effective and it's usually going to be cheaper than trying to retrofit control measures later. The second is that control measures that apply to an entire organisation are likely to be more effective than those applying to an individual. So let's look at an industry example. I believe that the healthcare and social assistance industry is the largest employee industry in Tasmania so we'll start there. Let's say we're a work health and safety manager for a hospital somewhere in Tasmania. A pandemic is just here. We're probably increasing the number of patients we've got so that's our high work demand. The system for ordering essential supplies has developed a bug so our orders are arriving incomplete. And remember that not having the appropriate tools for the job is a form of low support. Patients are getting frustrated with delays and some are becoming aggressive. It isn't clear who in the hospital is responsible for managing elements of the response so that's our low role clarity. You will notice in the guidance of psychosocial hazards there are examples of possible control measures but we don't prescribe specific controls. For some hazards there are generic controls that we can look at. In this example, increasing the number of staff to reduce job demands or fixing that system fault to address the low support and defining roles and responsibilities will help control those hazards. But there may be reasons that this can't be done immediately and there might be other controls that are more effective. This is where consulting with our workers becomes essential. In our example there might be an opportunity when patients are triaged to refer some cases to GPs or other services which could both reduce the demands and possibly patient aggression if the information and options are provided early and possibly even before patients can arrive. We might be able to confirm orders and essential supplies by email or phone but maybe we could also look at options like stockpiling supplies and working with other health services nearby to do that. If we can't address the cause of patient aggression we might be able to look at things like minimising the risk to our workers by altering the physical workplace. So for example putting a counter between our staff and the patients or where that is impossible changing the layout so workers can't become trapped and have clear access to an exit. I don't and never have worked in healthcare so I don't pretend to know the best control measures and what will be reasonably practical for that industry but by consulting with workers in that area I could draw on that expertise and find the best controls. Another example, if we think back to the call centre let's say we have a sudden spike in calls due to a new product causing high work demand. We've got staff who don't really know the new product so are only able to follow prescriptive scripts so they've got low job control. There's a lack of supervisors available to assist which is causing high support and customers are getting abusive because of the long wait times. It's still a psychosocial hazard if the abuse occurs over the phone or online that's really important to consider it's not just the fact that you physically aren't. Now the best way to go about controlling the risk would be elimination. There are a few controls not introducing that hazard in the first place so it might be that we could dedicate more resources and careful consideration to a product before it's launched and actually prevent those hazards from popping up and limiting them completely. But let's say for some reason that isn't reasonably practical. What might be reasonably practical to minimize these risks? For high job demand we have identified that if we can't address it at source we might be able to increase the staff available. So let's have more workers less work feeds to do. Or we could have a system that prioritizes the workload so workers can address the urgent issues. For example the call centre it might be that call centre for a phone company you could stop taking the calls for bill payments while you deal with that urgent demand but then have an automated message advising that all payment deadlines have been extended. For low job control it can be addressed by allowing staff more autonomy to apply the appropriate judgment but that does require them to have the information and training they need to do that. For aggressive customers we may be able to address the cause of the aggression so for example we might be able to provide information on wait times or provide options like call back services. We may be able to provide workers with escalation training to recognize early when a customer is becoming abusive and prevented escalating but if we can't prevent the abuse then control measures like allowing workers to hang up on abusive callers or escalating the call to a supervisor may work but remember that those sitting towards the bottom of our hierarchy of controls they're less effective they start to look at administrative control measures. Control measures aren't a second forget the model work health and safety laws require reviews at certain points. So for example when the control measure is not controlling the risks so far as today's so practical before a change in the workplace it is likely to give rise to a new or different health and safety risk that the control measure may not effectively control if a new hazard or risk is identified if the results of consultation indicate a review is necessary or if the health and safety representative requests to review because they reasonably believe one of the above has occurred and it's not been adequately reviewed already. You'll notice some of these triggers have an implicit requirement for you to be monitoring your workplace and your control measures so that you will pick up any new hazards or control measures that aren't working effectively. The monitoring review process shouldn't be a tick and flick. You need to have an appetite for bad news expect to find things that aren't working as well as possible or could be improved. If I was doing a regular routine review of my organization's work health and safety systems and I wasn't finding things that could improve, I'd be really concerned that the process itself wasn't working. So a few frequent questions and problems we have with managing psychosocial risks. Not addressing culture and stigma. So a negative culture or stigma towards mental health can be a massive barrier to workers identifying psychosocial hazards. There are a huge range of things that contribute to stigma. Some of them may not reflect the organization or its leaders beliefs. For example using derogatory language or outdated language around mental health. Stigma reflects their attitudes to mental health and psychosocial hazards. That can be much harder to change but there are some really great resources out there to help with that. Also, regularly consulting workers about psychosocial hazards as part of your broader work health and safety consultation process helps it to normalize those discussions and shows a seriousness of it that has been discussed as part of the broader work health and safety process. The focus on hazards and risks moves away and starts by focusing on hazards and risks. It puts it back on the work and rather than the individual, the worker. So it makes it easier for people to raise their hands. Investigations were a complaint we made for example a bullying or sexual harassment complaint. Investigations often focus only on the behavior of individuals. So has somebody breached our code of conduct. What we should be doing is looking at whether there are hazards present which may have contributed to that behavior and whether there are opportunities to improve control measures. For example, bullying might be an appropriate response to other hazards such as high work demands. Even where a worker or other person has behaved inappropriately, there may be opportunities to prevent similar incidents in the future. So for example where sexual harassment has occurred, there might be things we could change in the design or way out of the workplace prevented happening again. Focusing on individual resilience and well-being. So improving resilience of individuals can be really valuable. I think for all of us we've been through times where having those tools really helpful to us to improve our mental health. But it doesn't replace prevention. It doesn't prevent workers being exposed to hazards that can only ever minimize the impacts. So no matter how resilient a worker is any of us can be harmed by sexual social hazards. It may take longer for some or it may harm may not be as visible. But workers all have differing reflex speeds. But none of us, I hope, would implement programs to improve our reflex times rather than putting proper guarding on a machinery. Some workers are stronger and more flexible than others. But we still aim to eliminate or minimize hazardous material tasks in our workplaces rather than sending them off to the gym. Our focus for psycho social hazards is similarly beyond the hazard and not on the worker's response to it. Thinking that a bullying policy or an EAP is enough. These are both really useful tools and maybe needed as part of a broader approach. But they don't replace a systematic approach to managing psycho social hazards. An EAP can assist to minimize impacts after a worker is exposed to a hazard. But it doesn't prevent that exposure. A bullying policy is a great tool to set out your processes and assign responsibilities. For example, your policy could work through the risk management process and set out responsibilities at each step. It can also demonstrate your commitment to work health and safety and provide information for workers on how to report bullying or another hazard. But unless it's put into practice, it just needs a paper. If you choose to have a separate policy or policies for psycho social hazards, I would encourage you to still incorporate them into the process of managing hazards generally in your workplace. Managing psycho social hazards separately may miss opportunities to control them more effectively. For example, if we were considering the lighting in our workplace and we'd identified that there's a trip hazard that we need to have better lighting for, we might also be able to simultaneously address a risk of sexual harassment if the lighting in the area and low visibility was an issue. Common questions. What do I do about a staff member with an existing mental health condition? If a worker chooses to disclose mental health conditions, then it may be reasonably practical to do more to manage the risks in that case. Or you may need to make reasonable adjustments outside of work health and safety. WHS laws don't require businesses to be councillors or to treat mental health conditions. And if a worker chooses not to disclose a condition, you must still do everything that's reasonably practical to manage the psycho risks. What I would say though is that any risk management process or risk assessment that assumes all workers are uniformly healthy and fit is not adequate. We know there is a level of people with mental health conditions in the workplace or people with different places on the mental health continuum and we need to account for that when we're managing psycho-social risks. Does this mean I can't manage under performance? No, definitely not. Managing performance issues may be uncomfortable. It may even be stressful. But it would not be considered reasonably practical to completely avoid it. But you do need to be conscious of how you manage under performance and you must limit or minimise any psycho-social hazards that are present. For example, low role clarity or not applying your policies consistently. So make sure the worker's job is really clear and that it's not understood something. And if you're managing applying a certain policy to manage somebody's performance you need to apply that consistently across your organisation. I mentioned earlier the people at WorkTool. So to support businesses managing psycho-social hazards. Safe Work Australia, Australian Work Health and Safety Regulators and leading researchers have collaborated to develop the People of Work Psychosocial Risk Assessment Tool. The People of Work Tool is validated, free for all Australian businesses. It helps identify key psycho-social hazards in the workplace and provides guidance on practical ways to manage them. The People of Work Survey comes from a project we began back in 2007. A generally validated survey to identify and assess psycho-social hazards in workplaces. It was originally a paper-based survey which had to be administered and interpreted by the workplace or they had to engage somebody to do so. The People of Work Tool takes this survey and built it into a systematic process for businesses to manage psycho-social hazards. It provides support and resources through each step and is backed by support from Australian Work Health and Safety Regulators. The People of Work Tool is available at www.peopleofwork.gov.au If anyone hasn't already gone and had a look I'd encourage you to do so. It's really helpful, particularly when it works for businesses with focus. Really helpful, we'll actually step you through that process, provides tools and support through each step.