A Roadmap to create a mentally healthy, compliant, organisation
Progressive Australian workplaces understand that psychosocial safety is just as important as physical safety. Under WHS legislation, employers have a duty of care to manage psychosocial risks – factors that can cause psychological harm such as stress, burnout, or interpersonal conflict. Managing psychosocial risks effectively is essential, yet for many organisations, putting this into practice can feel complex.
To help we’ve put together a practical guide that brings together Get Mentally Fit’s four-part psychosocial risk management series into one clear, evidence-informed roadmap. Managing Psychosocial Risks: A Practical Guide is designed to help those responsible for safeguarding their employees and organisation take proactive, confident steps to protect everyone.
Step 1: Identifying and Documenting Psychosocial Hazards
Start by building a living, audit-ready psychosocial risk assessment tool tailored to your organisation. This register serves as your central playbook, capturing hazards, documenting control measures, and maintaining WHS compliance.
Step 1: build a living, audit-ready Psychosocial risk assessment tool
Once created, the next step in the psychosocial risk management process is for your workforce to collectively figure out (Identify) what specific Psychosocial Hazards are, or could potentially be, affecting them.
Step 2: Identify and Document the hazards, unique to your workplace
Step 2: Assessing the Psychosocial Risks
Once you’ve done the hard work of building an audit-ready psychosocial risk assessment tool and identified and documenting the psychosocial hazards relevant to your workplace – now it’s time to understand how serious those hazards are, and who they affect.
This article lays out how to assess what risks are most relevant in your workplace, allocate resources effectively, and demonstrate due diligence under the Work Health and Safety (WHS) framework. You’ll find a practical guide for evaluating the likelihood and severity of harm each hazard could cause. Combining these gives a risk rating, helping your organisation prioritise which hazards need mitigating via control measures.
Step 1: Identify who is exposed
Step 2: Analyse how they’re exposed: frequency, duration, and severity
Step 3: Consider combined and interacting hazards
Step 4: Rate the risk: likelihood x consequence
Step 5: Document everything
Step 3: Controlling Psychosocial Risks: Plan into Action
After identifying and assessing psychosocial risks, the next step is to control and minimise them. This means taking practical, evidence-based action to reduce exposure to hazards and strengthen psychological health and safety across your organisation.
The goal is always to eliminate the source of risk where possible. When elimination isn’t feasible, organisations must implement measures that reduce the likelihood or severity of harm. These controls should prioritise sustainable, system-level solutions over temporary fixes.
Step 1: Apply the Hierarchy of Controls
Step 2: Analyse how they’re exposed: frequency, duration, and severity
Step 3: Consider combined and interacting hazards
Step 4: Rate the risk: likelihood x consequence
Step 5: Document everything
Implementing strong controls not only demonstrates due diligence under WHS law, but also builds trust and engagement.
Step 4: Reviewing to Improve Controls
The final stage in managing psychosocial risks is to review and continuously improve your control measures. Psychosocial risk management is not a “set and forget” process – workplaces and people evolve, and so must your approach.
Psychosocial risk management is continuous. Regularly evaluate whether controls are working and whether new hazards have emerged. Here’s how!
Step 1: Define What Success Looks Like
Step 2: Schedule Regular Reviews
Step 3: Involve Workers and Leaders in the Review
Step 4: Identify What’s Working – and What’s Not
Step 5: Document, Communicate, and Integrate Changes
When you review and monitor proactively, you turn psychosocial safety from a one-off project into an embedded system and safety culture of care and accountability.
Building a Safer, Healthier Workplace
By following our four step roadmap, created to support organisations as part of National Safe Work Month (16–31 Oct), you should find it easy to create your organisation’s psychosocial risk management plan.
Remember though: Safety, like culture, requires continual attention.
At Get Mentally Fit, we help organisations move from compliance to functioning more healthily by embedding psychosocial risk management into their everyday leadership and collective employee wellbeing practice.
Our workplace psychologists and consultants can help you:
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Review and update your psychosocial risk management plan
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Conduct workforce pulse checks and data analysis
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Facilitate leadership and staff consultations and training
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Strengthen psychosocial safety systems and culture
📞 Contact us today to ensure your psychosocial risk management plan remains effective, measurable, and meaningful.
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