Designing Workplaces to Support Psychosocial Safety

Relationships are the foundation of mentally healthy work. If you feel like you can have those conversations with a leader and there is good worker engagement, you're halfway there.

- Vanessa Cooper

About this Session

As awareness grows around psychosocial hazards, many industries are recognising the critical need to address issues like unbalanced job demands, low role clarity, and poor organisational design. If left unmanaged, these risks undermine trust, drive burnout, and compromise overall safety. Yet, for many health and safety leaders, the challenge lies in bringing psychosocial safety out from the "HR umbrella" and into day-to-day risk management operations.

In this session of the Safety Voices webinar series, Vanessa Cooper, Principal Advisor at WorkSafe New Zealand, and Terry Buckingham, Wellbeing Lead at ASB Bank, unpack what it actually takes to embed psychosocial risk management into everyday practice. From navigating regulatory guidelines to implementing practical controls on the frontline, they explore how to shift from merely treating symptoms to designing workplaces that actively protect people.

The Three Clusters of Psychosocial Risk

During the session, Vanessa shares WorkSafe's framework, which breaks psychosocial hazards down into three distinct, interconnected clusters:

1. Work design: This includes role clarity, job expectations, the level of control or autonomy people have over their workflow, and work scheduling.
2. Social factors: This focuses on workplace relationships, covering who you work with, how you collaborate, and the level of support provided by leadership.
3. Physical environment: Psychosocial safety is also shaped by physical surroundings, such as the amenities provided, noise levels, and lighting.

Together, these elements illustrate that a psychosocial risk is simply a person in interaction with their work environment.

Moving from Reactive Support to Work Design

The dualism of mind and body is a thing of the past, yet many organisations still get stuck in a reactive "whack-a-mole" space, only intervening or offering EAP support after the harm occurs.

Vanessa and Terry advocate for shifting focus to the top of the hierarchy of controls: elimination through better work design. Just as an organisation wouldn't drop a heavy new piece of machinery onto the factory floor without a risk assessment, they shouldn't introduce new, high-pressure workloads or structural changes without assessing the psychosocial impact on the team.

Key Takeaways from The Session

1. Focus on mentally healthy work, not just healthy individuals

Instead of trying to "fix" people so they can endure stressful environments, focus on the work itself. By designing work properly; clarifying roles, managing demands, and giving teams a sense of agency over their tasks, organisations can build an environment where people naturally thrive.

2. Treat new workloads like new machinery

Don't wait for an incident to assess psychosocial hazards. When organisational changes happen or new demands are introduced, proactively run a risk assessment. Identify the impact on the team and involve them in deciding how the work should be managed before the pressure hits. 

3. Start small and avoid the scattergun approach

It's easy to sleepwalk into trouble by either doing nothing or trying to solve every organisational risk at once. Instead of overwhelming the business with massive, complex plans, pick the top one or two relevant risks for your specific environment, like workload or external aggression, and manage them well.

4. Redefine the 'why' behind mental wellbeing

For too long, the justification for psychosocial safety is often tied to return on investment and productivity metrics. But safety is fundamentally about protecting people. When organisations shift the dial and focus genuinely on keeping people safe and supported, trust is built, and the productivity benefits naturally follow.