Every job involves some psychosocial (emotional and social) risks that have the potential to increase work-related stress, harm people’s mental and physical health, and if prolonged, lead to burnout. A lack of role clarity, an unmanageable workload, inadequate reward and recognition, poor workplace relationships, and poor change management are just a few of the hazards people in your workplace are probably navigating right now.

But how is your workplace wellbeing strategy minimizing these risks?

As psychosocial injuries claims have continued to rapidly grow, when it comes to protecting the mental health and wellbeing of employees and contractors, more than 70 countries have been part of updating international and national codes to clarify the responsibilities of workplaces. In Australia, these requirements have recently become legislation in several states with the risk of financial penalties for noncompliance.

So, what does this mean practically for your wellbeing approaches?

In our work with organizations around the world, over the last six months we’ve noticed that workplace wellbeing strategies are often being pushed aside in favor of complying with the new psychosocial hazard requirements. While we appreciate that the threat of financial penalties tends to grab leadership attention, unfortunately minimizing psychosocial risks will not achieve the same outcomes as promoting wellbeing.

As leading wellbeing expert Dr. Martin Seligman has noted: Fifty years of psychological focus on fixing mental illness taught us little about caring for wellbeing. Unfortunately, because the codes and legislation have been designed through a risk management lens, they generally fail to clearly outline any workplace responsibilities for promoting wellbeing.

We’re not suggesting workplaces should choose one approach over the other, but we are strongly advocating that efforts to protect mental health and promote wellbeing be strategically integrated. The alternative – which we are seeing in some organizations already – of competing messages, policies, tools, and tasks for leaders and their teams risks creating confusion and stress, which cannot be what success looks like.

How can you integrate your psychosocial safety and wellbeing requirements?

We find this simple safety and wellbeing map and the four questions below helpful in our conversations with workplaces:

• How is your workplace wellbeing strategy supporting the complex and dynamic nature of psychosocial risks?

For better or worse, the ways we work together are rarely logical. This is because our diverse personalities, values, life experiences, skills, job demands, and hopes make our relationships at work complex. Add to this our dynamic, always changing work environments, and even small changes such as an increased performance goal, a shortened deadline, or team changes, can dramatically increase the psychosocial risks we experience.

This means doing everything “reasonably practicable” to eliminate or minimize psychosocial risks, as required by the legislation and codes, is never a “won-and-done” exercise but instead requires an ongoing commitment to learning how to safely navigate our complex relationships and dynamic workspaces together.

• How is your workplace wellbeing strategy measuring and minimizing psychosocial risks?

Psychosocial hazards arise from the ways we work together. They are the emotional and social challenges found in how we connect, communicate, and support each other as we organize the completion of our work. And while identifying the hazards, assessing them, controlling them, and reviewing our efforts sounds logical, the danger of “managing” psychosocial risks lies in underestimating the complex and dynamic nature of the ways we work together.

For better or worse, the ways we work together are rarely logical. This is because our diverse personalities, values, life experiences, skills, job demands, and hopes make our relationships at work complex. Add to this our dynamic, always changing work environments, and even small changes such as an increased performance goal, a shortened deadline, or team changes, can dramatically increase the psychosocial risks we experience.

This means doing everything “reasonably practicable” to eliminate or minimize psychosocial risks, as required by the legislation and codes, is never a “won-and-done” exercise but instead requires an ongoing commitment to learning how to safely navigate our complex relationships and dynamic workspaces together.

• How is your workplace wellbeing strategy building psychological safety at the “Me” (individuals), “We” (leaders and teams), and “Us” (organization) levels?

Our research has found that workers who report often feeling psychologically safe in their team are significantly less likely to be experiencing any psychosocial hazards. They were also significantly less likely to report feeling burned out.

Why might this be the case? Because psychological safety facilitates our capacity for candor, vulnerability, and learning together. It helps us feel more confident about requesting improvements to the way our work is organized, to call out a lack of social support when encountered, to address poor working conditions, and to ask for help with bad work experiences as they arise. Instead of biting our tongues in fear, we’re more likely to ask for help and seek shared accountability for effective solutions.

Our safety perceptions, experiences, and behaviors are diverse and distributed through a complicated web of social connections across our workplaces. At the “Me” level, the presence of personal portable psychological safety helps us to manage our fears and chase our hopes. At the “We” level, the shared beliefs that we are safe to speak up, take risks, and learn alongside each other makes it easier for us to collaborate, innovate, and grow. And, at the “Us” level, a supportive organizational environment ensures we have the resources we need to not just meet the demands of our jobs, but to excel.

• How is your workplace wellbeing strategy helping your leaders to create a culture of CARE?

While safety is a business requirement, researchers have found that care is a business imperative that supercharges safety, wellbeing and performance. This is achieved by leaders often investing in expressions of compassion, appreciation, responsibility, and emotional wisdom as teams go about our work. By embedding small actions of CARE into their existing role-modelling, routines, rituals, and rules, leaders can both minimize psychosocial risks and build psychological safety. 

The right balance between protecting mental health by minimizing psychosocial risks and promoting wellbeing by building psychological safety will look different in each workplace. But the need to integrate both requirements into workplace wellbeing strategies is the same in every company. The only remaining question is, how soon will you begin?

Want to learn more? Join us for a free 60-minute, online workshop to dive into the research and gain additional free tools to help support your choices. Click here.