Key learnings for employers 

• ‘Psychosocial’ describes the interaction between an individual person’s psychological makeup and the environment in which they live – in this case their workplace. 
• The longer the exposure to psychological stress the more likely a psychological injury could develop.
• There are many examples of workplace psychological stress. Individual employees experience stress in different ways.
• Even though they may not be as obvious as physical hazards such as trips and falls employers have an obligation to deal with such psychological workplace hazards. 

You may have come across the word ‘Psychosocial’ more regularly lately and wondered what it means. ‘Psychosocial’ describes the interaction between an individual person’s psychological makeup and the environment in which they live – in this case their workplace.

Psychosocial work hazards can cause stress. Each person will react differently to such stressors/hazards. The longer the exposure to such stress the more likely a psychological injury could develop. The psychological harm could include anxiety, depression, sleep disorders and potentially post-traumatic stress disorder.

Some employers have difficulty grasping the nature of these types of hazards as they are not the same as easily identifiable physical hazards such as trips, falls and incorrect lifting techniques. These types of hazards can exist in all workplaces. Some are not obvious.

The best workplaces attempt to minimise psychosocial hazards. 

There are many benefits to minimising such workplace hazards including:

• Higher productivity and quality
• Improved teamwork / output 
• Staff retention
• Less illness / potential workers compensation claims
• Employees enjoying their work prompting intrinsic motivation 

However, it needs to be recognised that some level of stress may be beneficial as it provides a degree of motivation and propels the workplace towards necessary goals. Its important to recognise when the stress exceeds this base motivational level. 

Examples of Psychological Stress in the Workplace

Bullying & Harassment

Workplace bullying or harassment, particularly sexual harassment, are harmful behaviours directed towards another person that are recognised psychosocial workplace hazards. The more intense or frequent the bulling or harassment behaviour the greater the psychological damage that may result.

Common bullying behaviours include abusive, aggressive, intimidating behaviour or insulting conduct or behaviour that frightens, humiliates belittles or degrades.

Common harassment behaviours are derogatory comments, taunts, or offensive gestures in relation to a person’s characteristic such as race, sex or ethnic origin.

Some examples of common sexual harassment behaviours include inappropriate sexist comments, sexual innuendo or sexual banter through to indecent exposure and uninvited physical contact.

Such behaviours in the workplace can cause an individual significant personal stress.

To promote a positive workplace culture employers should attempt to prevent these behaviours through education sessions so that employees understand what behaviours fall within these categories.

Employers are now under a positive legal obligation to take actions to prevent workplace sexual harassment and similar behaviours.

Employers who do not have an internal grievance process to pick up on such behaviours often find out through external avenues. In many sexual harassment claims we have dealt with the employer states they did not realise this was happening at their workplace until it was too late. They either receive an expensive claim from the employee’s solicitor or the employee lodges a mental health workers compensation claim for repeated sexual harassment.

Interpersonal Conflict Between Employees

While its not usual for employees to disagree from time-to-time stress can be caused by regular or ongoing interpersonal conflict between individual employees. This can be caused by personality clashes, seniority or competency claims, unclear goals and job roles or senior managers who initiate ‘competition’ between employees believing that by playing one person off against another it will produce overall better results.

Lack of Role Clarity

Employees may not be clear of their job roles and the outcomes required of them. Alternatively, multiple employees may be asked to do the same task or portions of a task. This causes confusion and accountability issues. This could occur within an established organisation which has grown but not evaluated its systems, or it can occur in a change situation after redundancies have occurred and new job roles have not been established.

High Pressure Job Demands

High job demands can become a psychosocial hazard when they are severe and either prolonged or occur frequently. This may include working long hours or simply being overloaded with work volume or different tasks. This stress increases when an employee in this situation sees other employees underoccupied and coasting.

This could also result from employers not replacing staff who have left and asking existing staff to work harder and faster to carry the same workload.

High job demands can also occur through high mental job demands such as not having the right training or skills to undertake a task or not having systems in place to prevent errors especially when this results in severe consequences or loss. This causes significant stress.

A further, often unrecognised, area of job pressure demands includes employees in certain sectors supporting clients in distress or dealing with difficult customers but not being allowed to express any responsive emotions.

Inadequate Rewards or Recognition

This relates directly to the above section on High Pressure Job Demands and occurs where there is a perceived imbalance between effort and recognition as well as where an external comparison indicates a negative remuneration gap for the same work undertaken. This type of stress increases as this situation is prolonged. Employee loyalty can only be stretched so far. While there may be little vocal noise about the issue the most skilled employees will simply vote with their feet.

It is surprising how some managers provide almost no recognition of a job well done fearing any positive comments will induce an employee to seek higher remuneration.

Low Job Demands

Low job demands means ongoing low levels of physical and mental effort is required to undertake the work. This includes long idle periods or highly monotonous or repetitive tasks such as monitoring production lines.

While at first this kind of work can appear to be quite relaxing it can have an increasingly mentally numbing effect.

Poor Support

Psychosocial stress can occur from not having the resources to undertake work or from lack of support from supervisors or other employees around them. This can become a particular concern when it is prolonged and ties in with other factors such as high workload or dealing with difficult customers. Some employers have reduced the number of supervisors or taken out layers of management which previously helped to prop up an unsatisfactory/ad hoc work system. The same deficient work system is now propped up by fewer people.

Poor support may also come from lack of information, lack of guidance, no access to help when something goes wrong or trying to undertake work with faulty tools or deficient IT systems and support. Consider the stress of a situation where a faulty laptop keeps crashing while an employee has deadlines to meet.

Poor Organisational Change Management

Psychological stresses can come from poorly planned or resourced change management. Employers often underestimate the complexities and personal impact of a work system change, a restructuring or shutdown of a work section or site.

This type of stress can occur to employees directly involved in managing such a change process on top of carrying out their normal duties. It also affects the employees directly (or indirectly) affected through lack of input, unclear timelines, expected outcomes and duties, job loss or retention, impact on the jobs of those remaining and above all – a lack of clear communication. Be assured where communication is lacking rumours will fill the void and they are rarely positive.

Next steps

I would encourage senior managers to put aside some time and brainstorm the potential presence of the above hazards in their workplace and then assess the potential for harm. It’s important to look beyond the generic employee culture and look at individual’s job roles and how they are coping in their roles.

Employee interviews may also be useful to obtain useful information. Sometimes employees don’t complain – they simply leave. It would be better to know whether the above factors are present and their impact before valuable skilled employees leave.

The above provides a brief overview only. Employers seeking more information on Psychosocial Hazards at Work should review the Code of Practice.

Kind Regards
Michael Schmidt
M 0438 129 728
[email protected]
www.hunteremployeerelations.com.au

Industrial Relations - Employment Law - Workplace Performance

Sign up here to receive Hunter Employee Relations Update directly to your email inbox

Want to know more about our client services?