Designing Psychosocial Hazard Controls That Actually Work (Not Just on Paper)

Designing Psychosocial Hazard Controls That Actually Work (Not Just on Paper)

A delivery driver completed 17 consecutive overnight shifts on an 800-kilometre route. Twelve hours into one of them, he collided with a van. WorkSafe found the employer had no adequate system to manage fatigue - the company was fined $1.43 million and has since gone into liquidation.

The hazard, as Skodel co-founder Ian Fagan put it in a recent myosh Academy session, “showed up in the roster every night.” The control should have been living there too. It wasn’t.

In Part 2 of myosh’s psychosocial hazards series with Skodel, Ian Fagan explored exactly this gap - the one between identifying a psychosocial hazard and designing a control that actually holds up in practice. Here’s what safety and HSEQ professionals need to know.

Exposure and Impact Tell You Different Things

Most risk assessments produce a combined risk score, which is useful for prioritising, but it can hide an important distinction: how often people are exposed to a hazard, and how much harm it causes when it happens, don’t always move together.

Some hazards - like unmanageable job demands - might affect a lot of people but with a lower individual impact. Others, like bullying, harassment or traumatic events, tend to carry a high level of harm even when exposure is comparatively rare. Treating both the same way leads to the wrong kind of control.

“That pattern is really important from a controls perspective, because in traditional risk assessments, you’re going to see that high reach, high harm is where you’ll see the highest combined risk score.”

High-exposure hazards generally call for redesign - changing how the work itself is done. Low-exposure, high-harm hazards call for something different: fast, clear reporting pathways and targeted early intervention.

Four Categories, Four Kinds of Control

Fagan breaks psychosocial hazards into four practical categories, each pointing to a different type of control and, often, a different owner within the organisation:

- Work design (fatigue, job demands, role clarity) - fixed through workload allocation, roster rules and clear role statements, typically owned by operations

- Behavioural (bullying, harassment, violence) - managed through clear standards, safe reporting pathways and manager capability, typically owned by HR and leaders

- Governance (change management, organisational justice, job security) - addressed by making systems fair and visible, typically owned by executive and HR

- Environment (equipment, remote work, traumatic exposure) - engineered out through maintenance processes and check-in systems, typically owned by WHS and site managers

Consultation Is a Control, Not Just a Legal Duty

Perhaps the most counterintuitive point from the session: consulting staff on hazards and controls isn’t only a compliance step before the real work starts. It’s one of the most powerful controls available.

“Having a genuine say in those risks there is a direct control against things such as low job control, poor support and poor organisational justice.”

Genuine consultation does three things at once: it reduces the perceived impact of a risk simply by making people feel heard, it surfaces hazards leaders might otherwise miss, and it’s the only reliable way to test whether existing controls are actually working - because the people experiencing the hazard are best placed to say so.

This matters especially during what Fagan calls “predictable moments” - restructures, performance management processes and return-to-work periods, where foreseeable psychosocial risk reliably spikes. In one case covered during the session, SafeWork NSW halted a roughly $100 million restructure at the University of Technology Sydney over insufficient staff consultation - a process that then cost the organisation millions of dollars a month in delay.

What This Means in Practice

The throughline of the session was simple but easy to miss under day-to-day pressure: a control only counts if someone owns it, it’s reviewed on a known cadence, and there’s objective data proving it’s in place and working - not just assumed to be.

That means tying controls to real measurement: roster data for fatigue controls, survey data for job demands and organisational justice, incident and reporting data for behavioural risks. Organisations using a platform like Skodel to run this exposure-and- impact assessment consistently are better placed to design controls that are prioritised correctly and reviewed against real evidence, rather than assumption.

Key Takeaways

A psychosocial hazard control only counts if it lives in how work actually runs, not just in a policy document

Separate exposure (how often) from impact (how much harm) - they call for different kinds of controls

The four hazard categories - work design, behavioural, governance, environment - each need a different control type and owner

Treat consultation as a control in its own right, not a box to tick before designing the “real” controls

Plan for predictable moments (restructures, performance management, return to work) before they arrive

Tie every control to objective data so you can prove, not assume, it’s working

‍

Watch the Full Session

This article covers the key themes from Part 2 of myosh’s psychosocial hazards series with Skodel, but Ian Fagan’s full session goes much deeper - including a working framework for prioritising controls by effort and impact, and a live Q&A on improving staff participation in consultation.

This session is part of the myosh Academy free weekly webinar series. Explore the full library at myosh.com/academy/webinars.

‍

Presented by: Ian Fagan, Co-founder & Director, Skodel, hosted by Kristina Shields, myosh

‍