In today’s fast-paced work environment, poorly designed work systems contribute to psychosocial hazards, leading to stress, burnout, and reduced organisational performance. By leveraging work design principles, organisations can proactively manage these risks, fostering a healthier and more productive workplace.

This article explores how organisations can integrate work design into psychosocial risk management, drawing on the latest SafeWork NSW guidance and a systems-thinking approach. Key areas of focus include identifying common hazards, engaging stakeholders, and implementing effective work redesign strategies.

You can read a summary of the session below and watch the video recording. 

What is Work Design?

From a WHS perspective, work design is a methodical process which helps you understand your work context and then implement improvements to eliminate or minimise WHS risks to your workers. 

Work context includes:

• Financial pressures, type & size of business activities, products & services, supply chains & contractual arrangements; labour market
• Organisational structure, culture, and safety management systems
• Environmental working conditions and locations, technologies that are used
• Workers’ skills and attributes
• Work content – what needs to be achieved by whom
• Key tasks, activities, roles, responsibilities, work interdependencies, and performance expectations
• Resources, equipment, and information
• Current psychosocial hazards and risks
• Effectiveness of current control measures

^{Source: SafeWork NSW (2024). Designing Work to Manage Psychosocial Risks}

1.It is one of the most effective ways to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risk.

2.Helps PCBUs comply with WHS duties.

3.Designing out psychosocial hazards and risks and ‘designing in’ positive features/protective factors to boost workers’ resources can:

• reduce stress, burnout, fatigue, work-related injury, illness and even death
• reduce errors (and their consequences)
• improve job satisfaction
• boost worker engagement and retention
• improve organisational ability to adapt and respond to changing operational pressures and incidents (resilience)

For the purpose of this training, we have used the tool developed by Prof. Caponnechia et al., called The Psychosocial Hazard Work Re-Design Tool. 

In this tool, there are five steps in Implementing Work Design. However, in this training, due to time constraints, we were only able to go through a simplified version of the first 3 steps.

Step 2: Identify Psychosocial Hazards & Risks

Key considerations

• The nature of psychosocial hazards exposure:
  • Who is exposed?
  • How often (frequency)?
  • For how long (duration)?
  • What is the likely consequence (severity)?
  • Do several hazards combine or interact to cause harm?
• Two broad type of exposure:
  • Cumulative exposure
  • One-off highly stressful events

_{Source: Caponecchia C, et al. (2022). Psychosocial Hazard Work Re-Design Tool (PHReD-T). Safework NSW and NSW Centre for WHS}

Scenario Analysis

Eric has been working for organisation Y for 6 months. During this time, he consistently felt his workload was so high he couldn’t complete it during regular work hours, so he frequently works late. He noticed his colleagues and manager do the same. In fact, it seems to be a given that working overtime without compensation is the norm. Everyone is very committed to their work and they seem to take their ‘busyness” as a badge of honour.

Eric is finding that this is affecting his personal life so he decides to do his best to work faster. He finds however that even though he focuses and works fast, the system he uses is very slow and clunky. Learning to use it was difficult given that the training material didn’t quite address the problems he was encountering and his colleagues had not always been helpful either because they were too busy or they didn’t know how to help.

Eric also finds it frustrating that he needs information from different teams to complete his work and that this information is saved on different drives. He is also not sure who to contact in different teams to ask for support and he often gets abrasive answers from members of one team in particular. He finds himself wasting a lot of time trying to retrieve the information he needs without asking them for help.

What psychosocial hazards are present in this scenario?

^{(Watch the replay video to see the answers)}

Reflection Points

• Who is designing the work? Are they aware of WHS obligations?
• Have you identified whether stressors are systemic or isolated?
• What systems drive pressure (e.g. KPIs, software, customer expectations)?
• Are your policies aligned with how work actually happens?
• If you are engaging in work design/re-design, are you actively involving the people who do the work, including those in supply chains and networks?

Key Takeaways

• Work design is foundational to preventing psychosocial harm and fostering a safe work environment.

• Systems thinking enables organisations to address psychosocial risks holistically.

• Many workplace stressors stem from poor work design, not individual shortcomings.

• Legal obligations require organisations to act proactively to manage psychosocial hazards.

• Well-designed work benefits both employees and business performance.

• Continuous improvement and worker involvement are essential for sustainable change.

Resources

Please download below:

• SafeWork NSW’s 2024 Guide: Designing Work to Manage Psychosocial Risks
• The Psychosocial Hazard Work Re-Design Tool (PHReD-T)