Using Work Design in Psychosocial Risk Management

 A practical, systems-based guide to redesigning work to eliminate and minimise psychosocial hazards

Dr. Georgi Toma  |  Director, HeartBrain Works  |  Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland 

Introduction

When organisations discover they have a psychosocial risk problem, the instinct is often to reach for a solution that changes the person: a wellbeing program, a resilience workshop, an EAP. These responses are not without value, but they address the symptom rather than the source. The more fundamental question — why is the work itself producing harm? — often goes unasked.

Work design offers a different starting point. It treats psychosocial risk not as an individual failing but as a product of the conditions in which people work, and it focuses intervention at the level of those conditions. When work is poorly designed, psychosocial hazards accumulate. When work is well designed, protective factors are built in and hazards are reduced or removed before they cause harm.

This article is drawn from a session delivered through the HeartBrain Works monthly professional development program in March 2025, presented by Dr. Georgi Toma and Kirra Southwell. It walks through what work design is, why it matters from both a legal and a practical standpoint, and how to apply it using a systems thinking approach — illustrated through a realistic workplace scenario.

What Work Design Is

The definition provided by SafeWork NSW (2024) is a useful anchor: from a workplace health and safety perspective, work design is a methodical process that helps organisations understand their work context and then implement improvements to eliminate or minimise WHS risks.

The breadth of what counts as work context is significant. It encompasses financial pressures and the type and scale of business activities; organisational structure, culture, and safety management systems; environmental working conditions and the technologies used; workers' skills and attributes; the content of work — what needs to be achieved by whom; key tasks, roles, responsibilities, interdependencies, and performance expectations; resources, equipment, and information availability; current psychosocial hazards and risks; and the effectiveness of controls already in place.

This last point deserves particular emphasis: it is not enough to have a control measure. The question is whether that control measure is actually working. A policy that exists on paper but does not reflect how work is performed in practice offers no real protection — and, as we will see, can expose organisations to serious legal risk.

Why Work Design Matters

There are three distinct reasons why work design sits at the centre of effective psychosocial risk management, and it is worth being precise about each of them.

The first is effectiveness. When we look at the hierarchy of controls, the highest-order actions are elimination and redesign. Wellbeing training and EAP programs are positioned at the lower end of the hierarchy — they are necessary but not sufficient, and they cannot on their own demonstrate compliance with WHS obligations. The legislation across Australian states and territories is clear that organisations must show they are taking steps to eliminate psychosocial risks or design them out of the workplace as far as practicable. Administrative controls and individual-level supports are supplementary, not primary.

The second reason is legal. PCBUs have a positive duty to manage psychosocial risk at the source. This was reinforced in a recent New Zealand case involving the Port of Auckland Authority, in which the CEO was convicted following the death of a stevedore. Investigators found that the organisation had a policy requiring workers to remain outside a specified distance from operating cranes — but it was well known that the policy was not being followed in practice, and leadership had failed to act on that knowledge. The court's finding rested substantially on this gap between the imagined work and the actual work: having a policy is not enough if that policy does not reflect how work is actually done.

From a psychosocial perspective, this case raises an important supplementary question. When policies are systematically not followed, the reason is often not individual carelessness — it is that the conditions of work make compliance impractical. Time pressure, cognitive load, insufficient resources, and unclear processes are frequently the underlying drivers. Understanding why the gap exists between policy and practice is itself a psychosocial risk management task.

The third reason is the range of organisational benefits that flow from well-designed work. Designing out psychosocial hazards and deliberately building in protective factors — what SafeWork NSW calls designing in job resources — reduces stress, burnout, and fatigue; reduces costly errors and their consequences; improves job satisfaction, engagement, and retention; and strengthens the organisation's capacity to adapt and respond to changing pressures and incidents. These are not incidental benefits. They are the business case for taking work design seriously.

A Tool for Doing It: The PHReD-T

One of the most useful practical resources available to WHS professionals is the Psychosocial Hazard Work Re-Design Tool (PHReD-T), developed by Professor Carlo Caponecchia and colleagues and commissioned by SafeWork NSW and the NSW Centre for Work Health and Safety (2022). The tool is freely available and provides a five-step process: understand your workplace and its context; identify psychosocial hazards and risks; redesign work to control those risks; plan for the redesign; and evaluate the redesign.

This article focuses on the first three steps, which form the analytical core of the process.

Step 1: Understanding Your Workplace and Its Context

Before hazards can be identified or redesigned, the context in which they occur must be understood. The PHReD-T uses what it calls an onion model — a series of concentric layers, each representing a different level of context that can give rise to psychosocial risk.

At the outermost layer sits the external environment: broader market pressures, labour shortages, financial constraints, and operational factors such as contractual arrangements or supply chain instability.

The next layer is the organisational level: the culture, the leadership, and the degree to which those in authority are genuinely committed to managing psychosocial risk — as opposed to treating it as a compliance exercise.

Inside that sits the workplace level, which captures the conditions specific to how and where work is performed. Flexible working arrangements that apply to some employees but not others, for instance, can generate a sense of unfairness and low organisational justice. Similarly, roles that require regular travel across multiple sites impose workload and work-life balance costs that are easy to miss when looking only at task lists.

The task level focuses on the specific activities people perform and the risks those activities expose them to. Client-facing roles in call centres or retail environments, for instance, carry an inherent risk of customer aggression — a hazard that is easy to underestimate when it is not named explicitly.

At the innermost layer is the worker level: the composition of the team, including factors such as turnover rate, gender balance, and age diversity, which can affect both exposure to risk and access to support. High turnover, for example, means a workforce that is perpetually less experienced and less embedded in supportive peer relationships.

The purpose of mapping these layers is not to produce a comprehensive list — it is to develop an accurate understanding of where and why risk is likely to emerge, and which factors may be amplifying one another.

Step 2: Identifying Psychosocial Hazards and Risks

Once context is understood, the next step is identifying the specific psychosocial hazards present and assessing the nature of exposure. Several dimensions of exposure are relevant here.

Who is exposed? Is the risk concentrated in one team, role, or location, or is it distributed across the organisation? In one audit conducted by the HeartBrain Works team, frontline service employees were found to be facing substantially higher emotional demands than back-office staff — a disparity that only became visible when exposure was mapped by role.

How frequent is the exposure? Is it daily, weekly, or periodic — perhaps concentrated at certain times of year, such as end-of-financial-year reporting periods?

How long does the exposure last? Is it a short burst of pressure or a sustained experience over months? The answer has significant implications for the severity of harm and the urgency of the response.

What is the likely consequence? Will exposure produce frustration, or something more serious — burnout, a psychological injury, or a workers' compensation claim?

Do multiple hazards interact? This is perhaps the most important question of all. It is rare in psychosocial risk management to find a single, isolated hazard. Almost always, hazards combine and compound one another. High workload, poor leadership support, and inadequate systems operating simultaneously produce distress that no single intervention — addressed only to one of those hazards — can adequately address.

There are also two broad types of exposure to keep in mind. Cumulative exposure — the gradual accumulation of stress over time — is often harder to detect than a single acute event but can be equally or more damaging. And a significant one-off event, such as exposure to a traumatic incident or a serious workplace injury, can interact with existing cumulative stress to produce outcomes far more severe than either alone would generate.

A Scenario: The Many Hazards Hiding in Plain Sight

Consider the following scenario. Eric has been working for Organisation Y for six months. His workload is consistently too high to complete during regular hours, so he works late — something he has observed his colleagues and manager do as well. The culture treats busyness as a badge of honour, and overtime without compensation is simply the norm. This is already affecting Eric's personal life.

In an attempt to manage, Eric begins working faster. But the system he uses is slow and unreliable, and the training he received did not adequately address the problems he encounters. His colleagues, also under pressure, are rarely in a position to help — and some do not know how. Eric needs information from multiple teams to complete his work, but that information is saved across different drives and he is not always sure who to contact. When he does reach out to one team in particular, he regularly receives abrasive responses. He has started avoiding asking for their help, which means wasting time trying to retrieve information independently.

This scenario is not exceptional. It is, in fact, entirely ordinary — drawn from patterns observed across many organisations.

Paragraph by paragraph, the psychosocial hazards emerge clearly. The first paragraph reveals high workload, poor job control (Eric has little ability to manage his own working time without implied social cost), poor manager support, and a culture that normalises harmful working patterns. The second paragraph adds high work pace — Eric's own adaptive response to an unmanageable workload — alongside ineffective systems, ineffective training, and poor colleague support. The third paragraph surfaces poor role clarity around information access, fragmented and ineffective information systems, and incivility from another team.

What is notable is that most of these hazards are not visible in any one moment. They accumulate and interact. The unhelpful abrasive responses from the other team, for example, are almost certainly not a personality problem — they are a stress response. When we investigate incivility in organisations, we typically find people who are themselves under significant pressure, often from the same underlying resource and system failures. The ripple effects of poorly designed work extend well beyond the person we can see struggling.

Step 3: Redesigning Work Using Systems Thinking

The third step of the PHReD-T process is where analysis becomes action: redesigning work to control the risks identified. The conceptual approach that underpins this step is systems thinking.

Systems thinking does not look at problems in isolation. It recognises that in any workplace, multiple systems operate simultaneously and interact with one another — and that psychosocial risk is a product of those interactions, not simply of any individual component. When several hazards always combine and compound each other, controls must be designed with those interactions in mind. A single intervention that addresses only one part of a multi-hazard problem will produce limited results.

The PHReD-T identifies five key systems to examine when redesigning work: people, tasks, physical environment, equipment and resources, and processes and systems. Working through each of these in the context of a specific scenario produces a structured, evidence-based set of interventions.

People. The first questions to answer are: who is impacted by the hazards identified, and who has decision-making power? The answer to the first question is often broader than it initially appears. In Eric's scenario, the team giving abrasive responses is also impacted — their behaviour is, in all likelihood, a symptom of their own exposure to the same underlying hazards. Clients, too, are ultimately affected by the quality and accuracy of Eric's work. Identifying all impacted parties opens the door to a more complete understanding of the system.

The second question — who has decision-making power? — matters because change requires authority. Eric himself has some capacity to raise the issue with his manager or health and safety representative. But the decisions about IT systems, resourcing, information architecture, and organisational culture belong to people higher in the hierarchy. Knowing who those people are, what their priorities are, and how to present the case in language that resonates with them is part of the work.

The third question asks what the needs of the impacted people are. For Eric specifically: time to complete work within regular hours, training that actually addresses the problems he encounters, clear guidance from his manager, accessible and properly maintained information systems, and a role description that gives him clarity about his responsibilities and relationships with other teams. Going through this exercise for each impacted group — Eric, his manager, the other teams — produces a rich picture of what a redesigned system needs to deliver.

Finally: who can champion change? This might be Eric himself, raising the issue with his supervisor or the health and safety representative. It might be a manager who is also experiencing the problem and has the standing to escalate it. In most organisations, the pathway is not obvious — but identifying it explicitly increases the likelihood that it will be used.

Tasks. The task-level analysis asks which specific tasks are impacted by the hazards identified, and at what point in those tasks does the psychosocial risk emerge. If Eric needs to generate a client report, and that process requires him to retrieve data using a slow system and to request information from the team that responds abrasively, then the specific steps where risk arises are identifiable and targetable. This precision matters when designing controls: rather than addressing the problem at a general level, the intervention can be mapped to the exact point where it is needed.

Processes and Systems. For systems-related hazards — such as those Eric is experiencing — the key questions are: which specific systems are involved, which teams use those systems, how is each team affected by them, and what improvements are needed? This line of questioning serves a dual purpose. First, it produces the evidence base needed to make a compelling case to executive leadership for investment in system improvement. When the case can be articulated in terms of specific impacts on specific teams, and the downstream consequences for clients and organisational performance, it is substantially more persuasive than a general complaint about technology.

Second, and equally importantly, it preempts the emergence of new psychosocial hazards as a result of the change process itself. Organisational change — including IT system changes — is a well-established source of psychosocial risk. It almost invariably creates uncertainty, disruption, and, when managed poorly, a further erosion of trust. By mapping the needs of each affected team before any change is implemented, the organisation is better positioned to negotiate appropriate customisation with providers, to design training that addresses real problems rather than generic ones, and to avoid the pattern — encountered repeatedly in practice — of rolling out a new system that creates more problems than it solves.

Equipment and Resources. The equipment and resources lens focuses on training and information. What training is actually required to use the systems and processes involved, and does the training that has been provided deliver against those requirements? In Eric's case, the answer is clearly no. Generic training provided by a software vendor at the point of procurement frequently fails to anticipate the specific problems that users encounter in practice. Identifying those problems in advance — through consultation with the people doing the work — enables the organisation to negotiate better training content and to build in opportunities for people to flag ongoing issues.

The information architecture question is similarly concrete. When information needed to do work well is scattered across different drives, different naming conventions, and different team repositories, the result is not just inefficiency — it is a source of ongoing frustration, time waste, and role ambiguity. The solution is a working group, drawn from each of the teams that use the relevant information, to agree on what information is needed, where it should be stored, how it should be named, and who is responsible for maintaining it. This is not a complex intervention — but it must be done with the people who use it, not for them.

Reflection Points for Practice

Before closing, it is worth naming five questions that can serve as a practical self-assessment for any WHS or HR professional working in this space.

Who is designing the work, and are they aware of their WHS obligations? Work design decisions are made every day by people who may not identify themselves as WHS decision-makers — IT teams choosing new platforms, HR teams setting performance expectations, managers designing rosters. Whether they are aware of how their decisions affect the health and safety of the people who work within the systems they create is a critical question.

Have you identified whether the stressors are systemic or isolated? What looks like an individual performance problem — or even a single team's difficulty — is very often a systemic issue embedded in organisational culture or structure. The difference matters enormously for the type of intervention required.

What systems are driving pressure? KPIs that remain unchanged when resources are reduced, performance expectations that have not been recalibrated to reflect changed conditions, software that is routinely worked around rather than with — all of these are system-level drivers of psychosocial risk that can be identified and addressed.

Are your policies aligned with how work actually happens? The Port of Auckland case is a stark reminder that imagined work and actual work can diverge in ways that have serious consequences. Understanding that divergence — and asking why it exists — is a core work design task.

Are the people who do the work actively involved in designing it? This is not a question about consultation in the procedural sense. It is a question about whether the people closest to the work — including those in supply chains and contracting networks — are genuinely informing the decisions that shape their working conditions. They know what is not working. The job of the WHS professional is to create the conditions in which that knowledge can reach the people with the power to act on it.

Conclusion: Designing Harm Out, Not Training It Away

The central insight of work design as a psychosocial risk management strategy is straightforward: psychosocial hazards most often stem from poorly designed work, not from individual failings. The appropriate response is therefore to change the work — not to train people to be more resilient in the face of conditions that should not exist.

This does not make the challenge simple. Redesigning work in a complex organisation requires authority, resources, time, and genuine consultation. In large organisations, the process must be prioritised and targeted at the highest-risk populations first. External support is often needed to do it well. And because hazards interact, solutions must also interact — a single control targeting a single hazard will rarely be sufficient.

But the legal obligation is clear. The practical tools are available. And the evidence that well-designed work produces better outcomes for both people and organisations is robust and consistent.

If psychosocial risk management in your organisation has so far been primarily about what happens after work makes people unwell, it may be time to look more carefully at the work itself. That is where the opportunity lies — and increasingly, that is where the law requires organisations to look.

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References

Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The Job Demands-Resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328.

Caponecchia, C., et al. (2022). Psychosocial Hazard Work Re-Design Tool (PHReD-T). SafeWork NSW and NSW Centre for Work Health and Safety.

SafeWork NSW (2024). Designing Work to Manage Psychosocial Risks.

About the Author

Dr. Georgi Toma is the Founder of HeartBrain Works and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland. With over a decade of experience in research and practice on workplace wellbeing and psychosocial risk, Georgi works with organisations across Australia and New Zealand to create mentally healthy workplaces. Her areas of expertise include stress, burnout, employee psychological health, and psychosocial hazards.

About the Healthy Work Community of Practice

The Healthy Work Community of Practice is a professional community for WHS, HR, and wellbeing leaders committed to managing psychosocial risks and creating mentally healthy workplaces — together. Members access quarterly knowledge-sharing sessions, a psychosocial risk controls library, real-world case studies, legislation and regulator updates, industry groups, funding alerts, a jobs board, member chat, Science Corner research summaries, and ongoing training and workshops. To learn more, visit https://www.heartbrainworks.org/Healthy-Work-CoP