Psychosocial Risk Assessment
Under regulation 14 of Victoria's Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025, employers must identify the psychosocial hazards present in their workplace, so far as is reasonably practicable.
The Regulations do not tell you how. That leaves the design of the process with you, and the burden of demonstrating it was adequate.
A survey is one input into that process. It is not the process.
What we assess
We assess twenty-one psychosocial hazards.
Sixteen are the hazards described in WorkSafe Victoria's Psychological Health Compliance Code. Five are hazards arising from First Nations identity, cultural responsibility and community obligation, which standard frameworks do not name.
Both sets are set out in full, with the evidence base behind the five, on the 16+5 Model page.
The Compliance Code states that its list of examples is not exhaustive. Where we identify a hazard specific to your workplace that no framework anticipated, it goes in the register.
How the assessment works
1. Scope and governance. We agree what is being assessed, who is accountable, and what the output has to support. Assessments built without this produce reports that sit in a drawer.
2. Document and data review. We review what you already hold. Incident reports, complaints, grievance records, turnover by team, absence patterns, exit interviews, existing survey data. Most organisations are sitting on more evidence than any new instrument will produce.
3. Structured consultation. Interviews, yarns and focus groups designed around your work, not a template. Confidential by design, so exposures that carry professional risk can be raised.
4. Hazard identification and risk assessment. Each identified hazard is assessed for likelihood and consequence, and entered in a psychosocial risk register with an assessed rating.
5. Findings and recommendations. What was found, what it means, and what should be done, ranked against the control hierarchy.
What you receive
- A psychosocial risk register naming every hazard identified, with assessed risk ratings
- A findings report describing what was found and how it was identified
- Prioritised recommendations ranked against the control hierarchy in regulation 15
- An evidence trail showing how hazards were identified, which is what a regulator asks for
- A leadership briefing on the findings
We do not provide transcripts, attributed quotes, or any finding drawn from a group of fewer than five people. That is what makes honest disclosure possible, and it is a condition of engagement rather than a matter of discretion.
Who this is for
Organisations that need to demonstrate how psychosocial hazards were identified, not just that a survey was run. Organisations facing a regulator conversation, a notifiable incident, or a board asking whether the current process is defensible. Organisations employing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people whose existing framework was not built to see the exposures those workers carry.
Common questions
How long does a psychosocial risk assessment take?
It depends on workforce size, the number of sites and how much usable evidence already exists. A single-site organisation of under one hundred people is typically four to six weeks from scoping to final report. Larger or multi-site organisations take longer, mostly because consultation cannot be rushed without costing you the disclosure that makes it worthwhile. We quote a fixed fee and a timeline against a defined scope before work begins.
Do you use a survey?
Where a survey adds something, yes. It is never the whole assessment. A survey tells you about the things it thought to ask, from the people willing to answer. Identification also requires inquiry into the work, the workforce and the evidence your organisation already holds. An assessment built only on an instrument inherits every blind spot that instrument has.
Will our people be identified?
No. We report hazards, patterns and recommended controls. We do not provide transcripts, recordings, survey responses or attributed quotes, and we do not report any finding drawn from a group of fewer than five people. Where a team is too small to report on without identifying someone, we report at a higher level of aggregation or not at all.
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