By Dr Donna Stemmer
Psychosocial hazards rarely occur in isolation. Yet many organisations still assess, report and control them as though they do.
An employee reports excessive workload while another reports unclear responsibilities. A manager describes constant changes in priorities, yet elsewhere employees identify poor communication, inadequate support, or deteriorating workplace relationships. Each may legitimately be recorded as a separate psychosocial hazard requiring a separate control.
But what if they are not separate problems? What if they are different manifestations of the same underlying organisational conditions?
That distinction matters because the way we define the problem determines where we intervene. If we treat hazards independently, we may reduce one symptom while leaving the system generating the risk unchanged.
Hazards interact
Consider what can happen during organisational change. Staffing capacity decreases as responsibilities are redistributed, resulting in less clear roles and shifting decision authority. Managers and workers are expected to maintain output while adapting to new processes.
The organisation may subsequently identify excessive workload, role conflict, low job control, poor change management, inadequate support and deteriorating workplace relationships. These are individual hazards, but they are also connected.
- Workload may be driven by insufficient capacity.
- Role conflict may emerge from unclear accountabilities.
- Communication problems may reflect uncertainty about decision rights.
Eventually, these pressures can surface as conflict, complaints, absence, turnover or psychological injury. The visible problem may therefore sit at the end of a much longer organisational chain.
What happens when we look at the constellation?
A manufacturing organisation employing approximately 150 people provides a useful example.
Its initial assessment identified numerous psychosocial hazards, including unreasonable demands and deadlines, conflicting demands, poor organisational support, role conflict and ambiguity, poor communication, withholding of information, ignoring opinions, excessive monitoring, and concerns about job control. Viewed individually, these hazards pointed towards multiple interventions. Viewed together, they told a different story.
At the centre was an organisational disconnect. The CEO wanted to be inclusive, but employees did not know where the company was going. They were being offered autonomy without sufficient strategic direction. Rather than increasing empowerment, the uncertainty was contributing to conflict and a lack of trust.
Instead of developing a separate control for every hazard, the organisation addressed an underlying structural condition: clarity and predictability about organisational direction.
A five-year organisational target was established, supported by a four-quarter rolling budget and a communication plan.
Before the intervention, the organisation’s Constellation Risk Index (CRI) was 81, and its Constellation Stability Score (CSS) was 47. Following the intervention, the CRI was 79 while the CSS had risen to 86. That difference matters.
The overall level of psychosocial risk had changed relatively little. Significant hazards remained. But the stability of the organisational system had changed substantially. The post-intervention constellation was smaller and less complex, with several previously interconnected hazards no longer evident. Early organisational outcomes also moved. Within three months, the intervention had cost less than $10,000 and turnover had reduced by 2%. At six months, the organisation recorded a 36% increase in contract win rate and a 9% increase in profit margin.
These figures should not be interpreted as evidence that a single psychosocial intervention caused every subsequent business result. Many variables influence organisational performance. What the case demonstrates is more useful for WHS practice: changing an underlying organisational condition can simultaneously alter several connected psychosocial risks.
The reported hazard may not be the root cause.
This creates an important challenge for psychosocial risk assessments. If employees report excessive workload, the obvious response is to implement workload controls. But the better question is: Why is workload high?
If it is being created by chronic understaffing, repeated priority changes, poorly designed processes or unclear decision authority, an intervention aimed only at helping employees cope with workload may have limited effect.
- Poor communication may not fundamentally be a communication problem.
- Role conflict may not fundamentally be a job-description problem.
- Interpersonal conflict may not originate solely with the individuals involved.
Sometimes these are downstream consequences of organisational design. This does not remove individual accountability for inappropriate behaviour, nor does it mean every workplace problem is systemic. It means that effective risk management requires us to investigate both the immediate hazard and the conditions that allow it to emerge.
Three questions for your next assessment
The next time a psychosocial risk assessment lands on your desk, don’t look only at which hazard received the highest score. Ask three additional questions:
- What hazards are occurring together?
Look across your indicators for patterns or clusters. Hazards that repeatedly appear together may be connected.
- What organisational conditions could explain several of them at once?
Triangulate data from different sources to identify relationships between indicators and the organisational conditions that influence them.
- Are our controls addressing the reported hazards, or the conditions producing them?
Examine the push and pull among indicators to identify potential root causes and target the conditions that produce multiple hazards.
A control can be perfectly reasonable and still be directed too far downstream.
Psychosocial risk management is advancing rapidly. The next step is not simply getting better at measuring individual hazards. It is getting better at understanding the relationships between them. Because workers experience organisations as systems, our psychosocial risk assessments need to do the same.
By Dr Donna Stemmer, WorkRight23
Dr Donna Stemmer an organisational transformation specialist with more than 25 years’ experience. Her work focuses on psychosocial risk, organisational intelligence and the use of systems thinking and data analytics to identify the underlying conditions that affect worker safety, organisational performance and agility.
