In its early days, occupational health and safety was mostly concerned with the most obvious issue: preventing physical injuries. Basically, protecting life and limb.
Now, with the benefit of decades of experience and extensive data, we have discovered that some acute work hazards can also lead to debilitating and sometimes fatal conditions. This includes, among many others, chemical sensitization, hearing loss, black lung disease, asbestosis, and a number of different types of cancers.
With studies on stress and well-being, we also came to recognize that psychosocial factors can result in debilitating mental and physical conditions. Not only that, but that these hazards are omnipresent in the workplace.
After all, we spend the majority of our waking hours at work. And the way we interact with coworkers and organize our work influences our mental well-being. Moreover, our mental balance and fitness (or lack thereof) can also lead to physical injuries and fatalities.
Clearly, then, assessing psychosocial hazards isn’t a break from the way safety professionals approach their work. Rather, it’s a natural evolution in occupational health and safety.
Possible Approaches to Psychosocial Hazard Assessment
We know that psychosocial hazards should be assessed. What’s less obvious is how we should carry out those assessments.
This can be done in different ways.
A Formal Hazard Assessment
The old-fashioned way is to create a formal hazard assessment, starting with a list of tasks each employee performs and then identifying the specific hazards and controls for each of those tasks.
- Pro: This is a well-established process that is familiar to most safety professionals
- Con: Most safety professionals are not well versed in psychosocial hazards
- Con: This approach often focuses on surface-level factors, while psychosocial hazards are often more subtle
A Standardized Assessment Method
Another approach is to learn and apply a standardized psychosocial hazard assessment method, such as Guarding Minds at Work.
- Pro: This method is great for identifying psychosocial hazards
- Con: Provides less direction in how to control psychosocial hazards
A Hybrid Approach
Finally, there is a hybrid approach that uses a standardized framework for assessing psychosocial hazards and combines it with a plan to control those hazards. Knowing the organization’s psychosocial strengths and weaknesses will allow you to integrate psychosocial hazards into the formal hazard assessment process and design adequate controls for them.
A key point is to identify all areas of your operations where there are human interdependencies. Psychosocial hazards are most frequently (but not exclusively) connected with the working relationship among the members of our organization.
Consider integrating psychosocial hazards and controls into your current formal hazard assessment instead of creating a separate psychosocial hazard assessment. Psychosocial hazards are human-centric hazards, and people are, along with equipment and the work environment, one of the common hazard categories.
And remember that the work environment, equipment, and people on site are inextricably connected and influence and overlap with each other. Because of this, it doesn’t make sense to isolate psychosocial hazards from other types of hazards.
Assessing and Controlling Psychosocial Hazards
In this article, we will focus on the third method. The goal is not only to identify these elusive hazards, but to establish controls for them that fit into your formal hazard assessment process.
Given that many safety professionals and executives have little training in psychological health and safety, getting started can be daunting. That’s why using an assessment framework like Guarding Minds at Work is invaluable.
Let’s go over some of the steps you could take to identify and address psychosocial hazards.
Organizational Review
First, you can resort to the tried and true method of collecting and making sense of already existing data. While most of this data is not obvious to the untrained eye, its aggregation can help indicate focus areas – those being specific departments or specific psychological factors.
Lagging Indicators
One source for this data is human resources documentation. Depending on the size of the organization, this document review could be done by:
- The owner (small organizations)
- A human resources professional (medium organizations)
- A team of human resources and safety professionals that could be supplemented by department heads (large organizations)
Some relevant data might include:
- The rate of absenteeism
- The reasons for absenteeism
- The rates of injury or disability
- Violence and harassment reports
- Extended leaves
- Turnover rates
- Benefits utilization and costs
Aggregating these lagging indicators could give us a good indication of the morale, fatigue, or engagement of the workforce and would help us determine our assessment areas.
The key questions to ask are:
- What contributes to these rates?
- How can we leverage these contributors?
Employee Input
Direct input from employees is another valuable source of data. This could already exist or, in some cases, be generated ad-hoc by collecting data specifically for this purpose.
Data points could come from:
- Employee suggestions
- Joint health and safety committee reports
- Employee surveys (e.g. human resources surveys, engagement surveys, psychological factors surveys)
This data is a great starting point. However, be aware that biases can be introduced into the data due to, for instance, the availability of employees, the age of the workforce, major organizational changes (like mergers), and changes in market conditions (like economic downturns). These factors are likely temporary, meaning their psychological effects would be as well. As such, any mitigating measures might also be temporary.
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Selecting the Psychosocial Factors to Assess
The Guarding Minds at Work framework lists 13 psychosocial factors, which can be used to give your assessment.
- Psychological Support
- Organizational Culture
- Clear Leadership and Expectations
- Civility and Respect
- Psychological Competencies and Requirements
- Growth and Development
- Recognition and Reward
- Involvement and Influence
- Workload Management
- Engagement
- Balance
- Psychological Protection
- Protection of Physical Safety
For each factor, the framework identifies the benefits of addressing it (such as reduction of absenteeism, disability costs, and conflict). Read each description and its associated benefits. If they relate to the issues identified in your organizational review, that factor should be a priority for your assessment.
For each assessment you complete, thank the employees for their participation and communicate the results. This openness and transparency will help build trust, which is not only beneficial for the remaining psychosocial factors to be assessed, but is itself an indicator of a psychologically safe workplace.
After completing all relevant psychosocial assessments, it’s time to make sense of the data. Score each psychosocial factor using the scale provided by the Guarding Minds at Work worksheet and determine whether it is an area of concern or a relative strength.
For strengths, assess what your organization has done to receive such a positive score. Consider whether adding controls or enhancing the ones currently in place could improve things even further.
For weaknesses, determine why the scoring was low. This can be done by reviewing the average score for each of the five questions that form the assessment. Then, determine which controls you could implement to mitigate the issue.
For example, if you run the PF3 Clear Leadership & Expectation survey and one of the areas of concern is “Staff are informed about important changes at work in a timely manner,” your control measures should focus on improving the timeliness of communication.
Keep in mind that your analysis should not be strictly limited to traditional safety tasks (though these should be included). Poor or lagging communication can lead to stress, burnout, and confusion, which can lead to both mental as well as physical injury. Mitigating this requires the creation of a communication framework – a formalized system to determine what needs to be communicated, when, by who, and to whom. Since this type of control is not strictly related to traditional safety, they will require input from more than the safety personnel – and especially the leadership team.
With this information now available, review your formal hazard assessment and see where timely communication would be required and incorporate it into your controls. For example, if the staff will be required to take on a new and unique project, be sure to notify them well in advance so they don’t go into it feeling unprepared, rushed, or exposed to unknown risks.
Repeat this process until all timely communication is worked into your formal hazard assessment (and where doing so is not possible, in other documents and processes). Then move to the next question or psychosocial factor, until all of them are recognized and mitigated.
Conclusion
Psychosocial hazards are diverse and, if left unmitigated, can lead to severe mental and physical injury, as well as other organizational problems like productivity loss. Recognizing and controlling for them requires a concerted effort from many stakeholder groups, and support from senior leadership.
Identifying psychosocial hazards can be difficult. While their impact is felt in occupational safety, their roots might be in departments and processes that are severed from traditional safety. The process is further complicated by the fact that many safety professionals lack formal training in this emerging field, though they are expected to deal with the negative outcomes when they arise.
To mitigate these shortcomings, we need better training for safety professionals. But also, an expansion of the sphere of people participating in the assessment process, along with the integration of existing psychosocial frameworks into our formal hazard assessments.
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