How to Carry Out a Psychosocial Risk Assessment
More people could flourish at work if organisations took a similar approach to looking after employees’ psychosocial wellbeing, as they do to managing physical health and safety in the workplace.
Psychosocial Risks Cause Physical Harm
Good work is good for us. Supporting people to flourish at work helps them perform at their best and promotes a sustainable workforce. People get a sense of purpose and inclusion, mental stimulation and positive relationships in a safe working environment. Effective job design and consideration of psychosocial risks will support the development of a safe working environment. Conversely work-related psychosocial hazards can cause a range of mental, social and physical harms. These include excessive job demands, discrimination, poor working relationships and change management.
Psychosocial risk assessment should be a key part of any organisation’s approach to worker mental health and wellbeing and a traditional risk assessment approach can be used. In June 2021 ISO 45003 was published. It aims to give practical guidance on managing psychological health and safety in the workplace. It is the first international standard to provide guidance on the management of psychosocial risks, as part of an occupational health and safety management system.
The standard sets out guiding principles and advice on how to assess and manage psychosocial risks that should be considered, even if organisations do not choose to adopt a formalised occupational health and safety management system.
Organisations Can Use a Traditional Risk Assessment Approach for Psychosocial Risks
The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work found in their 2019 ESENER survey1 that 35% of organisations with over 250 employees found psychosocial risks more difficult to address than other risks. At a recent roundtable event we asked how many of the delegates were confident their organisation had assessed the risks associated with machinery in the workplace. Everyone put their hand up. When we asked the same question about assessing stress, or psychosocial risks, a few hands went up. In the UK the same legal requirement applies to the assessment of all work-related risks.
There is a range of guidance to support organisations to plan, implement and review a suitable and sufficient risk assessment process. The same steps of a traditional health and safety risk assessment approach can be applied to psychosocial hazards. Further guidance on what to consider in each of the five steps can be downloaded.
- Identify psychosocial hazards
- Identify who might be at risk and how, including consideration of personal factors
- Evaluate the risk looking at the degree of exposure and severity of harm
- Apply measures to reduce and manage these risks
- Review hazards, assessments and controls to continuously improve.
Job Design and Psychosocial Risk Management are Important Controls
There is a clear relationship between psychosocial risks and impacts on employee mental health and wellbeing. The impact on people can be physical, psychological, or social. Stress at work is associated with heart disease, depression and musculoskeletal disorders.
There is clear evidence that excessive job demands, poor relationships and effort-reward imbalance are risk factors for psychological and physical health. This as a key public health concern and with clear implications for employers and their duty of care.
Good work is good for us. Well-designed jobs and effectively managed psychosocial risks can support individuals to flourish at work, supporting business objectives and a sustainable workforce. People are more likely to flourish in a workplace that has been designed to reduce physical and psychosocial risks.
Zurich Resilience Solutions (ZRS) offer a range of services to help organisations to understand, assess and manage psychosocial risks. Key to this is our partnership with FlourishDx and their enterprise grade, psychosocial risk management platform. Our Risk Consultant can help organisations to review their arrangements for managing stress and mental health at work. We can provide insight and suggestions for developing strategy and policy too.
There is also our free self-assessment tool in the award-winning Zurich Risk Advisor app. The tool enables an organisation to carry out a simple self-assessment for the reduction of stress and mental health decline at work. It allows multiple users from the same organisation to assess different parts of the business and to compare findings and outcomes.
How We Can Help
For more information about how ZRS can support you with this or other risks please contact zrs.enquiries@uk.zurich.com or visit us here.
