People & Culture · Risk & Safety · Sustainability
Designing psychosocial safety
From "toughen up the worker" to setting the work up well.
Under WHS law, health means physical and mental health.
A quick starting question
Where do we stand?
When someone burns out — is it the person, or the way the work is set up?
Have your say — scan the QR.
Grounding the language
What it is — and is not
Psychosocial safety is about the work, not the worker.
Legal note: WHS duties don't cover workers' personal lives — but where work design compounds personal stress, the organisation must minimise that combined risk.
Our experience · Project Simplify
Our own experience backs this up
Through Project Simplify, we found that as work gets more complex, sleep and performance drop. Complexity needs to be designed out.
The driver is complexity in the work — not weakness in the worker.
The legislative sandbox · one duty, nine regulators
What the law asks of us
Two frameworks, one direction. Tap a jurisdiction to see what applies where Indara's people and towers are.
Pick a state or territory
So far as is reasonably practicable
Every jurisdiction lands in the same place: reduce psychosocial risk at its source in the work. The map changes the paperwork — not the job.
Change the work first
Design over training, every time.
Ask the people doing it
Consult before decisions lock in.
Keep the evidence
Assessments, consultation, plans.
The conditions that create risk
Recognised hazards
The codes name hazards differently (14 in the national model, 17 in SA) but they all describe the same landscape. They rarely arrive individually — the harm builds when they stack up.
High & low job demands
incl. fatigueLow job control
Poor support
Lack of role clarity
incl. poorly managed changePoor relationships
incl. conflict, bullying, harassment, violence & aggression, traumatic eventsLow recognition & reward
incl. organisational justiceRemote & isolated work
incl. poor physical environmentsIntrusive surveillanceExplicitly codified in SA
Job insecurityExplicitly codified in SA
Tap the hazards one role actually faces.
The idea behind it
Demands vs resources
High demands only harm when they meet low resources.
Drag each onto its side of the beam. Can't lower the demands? Build in more resources.
Our experience · Metro Trains Melbourne
Add resources, not demands
140 scattered procedures, rebuilt into one tool that works at the point of work.
The job didn't change. The support around it did.
How it all connects
One direction
Design the work well, and the harm never arrives.
The work & how it's set up
The parts of the job we design and control.
Demands vs resources
When demands outweigh resources, pressure builds.
Psychosocial hazards
The recognised conditions from the last slide.
Harm
Poorer health, sleep and safety.
The levers we can redesign
Eight levers
These levers sit underneath the hazards. Redesign these and you shift the hazards.
Policies & Procedures
Procedural clutter — dense, compliance-heavy paper guides that hinder rather than help access.
Where factors collide
Where pressure builds
In many situations, several work factors are at play at once. That overlap is where the root cause analysis on the next slide begins.
Tap an example to light up the factors:
Tight deadlines, alone, in a remote spot.
Emergency hits a short-staffed night shift.
Specialist gear, tangled structure, dense procedures.
Working through an example
The 5 Whys
The factors driving harm rarely sit on the surface. Techniques like the 5 Whys dig into the system to find the real cause.
What happened: a technician skipped a pre-start check at a remote tower. A serious incident followed.
Our experience · Compass Group "5IVE"
Teach it to the whole workforce
Hundreds of staff trained to run these investigations themselves.
The real shift was cultural: system first, not blame first.
Over to you
Which fix would you choose?
For the tower incident — which response fixes the real cause?
Vote now — scan the QR.
More than one is reasonable. Which fixes the cause?
How the day-to-day plays out
Two ways to lead
Same situation. Leadership is where the system's pressure is turned up or down.
Putting it to work
Three teams, one system
No team fixes this alone. Their actions combine to take the pressure off the work itself.
Hazards reduced at the source
No levers engaged yet — the pressure stays in the work.
What the law asks, in order
The four moves
Not a mindset — a sequence we're expected to follow, and to show we followed.
Design first
Treat work design as the primary control. Training and awareness can't do this job on their own.
Ask the people who do the work
Consult to understand how the work really happens — that's where the hazards and the fixes are.
Redesign the work
Change the work itself to remove or reduce the hazard at its source.
Measure, monitor, record, review
Throughout — the evidence you did what was reasonably practicable.
Where we've landed
Safer work, by design
Three questions to take back to your desk.
- Are we asking the people who do the work first?
- Are we fixing the work, or just the symptoms?
- Can we show we did what was reasonably practicable?
This week, pick one pressure point your team keeps hitting — and ask the people doing the work what's really causing it. Start there.