When we talk about psychosocial hazards at work, we tend to focus on the obvious things:
- Bullying
- Harassment
- Unreasonable workloads
- Aggressive customers
- Conflict
And yes, these absolutely matter. But I think some of the most damaging psychosocial hazards in workplaces are the things nobody identifies as a hazard anymore – because they have become normal.
“That’s just how it is here”
Every workplace has things people quietly adapt to. For example:
- The manager who regularly sends emails at 10 pm.
- The team member who sighs and rolls their eyes every time someone asks a question.
- The constant restructuring.
- The priorities that change every week.
- The meeting where nobody says what they really think.
- The person who carries 40% more work than everyone else because they are “the reliable one”.
- The client who is allowed to speak to staff in ways nobody would tolerate internally.
None of these things, in isolation, may trigger an incident report, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t having an impact. The problem with psychosocial hazards is that they are often cumulative. It isn’t always one terrible event that causes people to disengage, burn out, or decide they have had enough. Sometimes it’s 200 small moments where they think:
“This isn’t worth saying anything about.”
“Nothing will change anyway.”
“I’ll just deal with it.”
Many organisations are providing resilience training for their staff, which is a good thing, but it’s dangerous to mistake having great coping skills for wellbeing. You know the employee, they:
- never complain.
- take on the extra work.
- calm everyone else down.
- work around dysfunctional systems.
- don’t make a fuss.
So what happens? They get given more work.
Ironically, some of the most resilient people in an organisation can become the people most exposed to psychosocial hazards.
Resilience should not become an excuse for poor systems, poor leadership or poor behaviour.
We shouldn’t be asking:
“How can we make our people more resilient?”
before asking:
“Why do they have to be so resilient in the first place?” ‘What systems, processes or behaviours need to be addressed?
Culture isn’t the values written on the wall. Culture is more accurately measured by what happens when a worker:
- makes a mistake
- raises a concern
- disagrees with their manager
- is struggling with their workload
- says “no”
- challenges the behaviour of a high performer
- reports inappropriate behaviour by someone senior
That is often where psychosocial hazards hide – in the gap between what the organisation says it values and what people experience every day. The question I think more workplaces should ask is:
“What have we normalised around here that we probably shouldn’t have?”
That question might reveal far more. Perhaps people have normalised working through lunch, being available outside work hours or abusive behaviour from customers. Psychosocial safety isn’t about making work stress-free. Let’s be realistic: work can be demanding. People will occasionally have difficult conversations; there will be deadlines, pressure and conflict. The aim isn’t to remove every uncomfortable experience from work. The aim is to make sure that the way work is designed, managed and led doesn’t unnecessarily harm the people doing it. That requires something more difficult than simply introducing another wellbeing initiative. It requires organisations to look honestly at themselves:
- at their workload
- their leadership
- their systems
- their behaviour
- their communication
- and, perhaps most importantly…
- the things everyone has quietly started calling“normal”.
What is something your workplace has normalised that probably shouldn’t be normal?
If you’d like more information or training in Psychosocial hazards at work, please contact us on 1300 850 959
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