The new financial year, along with flagged WorkCover amendments, including changes in relation to ‘burnout’ and ‘stress’, your business should check in on its basic OHS obligations.

Below, the Victorian Chamber’s Workplace Relations experts outline how psychosocial hazards and injury, and poor mental health can manifest in your workplace, and the responsibility of employers to manage such issues.

Current landscape

As people work longer and harder, there is less time to spend recovering from work. We are seeing the effect of this in the high incidence of mental illness caused by the workplace. Mental health injury claims (including workers’ compensation claims) have increased and businesses need to commit to preventing workplace mental injuries and better protect workers with a mental injury.

Employer obligations

The Victorian Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (OHS Act) requires employers to provide and maintain a working environment that is safe and without risks to health. This includes:

• providing and maintaining safe systems of work
• monitoring provision of information and instructions and supervision to ensure employees can work safely
• consulting with employees and health and safety representatives (HSRs) on matters that directly affect or are likely to affect their health or safety.

Maintaining a healthy workplace also requires employers to take all reasonable steps to eliminate or minimise any risks/hazards to mental health such as bullying and harassment, stress, overwork, low morale and workplace trauma.

Crucially, employers are required to identify and manage mental health conditions in the workplace, which can be challenging.

Employees also have duties under the OHS Act to take reasonable care for their own health and safety, the health and safety of people in the workplace and to co-operate with their employer.

Identifying psychosocial hazards at work

A psychosocial hazard is anything in the design or management of work that causes stress. This can be anything from:

• low job control
• high and low job demands
• poor support
• poor organisational change management
• poor organisational justice
• low recognition and reward
• low role clarity
• poor workplace relationships
• poor environmental conditions
• remote and isolated work
• violent and traumatic events.

These risks can arise in your business through burnout, lack of job clarity, bullying, lack of teamwork, disconnect/communication breakdowns in the workplace, changes to award and pay structures for casual staff, lack of support from managers due to financial pressures, poor staff retention, fear of illness (flu/Covid) and need for integration of cultural diversity management.

How the Victorian Chamber can help

As the spotlight increases on business ethics and ESG (environmental, social and governance), it’s important to ensure your workforce practices are genuine and sustainable.

The Victorian Chamber is committed to supporting businesses and offering an evolving range of products and services to drive sustainable performance and impact in the workplace.

It has never been a better time to be proactive to manage issues to prevent mental injury and improve the mental health of your workers, protect those with a mental health injury, support them in the workplace and improve capability to create positive, mentally healthy workplaces – a key pillar of ESG.

The Victorian Chamber can support you by identifying risks and generating actions to develop a mental health strategy that will play a fundamental role in protecting, improving and supporting the mental health of your workers.

Our Advice Line can support members with queries about Fair Work Act and OHS Act changes, Workcover claims, return-to-work plans and day-to-day wellbeing queries.

Our WPR team can provide a range of assistance, including:

• Provide HR Partnership to assist with developing clear policies and procedures to increase staff retention, support people management and drive positive culture and address the management of psychosocial hazards.
• Determine whether employees can meet the mental health “inherent requirements” of the job; the ability to perform essential tasks to promote productivity and quality, the ability to work effectively and safely in a team.
• Identifying what “reasonable adjustments” can be made to ensure the employee can still perform the inherent requirements of the role.
• Support with ensuring employers have enough medical evidence to assess whether an employee can perform the inherent requirements of a job without reasonable adjustments, (including before the employer proposes termination).
• Help minimise mental health WorkCover claims through preventative measures and Wellbeing tools to reduce absenteeism, turnover and insurance premiums.
• Review systems, identify risks and provide support with developing actions to mitigate risk including improving awareness, training, education, fostering organisational change and compliance.
• The implementation of wellbeing programs.

For more information on how the Victorian Chamber can support your business or to access our consulting services call us today on (03) 8662 5222.