Psychological Safety and Risk Management

4. Identifying psychosocial hazards

The principal or their delegate, in consultation with affected or likely to be affected school staff and health and safety representatives (HSR), where elected, must, so far as reasonably practicable, identify psychosocial hazards.

When identifying hazards, consider the following:

• some hazards can cause injury with a single exposure event, such as a threat to life or physical safety
• with other hazards, the impacts of exposure can accumulate over time, even if appearing as less distressing as an isolated event (such as witnessing, hearing about or experiencing negative behaviour on a regular basis)
• people will react differently, and the absence of a reaction (indicator) should not be taken as the absence of a hazard
• the impact of events can be delayed, sometimes by weeks, months, or even later
• some hazards might impact some people more than others (for example, a person living with a diagnosis of mental illness or disability)
• psychosocial hazards can be present alongside physical hazards (for example, safety concerns for school infrastructure may not be raised if staff do not believe their voice will be heard)
• some hazards may be present all the time, others only occasionally
• current trends in data, such as eduSafe Plus hazard, near miss and injury data.

The department has identified 4 common psychosocial hazards that every school must include in their OHS risk register. These are:

• workplace bullying
• work-related stress
• work-related violence or aggression
• students with challenging behaviours.

To identify further hazards in the workplace, principal or their delegates can consider the following methods.

1. Observing staff indicators

These include:

• excessive and/or unusual patterns of sick leave
• high staff turnover and/or burnout
• negative behaviours and performance issues (for example, disrespectful behaviour or misconduct)
• staff withdrawal or avoidance of certain situations
• change in appearance (for example, deteriorating physical appearance)
• safety incidents (for example, personal physical injuries, high number of student safety incidents)
• behaviours that are inconsistent with a person’s usual characteristics.

2. Reviewing incident notifications and data

A range of data points can indicate the presence of psychosocial hazards, including:

• eduSafe Plus injury, incident and near-miss reports of all severity (from low to extreme)
• workers’ compensation claims
• records of hours worked (that is, patterns of extra hours indicating high work demands)
• absenteeism and worker turnover data, including exit interviews
• health and safety committee meeting records
• school staff survey data (wellbeing indicators).

Alerts from eduSafe Plus will notify the principal or the delegate of incidents or near-misses involving staff. Some of these incidents may be related directly to a psychosocial hazard (for example, challenging student behaviour), but it is still important to consider the psychological impacts of other occupational health and safety categories. For example, there could be a psychological element involved with chemical management, such as stress from managing chemicals and workload pressures from logging purchase and expiration date.

Consideration should also be given to cumulative effects of exposure to what might be at the time, identified as a minor incident. If minor incidents are occurring often, this can lead to psychological injury.

Principals should encourage their staff to report all workplace psychosocial hazards, injuries and near misses in eduSafe Plus. Training is available, search ‘eduSafe’ in LearnEd (eduPay) to find the relevant courses.

For more information on how to examine workplace data, see Workplace Health and Safety Queensland mentally healthy workplaces How to examine and interrogate workplace data guide (PDF).

3. Staff feedback

The observation of staff indicators and data analysis is important, however identification of hazards can be significantly strengthened if good communication and consultation coincides with this information.

Refer to the Effective consultation and communication for psychological safety section for further information.