How to Manage Psychosocial Risks in the workplace

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Jason van Schie, a psychological Health and Safety expert, qualified psychologist, podcaster and Managing Director of People Diagnostix - a health technology company.

Jason explains that psychosocial risk covers anything in the design or management of work causing employees stress e.g. ongoing unreasonable deadlines or witnessing a traumatic accident.

Safety professionals are given a brief history of workplace mental health awareness - which is now being taken much more seriously and thankfully focuses on prevention rather than cure. Jason explains the key reasons behind this shift in approach and shares the benefits of managing psychosocial risk.

A new standard, ISO 45003, implies that mental health should be managed like any other health and safety risk. Jason reviews this standard and explores what this means for the safety profession. He suggests that HSE professionals should take the lead in psychosocial risk assessment - so workplace mental health isn’t confined to HR.

Jason provides practical guidance on how to monitor and manage psychosocial hazards, with a strong focus on utilizing technology and keeping things simple.

You may be relieved to hear Jason doesn’t believe EHS professionals need to become psychologists(!) - but he does advocate the development of compassion.

- [Mary] Hi there, welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." We've all had a bad day at work, sometimes many bad days.

But when these bad days are a direct result of poor work design, a harmful social environment, or systemic workplace issues, they can turn into much more than a bad day. They become symptoms of poorly managed psychosocial hazards. Our guest today has built a career from understanding workplace psychological health and safety, and helping organizations discover, mitigate, and manage psychosocial risks.

Jason Von Schie holds a master's degree in occupational psychology. He's been working as a registered psychologist for over 15 years. In 2014, Jason co-founded People Diagnostics, the company behind FlourishDx. Which is a psychological health, safety, and well-being digital platform that takes an integrated and risk-based approach to workplace mental health.

Jason is the lead contributor for FlourishDx. He co-hosts "The Psych Health and Safety" podcast and is the lead instructor for the ISO 45003 Academy, offering free resources to help organizations understand and implement the international standard on psychological health and safety at work.

Jason is speaking to me from Perth. Welcome.

- [Jason] Thanks for having me, Mary.

- Let's start with sort of an overview. Can you give me a broad strokes history of the awareness of workplace mental health issues? So when did employers start taking the conversation more seriously, or have they?

- Well, there's an argument to say that they probably haven't been taking it seriously enough. And it's only recently on the back of the pandemic that they've started to pay more attention. But I guess, you know, the idea of mental health interventions in the workplace have probably been popular for the last 10 to 15 years. It's where we've devoted our attention though, which has really changed, I guess, in the last, you know, a year or two.

Largely when companies look at workplace mental health, they look at the illness end of the continuum. So there's a lot of effort and time spent on, hey, let's create awareness, let's try and reduce stigma, let's get people support. And that's often through the use of things like employee assistance programs, or EAPs. And then that was kind of like where it started and where a lot of effort still is today.

Then there was kind of the rise of things like, let's make people more resilient, you know? If they're stressed at work, let's try and get them to be able to cope with that and bounce back if they have any issues. With the rise of digital tools, let's give them access to mindfulness or let's give them access to self-care tools that they can kind of be gamified, do, and to practice in order to remain mentally healthy and prevent mental illness.

So that's kind of like a progression that we've seen occurring over the last probably 10 to 15 years. It's very common these days that, you know, things like employee assistance is a benefit that most large companies provide to their employees, and that's globally. What we're seeing now, though, is more of a shift to going, "Well, how can we be more preventative?

How can we think about the role of the workplace? And I guess for your audience being health and safety, you know, this is now where health and safety starts to get involved and thinking about things systemically and from a risk-based approach.

- I was going to say it sounds like it started with sort of, if you'll excuse me, cleaning up the mess of poor mental health, and a shift now towards, "Oh, maybe if we prevent these issues, they won't be so serious. We won't have any messes to clean up."

- A lot of reactive. I mean, a good analogy would be thinking, "Oh, you know, people are going to get injured at work, so let's do really good rehab," you know, that's kind of like been the focus, right? Whereas we know in health and safety, well, if we can prevent injuries from happening in the first place, you know, not only is that good for workers, but it's also good for productivity and organizational performance as well.

- Okay, so how do you define psychosocial risk?

- Okay, so psychosocial risk is basically the likelihood and consequence of harm occurring based on exposure to a psychosocial hazard. So I guess more importantly, a psychosocial hazard is anything in the design or management of work can contribute to stress. Now, we all know a little bit of stress is good, right? So you've all probably been stressed before because you've had an exam due the next day or a piece of work.

And a little bit of stress can be quite motivational and make you quite productive and focused. However, if that stress is ongoing, let's say, for example, you had a deadline every single day that you had to hit, that's going to take a toll. Or if you're exposed to very significant stress like occupational violence, or, you know, a traumatic accident that you witnessed, well, those things don't actually take a lot of exposure in order to lead to an injury.

So psychosocial hazards are these things that cause stress. And it's the ones that are generally ongoing for a period of time without respite, or that very high level of stress that can lead to a psychological injury occurring.

- Right, which, you know, as safety professionals, unfortunately, I'm sure that our listeners are familiar with some of those traumatic incidents. What kind of activities or systems comprise psychosocial risk management?

- So typically, and I got to say we're talking about companies here at the bleeding edge because it's not popular at the moment. It's just kind of recently that more companies are starting to switch on and start to do this. It's generally something that's included in the Occupational Health and Safety Management System. So in the same way that we manage physical hazards by taking a risk management approach where we're identifying hazards, assessing risks, controlling them, monitoring them over time, and consulting with workers throughout that process, in the same way, we can actually have that same approach to psychosocial hazards.

And then fitting that in with how a company manages risk as well, in general. So it's not commonplace but through things like ISO 45003 that we're going to talk about today, you know, it is becoming understood that this is actually best practice. And in companies or countries, I should say, that have regulations in place that kind of force them to do this like Germany, for instance, we've had regulations in place since 2014.

Particularly in large organizations, we are seeing high adoption of that kind of risk management, continuous improvement approach.

- So you touched a little bit, but please expand on what are the benefits of managing psychosocial risk? And also, what are the consequences of mismanaging or not managing psychosocial risk?

- So we've all heard of, you know, the great resignation. I think the latest term is quiet quitting, you know? People, if they're not happy with their roles at the moment, particularly with labor markets the way they are, they realize that they can probably move elsewhere where they might be looked after a bit better, or, you know, they might feel like they're wanted a bit more.

And the company actually is going to do things in their power to make their working conditions and work life a lot nicer than maybe wherever they are currently. So one of the benefits of having a psychologically healthy and safe workplace is not that just people are happier and have higher levels of well-being and less likely to take sick leave. But they're more likely to stay and they're more likely to be productive, as well.

The culture is likely to be better as a result because people are happier and there's less interpersonal conflict. Interpersonal conflict being, you know, a very common psychosocial hazard. So there's lots of benefits. On the flip side, if a company isn't going to manage the psychological health of their employees by having an approach to understanding and managing psychosocial risks, not only can there be cultural risks.

And like I said, the downside is people are unhappy and then that becomes really quite a toxic environment to be in. There's also legal risks if you're in regulated markets like Australia or Germany, where the regulators can say, "Well, look, you actually haven't been following your duty of care to create a healthy and safe work environment."

And therefore, there can be financial and even jail time for directors these days in Australia if, you know, something significant happens to someone. Let's say suicides, for instance, after exposure to workplace stresses that weren't managed properly, well, then, you know, that could actually be held, or the directors of that company can be held liable.

So there's financial implications, sorry, legal implications, financial implications as well. And a lot of that is because of the reputational risks or the reputational damage that can happen when a company doesn't do this properly. A really good example was there was a financial advisory firm, a large one here in Australia, who not only did they have a case of sexual harassment that they didn't manage correctly, they managed it very poorly.

And that they actually promoted this person who was accused of sexual harassment up into a senior leadership position in the organization. And when that came to light, and investors heard about it, it wiped $2 billion of this company's market cap. So with the rise of things like sustainability and ESG, and, you know, shareholders, you know, being much more willing to penalize companies who aren't doing the right thing by either the environment or to people through the social side of ESG, then they can really be held...companies can be really held to account by their shareholders.

And that financial advice institution has actually never fully recovered to their market capitalization before this incident either. So they can be...you know, people go, "All these fines and these sorts of things in regulated markets if, you know, companies would not manage this properly and people were to get injured. But the reputational damage that can be done, and then the cost to the company in terms of quite tangible things like their market capitalization is a direct result, too.

Yeah, there's lots of consequences of not doing it properly: cultural, financial, reputational, legal. So even if you're not in a regulated market, it's worthwhile thinking about how your organization is managing these risks.

- I don't expect you to be intimately familiar with every market, whether unregulated ones, but do you think that expectations of both workers and in this case shareholders are changing? Do you think people are expecting more in terms of being taken care of and expecting more in terms of the companies that they invest in to do the right thing?

- Definitely, yeah, we're seeing more shareholder movement and also, you know, investment or institutional investors as well, they are desiring more from the companies that they invest in. So we've all heard of greenwashing, you know, companies trying to make themselves look better from a sustainability perspective and what they are.

But the thing with things like social media these days is it's very hard. And Glassdoor and these other review sites of companies, very hard to kind of get rid of any negative reviews that are coming from your employees that can be made public very easily. So, you know, investors can see that and, you know, they can hold organizations to an account as a result of that.

So, you know, it's not just in regulated markets as you're pointing out, Mary, it's also, you know, thinking about the reputation of the organization and how you care for workers. Not just from a physical health and safety space, but also the design and management of work, which is a psychosocial component, which has this impact on their psychological health is also very important.

- I imagine too even the leadership that may have tolerated some poor behavior, I don't imagine it feels good to be a leader in that kind of a toxic environment, to know that you're somewhat responsible. That's just an aside.

- I don't think there's any disagreeing with that. I think with some leaders though they...first of all, there's a very low understanding, psychosocial risks. I mean, I've defined it up the front of this podcast thankfully. So thanks for giving me that opportunity. But imagine a lot of your listeners may not have even heard of psychosocial hazards or psychosocial risks before this podcast episode either.

So for leaders who aren't even in the health and safety space around a psychologist, they're not going to necessarily understand it either. And things like concept confusion, things like psychological safety, which sounds so similar to psychological health and safety but it's, in fact, a very different construct that just confuses and muddies the waters even further for leaders. So I don't think leaders would be happy, the majority of them anyway, would be happy and knowing that they are inadvertently harming the psychological health of workers based on how work is going on and what people are exposed to.

At the same time, I think a lot of them just don't know any better and they're thinking about mental health in the workplace really from this public health model. Which is, hey, if people are distressed, let's give them access to assistance, or let's get up and talk about lived experience and kind of destigmatize it. Well, that doesn't help anyone, that doesn't actually prevent mental illnesses from occurring in the first place.

Thinking about what you can do as an employer and that's to do with how work is designed and structured, and their kind of interpersonal elements at work as well, those things are the things that the employer can control in order to prevent mental illnesses occurring. But most leaders wouldn't be aware of that. So there's a lot of, I guess, indifference or lack of understanding which is a big issue at the moment, and a lot of education still to occur, which is why we do our own podcast to try and educate the market.

- Just to be crystal clear then, I'm going to say my understanding of psychological safety as opposed to what we're talking about, which is... and then I'd like you to tell me if I'm way off the mark or if I've got it. But psychological safety is essentially feeling trust that you can bring forward issues to your management without fear of reprisal, is that...?

- Yeah, without, you know, fear of professional or personal consequences, right? Yeah, so that's exactly right. It's actually a leadership concept that was really brought forward by Amy Edmondson from Harvard University. You can understand the confusion because we're talking about psychological safety and I guess we're talking about something that kind of sounds linked to mental health.

I haven't seen any research that actually links psychological safety to better mental health outcomes. But there is this kind of feeling, I guess, in the market that because it has psychological in it and safety in it, and we're talking about trust and respect and lack of consequences or repercussions, that it must have a good benefit for mental health. But there's a very...well, I haven't seen the evidence base myself, I'm assuming if there is one, that it's very limited.

But it's just a bloody concept. It's just a terminology just so similar. Because remember again with psychological health and safety, we're talking about taking a risk-based approach to the management...understanding and management of psychosocial hazards which is very different to a leadership construct like psychological safety.

- So it's really more analogous to say critical risk management, then psychological safety probably does make things better, but this is about work design really.

- Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so psychological safety could be one element of work design which is, you know, how people are able to bring forward something at work. And that's around leadership support and colleagues' support and having that supportive environment where people have a voice and are willing to speak up. If you've got poor psychological safety, that could be an example of a psychosocial hazard.

But it's one element of something that's multi-pronged when it comes to psychological health and safety, yeah. That's about where the similarities begin and end, unfortunately.

- Okay. Well, I'm glad we had a chance to clear it up, though. So on this show, we don't usually discuss regulations because regulatory bodies differ country to country. But with 167 member nations, the International Organization for Standardization or ISO is nearly universal.

So in June of 2021, ISO published a new management system standard on psychological health and safety at work, which is ISO 45003. So my first question is, did this replace anything that was in place, or is this a completely new standard?

- Yeah, and I say it is a completely new standard. It is a child standard of ISO 45001, which is the international standard for occupational health and safety management systems. And many of your listeners will be very familiar with ISO 45001. So it didn't replace anything. It came out of the understanding that psychosocial hazards need to be managed a little bit differently than what physical hazards do in the workplace.

So it was decided that we really needed a separate standard on this. And just to be clear, it's not regulation, it's a voluntary standard. But in regulated markets again like Germany and Australia, if you'd follow this because it is an international best practice standard, more likely than not, you're covering most if not all of your legal responsibilities.

- Okay, so how specifically is ISO 45003 helpful?

- So it's helpful for any organization that wants a structured approach to understanding and managing psychosocial hazards. It really takes an organization through all of the necessary steps from, you know, leadership support and commitment, the competence requirements within an organization. It's not explicit in terms of how you should assess risk, but it does take you through that kind of Plan, Do Check Act approach around, okay, let's assess risk, let's now put in controls.

Let's now check to make sure that those controls have been effective and then we're continuously improving. It also has some recommendations in there around injury management and return to work. So what should you consider doing if someone has experienced a psychological injury? And then you're bringing them back into the workplace. So how do you prevent a relapse or an exacerbation of an underlying issue, thinking about accommodations an employee might need?

So it's quite a structured approach. It's designed to be a continuous improvement, so it's not about becoming a great mentally healthy workplace overnight. It's about, you know, regular iterations to continually improve where you're at. And it also talks about how that approach sits within an occupational health and safety management system. So that means it's not actually done in a vacuum which mental health activities often are.

It's kind of like, oh, we're doing this as kind of like an event, or we're doing this as a one-off. Whereas this is actually integrated in how we operate as an organization, not just this one-off event that is unlikely to be sticky or have any really meaningful difference.

- That brings up a couple of questions, but the first one is, you're talking about structure. So international standards, I would think, need to be flexible enough that they can be adapted to a variety of different industries and organizations. But at the same time, they have to give some useful structure or else there's no point. Where do you think ISO 45003 falls on this kind of flexibility to structure spectrum?

- Quite a bit because...yeah, so first of all, like I said, it covers kind of like the main things like the leadership support and competence requirements. And that's kind of required regardless of what industry you're in or, you know, what job roles you have, or what market you're in.

Where it does provide flexibility is in how you assess psychosocial risks. So that might be through qualitative methods like interviews or focus groups. At scale, it could be done through surveys and using digital tools online and that sort of thing. And they also talk about, you know, the different psychosocial hazards that they recognize that can have this detrimental effect on psychological health.

But it's not the whole list, and not all of those psychosocial hazards will apply to every organization either. So it's giving good recommendations of where you can start, I guess. But when you're getting into the nuance bit about how we are understanding these risks, and also how we're controlling them, there's actually a fair bit of customization that an organization can make because of the context.

- You were talking about the integration or siloing of psychological health and safety. So in a typical organization, is there a department where you think the responsibility for this kind of management falls most naturally? Is it OHS? Is it HR? Is it a combination?

- So this is the thing. So traditionally, workplace mental health has really been in the portfolio of HR or employee benefits. What this standard really signifies is actually, no, this should be managed like any other health and safety risk, and so really health and safety should be taking the lead. I liken it to how a health and safety professional might work with an engineer. So a health and safety professional might identify a risk based on the environmental conditions that employees are exposed to, or maybe there's a particular hazard like lack of guarding on machinery.

So they can identify those hazards. But then they don't go out there with their hammer, you know, and their tool belt to go and fix a duct tape. They get an engineer in, right, to go, "Can you engineer out this hazard?" In the same way, health and safety, I believe using the structured approach can help to identify these hazards and bring light to them, and actually assess the risks associated with these hazards.

But then bring in their HR or an organizational development counterpart in order to help engineer out those hazards. So we have heard pushback from some health and safety professionals saying, "I'm not a psychologist, I'm not an OD practitioner." In the same way, we don't expect them to be an engineer, we don't expect them to be an architect, we don't expect them to be electrician, right? All these other hazards where they have to draw around the normal kind of expertise or professionals to be able to deal with those hazards once they've been identified.

So yeah, that's something that should be very clear, hopefully, I can make very clear.

- You're not expected to become a psychologist, but to learn enough so that you can even just identify the risks and raise the problem, right?

- Yeah. So being familiar with the main hazards is actually very useful. There are tools out there of which we design and develop one. There are tools out there to help them to more easily identify and monitor hazards and risks as well. So they don't need to be psychs, they can leverage some of the existing tools and knowledge that's out there, yeah.

- Excellent. Going back a little bit to the standard. Are there any ways in which you think it falls short? Are there any missed opportunities in the way it was written or created that you can see?

- One is, yeah, the translation piece. In fact, it's interesting because this ISO standard kind of borrows a lot from previous standards that are out in existence in the world, right? So the UK standards came out in 2004. So that was kind of like the first kind of attempt at this.

Probably the most well-known of all the international standards is the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety at Work, which came out in 2013. Australia has got some guidance and codes of practice and that sort of thing, which are of international quality as well. But the Canadian standard, they recognized that, you know, because it was a standard, it had to be written in standard ease, which sometimes can be difficult to understand.

And so what they did was actually came up with a translation piece, another bit that said, okay, this is in layman's terms what the standard actually means and how do you actually implement it? And that's something that we identified ourselves that, you know, there's a standard out there, but if people start reading the standard and their eyes just start glazing over as a lot of people's eyes do when they start reading through these complex standards, it's going to be very hard for them to dissect what do they actually need to do and how they're going to implement this thing.

And actually, realize the benefits that the standard should give you. So that's why we decided to do that translation piece through our 45003 Academy to help people to really understand this. And particularly how it talks to the parent standard ISO 45001, how they sit alongside and complement each other.

- It's almost an accessibility issue, right? I mean, if you're not using plain language, you're not really communicating. I do understand...

- Yeah, it's like a lot of these academic articles, you know, the academic articles are written very dense, right, they're very dense. And often, you know, it's the news articles that come out afterwards about, hey, there's this great bit of research and this is what it means. That's actually more valuable often than the original journal article which is usually paywalled, you know? And then it's not just the paywall, but it's also the language that is used that makes it very hard to understand, what did they actually do?

- And, I mean, as with anything including legal language, it is important to have a copy of maybe starting with all the nuances and everything. But if you really want to communicate with people, I think plain language is super important. What kind of reforms have been happening in Australia Workplace Health and Safety Regulation and how do they affect or what do they mean for psychosocial risk assessment and management?

- Yeah, so this goes back a number of years now. So we have a Workplace Health and Safety Act here in Australia. And that act was always...when it talked about the duty of care that employers and employees have to make sure that the working conditions don't harm people.

When that talked about health, it was always supposed to encompass both physical and psychological health. However, the way it's written and the way it's interpreted is often about the physical and it doesn't think about the psychological health. And that's a real issue because in Australia, I can tell you in the years leading up to 2018, and even continuing through the pandemic more recently, that we've just had this ragely rising rate of psychological injury.

So we have a worker's compensation insurance scheme here so people can make claims for psychological injuries that have occurred due to exposure to, you know, working issues. And so there's been, you know, this rising frequency of these claims and then the cost of the claims is really blowing out. So for example, these days, the average cost of a claim is about four times the amount for a physical injury claim or all the eligible other claims.

So it's really expensive. Yeah, they actually account for about 10% now of all injuries in our workplaces. But it's not just that percentage amount, it's like the cost of these claims because they're more complex. So the average time off work now when someone makes a psychological injury claim is half a year, 26 weeks. Which, you know, if you've even done quite a serious back injury or something, you're probably not going to be off work for six months.

Yeah, it can be the case. So I guess there was this, you know, growing need or understanding that we needed to review our act and supporting regulations to really make it very clear that employers have a responsibility, not just for the physical health and safety of employees, but also the psychological health and safety.

So in 2018, there was a review done by a woman named Marie Boland of the WHS Act, and out of 34 recommendations, the second one actually was, hey, we need regulations that deal specifically with psychosocial hazards. So since 2018, there's been a lot of work been happening behind the scenes, other reports that have come out regarding sexual harassment, the Productivity Commission in Australia actually put out a report as well.

And, you know, all of these reports are saying the same thing as what that original recommendation did. Saying, hey, we actually need regulation reform, we need to elevate psychological health and safety to the same level as physical health and safety. Because what we're doing in the mental health at workspace with again, as we started the conversation today on like EAP, and mental health first aid, and, you know, lunch and learns, and it's not having an impact.

It's, in fact, having no impact, we're actually seeing it's continuing to get worse, the issue, rather than any better. So what's happened in the background is that regulations have been drafted. In Australia, there is federal legislation that applies to all of Australia, except for Victoria. So WA were on basis the last state to have joined the Commonwealth legislation.

Victoria still sits out on its own. Victoria has already though completed its consultation on new psychosocial risk regulation. Whereas in the rest of Australia,the model workplace health and safety regulations have been published. But now it's up for all the states to determine on a state-by-state basis, how do they adopt that and incorporate that locally?

So within the next probably six months, we'll see that that will be in. In advance of that, we're seeing all the regulators, so the regulators are different state by state in Australia as well. All the regulators have been really ramping up their teams with a lot more psychologists, a lot of what they're calling psychosocial inspectors so that they can enforce these new regulations when they're published.

So yes, it's not just the new piece of paper, there's going to be a lot of activity, you know? So watch this space in Australia in the next probably 6 to 12 months, is probably going to get a lot of cases made public where companies are going to be held to account for making sure that they are creating a work environment where people aren't getting ill as a result of it.

- Do you have a sense of where the conversation is in other countries compared to Australia?

- Yeah, so I'm aware in Europe, there's about 19 countries including Germany which I mentioned, that already have regulations in place. I read an article recently about the regulations in Germany, they introduced that in 2014. Five years later, when they interviewed employers, they found that the adoption of the regulations was...and completing things like psychosocial risk assessment was only being done by about 20% or so of employers.

About 70% of large employers, so that's more than 250 employees, were doing psychosocial risk assessment. So as I was saying before, it's more the larger employers that we think will be the early adopters of this. So hopefully, it's a lot higher now. A few years after 2019 in Germany, about 70% after 5 years in place, that companies were actually doing the right thing is great.

And now I would say in Australia, maybe 10% if we're lucky that are currently doing psychosocial risk assessment. So it'll be interesting to see how that speeds up. So then other countries like Canada or in the UK, they have a similar workplace health and safety legislation approach to what we do. They're still relying, though, on the general definition of health rather than calling out psychological health separately to the physical health.

And I'm thinking given that we're all part of the Commonwealth, if Australia can do a good job of it, then UK and Canada might actually follow suit in the coming years.

- As a safety practitioner, how do you measure or research, or get your finger on the pulse? You know, you have to monitor these risks, you know, you can't just check a box one day and say, "Well, we've done all the things." Even if you have done "all the things," you'd have to continue to monitor that in some fashion.

So what kind of research methodologies like you mentioned a few, but just practically speaking, what does it look like?

- So if we think about the process, right, the first thing we need to do is to identify the hazards. Now, traditionally, at scale, has been done through a survey that looks very similar to an employee engagement survey. So if we're trying to understand a construct like workload, right, so work overload is a psychosocial hazard.

But workload, we might ask three or four questions like I have to work two demanding deadlines, or I have to work very fast. So a number of questions to do with workload. Then what we'd do is we'd get a score of let's say out of seven, and then we can compare it to a benchmark. Now, whilst these types of surveys have been useful in understanding the design of work, like workload by employees is perceived generally as low, medium, or high, doesn't actually tell us the risks associated with that.

So remember, risk is likelihood and consequence of harm. So if you're getting a score of 5.1 out of 7, compared to a benchmark of 5.2 out of 7, that tells you that maybe you're doing a little bit better or worse depending on the direction of the survey scale, then the benchmark. But it doesn't tell you the likelihood and consequence of harm occurring. So what we have really felt is that the tools that are currently in existence, particularly the quantitative ones, the qualitative ones, like focus groups, interviews, you know, that's pretty basic for a HR or OD practitioner to be able to do.

But the quantitative ones, we don't actually feel a fit for purpose for risk assessment. So we felt that there's actually a need to move to more exposure assessment methodology. So more from the discipline of occupational hygiene. So if you think about how a hygienist would measure for the risk of hearing loss due to noise exposure at work, that person would need to measure the severity of the noise, how loud is the noise in that work environment?

But they don't just measure the severity once, right, it's not just one loud noise generally that will lead to harm occurring, you also need to know the frequency of that exposure. And you need to know the duration of that exposure as well. So if it's very loud and it's happening, you know, on a daily basis for an hour at a time, that's probably going to lead to hearing loss.

And in fact, we actually now have recognized exposure limits, what is a safe level of noise exposure, before you can expect someone to experience harm? So in the same way, we felt that rather than just asking three or four similar questions around elements of work, around things like autonomy and workload and supervisory support, and bullying, it's actually better to understand the severity, frequency, and duration of the stress experienced as a result of exposure to those hazards.

And so, yeah, we have this new form of risk assessment that we've developed. I haven't seen it anywhere else in the world. I believe we're the first ones to do it, [inaudible] approach. Yeah, we actually believe this will be a much better way of understanding risk. And what we're in the midst of doing at the moment is linking that to longitudinal outcomes of things like burnout, psychological distress, illness, absence, and that sort of thing to build up a predictive algorithm.

So that once say a health and safety practitioner has used that tool across a group of individuals, they can very quickly identify the hazards and then they can get a risk associated with it. So the idea is we want to be able to say, hey, based on all of the psychosocial hazards that you've assessed here, let's say there's 8 of them, your cumulative injury risk is 80. Now, what does the score of 80 out of 100 mean?

Well, that would mean if you did nothing in the next 6 months, you could expect 30% of your employees to experience burnout. Twenty percent are going to take time off work due to work-related stress. Maybe, you know, workers compensation claims if there is that scheme in place maybe, you know, 3% of employees are going to make a workers compensation claim for a psychological injury. Now, that's a very tangible risk which is based on this predictive algorithm, even better than a risk matrices where you're trying to estimate, you know, on a...you know, is this a green or an orange or a red risk?

Because it's like, "Well, what does that actually mean?" Well, this is a very tangible risk. And then it's about escalating that up to leadership and going, "Well, are you comfortable with this risk?" And, you know, the employer might go, "Yeah, no, we're happy with that. You know, we're happy with 30% of our employees burning out." Hopefully, they're not saying that but, you know, that might be their risk appetite. Whereas others would go, "All right, no, that is unacceptable, what do we need to do to bring that down to a level that we're comfortable with."

Let's say we're going to accept there's going to be some people burning out, but we want that down to 10%. So how far do we have to reduce the risk? And what are the things that we need to focus on in order to bring down that risk the most? And that's where our tool will also go, "Well, these are the biggest risks, or hazards that are contributing to that cumulative injury risk." So I think largely, the tools haven't existed to date for health and safety practitioners, in particular, to play the game and really be able to understand hazards and risks well.

And that's where we're trying to make the biggest difference with what we're doing. The other thing as you pointed out is the monitoring of hazards. How do you know if your risks are being reduced and if hazards are being addressed appropriately, or if new hazards are emerging? And again, traditionally, the way you do that is through these surveys. And these surveys might be 30 to 60 minutes, which can have a big impact on operations.

So we thought, 'Well, actually, there's a better way of doing it. If we're only trying to identify hazards and not really assess risk, we can just use something that looks very similar to a mood check-in," which is very common in mental health apps. Once people have rated themselves positively or negatively on a continuum of, you know, feeling angry and stressed up to happy and joyful, let's ask them from a work perspective, what's actually contributing to that.

So in the end of this 30-second assessment, you can actually get a good understanding of these are the things we should be celebrating at work, these are the things we should be doing more of because they're actually contributing to a positive well-being for our employees. But hey, there's all these things that people are reporting when they have negative check-ins that from a work perspective that are contributing to that. So there are psychosocial hazards, so these are the things that we really need to hone in on. And by using that 30-second assessment on a regular cadence, you know, every month or two, a health and safety practitioner could kind of keep an eye on, you know, what are the main hazards, the controls that we have been putting in place, are they being effective or not?

Are there new hazards emerging? You know, that sort of thing. So, yeah, we're very conscious of, hey, if we're going to do this, we need to minimize disruption to operations as much as possible. Whereas in the past, I think they've been really academically led, and academics are really interested in, how do we get as much data as possible and they don't really care so much about the impact on operations.

Whereas we're thinking, "Well, if we actually want to make a difference, we need the company to accept these practices and these tools." And the only way you're going to do that is to make them really accessible and time effective as well.

- Yeah, I mean, that's much more scalable than a long interview type. And bonus, everyone knows emojis, right?

- That's right.

- There's already that language there.

- Yeah, and you reduce a lot of literacy issues as well, right, by having simpler tools. And the other issue with academic tools is that if you want to use them in multinationals where you've got multiple languages, even in North America, right, Spanish is very common, or in Canada, you've got French as well. So it's very hard to actually translate these tools effectively into different languages. And then be able to do direct comparisons between how French-speaking employees are writing it compared to English-speaking, doesn't necessarily cover the same nuance or the same thinking associated with, you know, these validated measures.

So with our approach, it's actually much easier to translate and then do direct comparisons regardless of language. Because we are using iconography and these other things to try and get across the meaning, not just the terminology. And the way that people are responding is the same every time, it's not, you know, a different question for every hazard that we're trying to assess. So I'm really excited, in fact, quite bullish about the impact that we can make once people get their hands on these tools that actually might help them to do their job in this space.

Because, you know, these employee perception surveys that we have used to understand the work context been around since like 1974. And there hasn't been a lot of innovation since, you know, in almost 50 years. The biggest thing we've done in the last 50 years is taking these paper and pencil surveys and put them online. In the meantime, they've probably gotten longer because, you know, it's very easy then for academics to go, "Oh, we'll just check in a few more survey scales here."

And we'll answer a few more research questions that we've got rather than shorter. So, you know, what we're doing, I'm really excited about because I feel like it can actually make a big difference to companies actually operationalizing psychosocial risk management with the right tools that will give them the answers they need in a shorter period of time.

- And I don't know if you're delving into this but, you know, you've got a predictive algorithm with the advances in machine learning, the sky may be the limit on how...you know, the problem was analyzing all this data. Well, if you have computers on the task, then it's a lot easier than as you were saying like a matrix.

- That's right. I mean, you know, at the moment, the very best you might be able to get is looking at each hazard in isolation, like work overload, or lack of autonomy, or bullying and harassment, and link that to an outcome. But what we want to do like I said is have that cumulative psychological injury risk which takes into account maybe 8 to 10 different hazards.

And then the other thing is we're not just interested in the average of how employees are scoring. The average might look okay compared to benchmark, but you might have 20 employees right at the top end of the continuum that are highly likely to burn out and have...there's an injury risk there. So you don't just go, "Oh, we're just going to look at the averages for this population," you really need to look at the distribution of the population as well and their exposure.

And that's where things like machine learning will actually be able to look at that whole distribution of employees and the potential harm of those employees and actually give you that injury risk. Yeah, averages and medians can be quite deceptive and make you look better or look like there's less risk there than what there might actually be.

- What advice do you have for companies who are wanting to move forward without knowing where I guess they're starting from? But I'm thinking listeners, like, what advice do you have for them if they want to move their own companies forward in the management of workplace mental health?

- Yeah, so I think a good way to start is to take stock of what you're currently doing. Most workplaces have something in place, whether it's an EAP, whether it's peer support programs, whether it's awareness raising, training, that sort of thing. Take stock of what you've got.

It would be useful to plot that against what's known as the integrated model of workplace mental health. And that basically recognizes that mental health is a continuum, right? So yeah, you've got people down the bottom end of that continuum who are distressed or having mental illness. You got a group that might be languishing, so not quite at that diagnostic level of having a disorder, but still not doing the best.

You have this big group of employees who are mentally well. And then you have this group who are flourishing or thriving at work. So really, you want to think about, "Well, we need to meet people where they're at." And what you'll find is with a lot of organizations as we mentioned from the outset, a lot of it is actually happening just in that reactive space for those employees who are already distressed. Think about what else are we doing as an organization that promotes flourishing. So what are the things that we're doing that really helps people to optimize their well-being and quality of life?

But then also, for those people in that middle section, how are we preventing harm? So what are the risk-based approaches? So really think about it in those three buckets when you're taking stock of what are the things that we're doing. And really you want a number of things in each of those buckets. So you want to be doing things that mitigate illness, you want things that prevent harm, and you want things that promote flourishing. So yeah, take stock of what you've got. We don't believe that the mitigate illness or the promote flourishing stuff actually moves the needle enough when it comes to mental health.

We think and probably your listeners would agree that taking that risk-based approach, where you're taking that continuous improvement approach to the management and improvement of working conditions will actually lead to a much bigger impact on mental health. I mean, for one thing, you know, it doesn't require behavior change on individuals who are reluctant often to change their behaviors and practice more self-care, you know?

It's actually improving the work environment so every employee can benefit from that, rather than just a small percentage of people who might be motivated enough to change their behavior. So, you know, really think about each of those buckets, but really start thinking how can we bolster what we're doing in the risk management space? And then obviously, then you've got things like ISO 45003, and our training academy which helps to, you know, translate that standard, you know, that can help you to understand how do you do that.

- I have a few questions that I ask all my guests at the end of the interview. So one question is, I'm going to call it the University of Jason. If you were to develop training curriculum for safety professionals, now not necessarily talking about specifically psychosocial hazards. But what kind of soft skill do you think would serve them well that you might focus on, you know, relationship building or listening or?

- Yeah, I have one which is my favorite which is compassion. You know, there's all this talk about EQ. So emotional intelligence is practicing empathy. And it's all well and good to understand where people are at and how they're feeling. But compassion is action orientated. It's actually taking that understanding of how people are feeling and their personal circumstances and then doing something about it.

So it's all well and good for a line manager to say, "I understand that you're stressed, great, deal with it. We can't do anything about it." For a line manager to go, "Okay, well, I understand you're stressed, let me see what we can do together in order to address that. Let's talk about, you know, some of these psychosocial hazards like your work demands, like, you know, how much support you're getting, the flexibility of your commitments based on other things that are going on in your life. Let's think about the accommodations that we can make."

I think it's one thing to try and teach leaders EQ and empathy. But if you really want to make a difference, then make them compassionate leaders and look at how can they work with their employees to make meaningful improvements to the way that they're working for that would have benefit for their mental health.

- That would make a very solid foundation for trust as well. So next question, if you could go back in time to the beginning of your career, and you could only give yourself one piece of advice, what do you think that would be?

- I'd say don't be afraid of trying something new or moving on from an organization after you've kind of learned enough. So funny story when...or wasn't funny at the time. But my first job out of getting my master's degree was in kind of where a lot of grads to go into a role around employee selection and recruitment.

So a lot of personality, profiling, assessment centers, that sort of thing. And, you know, I probably learned everything I needed to know about that within 12 to 18 months. And I ended up being there for two years. But fortunately, in hindsight, I got made redundant after two years because I was working for a consultancy of only about 10 people, small consultancy.

But we lost a very big client that was worth half of the revenue of the business, so obviously, they had to reduce headcount. But that then enabled me to go into a role which did focus on risk management and human factors. That's an area that I just absolutely love. So I think it's very easy to get comfortable in a career and go, hi, I'm an expert at this and, you know, I'm comfortable with where I'm at, there's no risk, I'm getting paid a salary, you know, I know what's expected of me every day.

But that doesn't leave a lot of room for growth. So if you are good at what you do, if you've got a love of learning, if you're always trying to make yourself better professionally and personally, there's always going to be jobs for you. Don't feel like you have to be a lifer in any particular organization. Well, now that I have my own business, I essentially feel like I'm going to be a lifer here. And I get to go, "Hey, look, I think that's actually something worthwhile exploring, or, no, that's actually something that we're not doing that I'd like to learn and be able to apply."

And these days, I get to work with some amazing people who are from very different disciplines to what I am. Whether it's software engineers, or whether it's graphic designers, or whether it's management consultants, marketing people, I just love absorbing all of the different things that they can teach me. So, yeah, I guess, you know, in short, an answer to your question, it's, like, don't be afraid of getting out of your comfort zone.

Don't feel like you have to follow a set career path, like, within an organization. Just keep learning as much as you can and developing yourself professionally and looking for opportunities for growth regardless of whether it's in your current organization, or in another organization if you can't get that level of development within your own organization.

- Wise words. So how can our listeners learn more about some of the topics in our discussion today? Obviously, the ISO standard but are there books or websites or groups that you would recommend?

- Yeah, so like yourself, we have our own podcast. We have over 100 episodes, believe it or not, psychological safety is a very niche topic. But we have over 100 episodes with...and we have guests on every episodes like you do. And these are some of the best experts in the world in the space.

And that covers academics, practitioners, and everything in between. So it's called "The Psych Health and Safety Podcast." For those who are in North America, we've actually got a Canadian-focus podcast, "Psych Health and Safety Canada," and "Psych Health and Safety USA," which is our most recent one. We have a number of podcasts that are suitable for anyone in different markets as well. The 45003 Academy which I've referenced today is free academy, which not only has a foundations course on the ISO 45003 standard, but it's got some other courses on things like how to create the business case for psychological health and safety.

So for those who want to take action after listening to this podcast, that might actually be a good place to start, to go, "Well, how do I actually convince leaders that this is worthwhile to do?" And it comes with a free template that you can adapt to your own needs to create that internal business case. We've got things on that academy as well like how to conduct a psychosocial risk assessment and talk through in more detail some of the methodology I was referencing today as well that's unique to how we operate.

So those resources are really good. And then, you know, there's things out of Australia that are very good as well. So Safe Work Australia have just in the last couple of weeks, in fact, released a Model Code of Practice for psychological health and safety at work. So that's something worthwhile looking up. And Mary, I can give you the link to put into the show notes as well for that resource. So, you know, there are a number of great resources to get your hands on and have a look at.

- Where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Frankly at LinkedIn more than I probably should, you know, probably sacrificing a little bit of productivity. So yeah, you'll find me on LinkedIn, Jason Von Schie. You'll find me easy on that. I don't know if there's another Jason Von Schie on LinkedIn, there might be one other one in the Netherlands. And then, yeah, just direct message me, happy to chat.

- Awesome. Well, I'm afraid we're out of time for today. Thanks to our listeners for your support, and thanks so much for speaking with me, Jason.

- No, thanks for having me on here again, Mary.

- My thanks also goes out to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team whose hard work brings you ideas from every corner of the safety world. Bye for now.