Psychosocial safety: Creating a healthy, productive workplace

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Psychosocial safety expert Carlo Caponecchia explains how to design and manage a safer, more productive work environment for employees

About the episode

How productive can you be if your working environment is toxic and bad for your mental health? 

Whether your workplace is challenging due to work overload, high stress levels or something as simple as unfair remuneration, mentally unsafe working conditions are a significant problem. They put workers at risk, but they also decimate productivity and morale.  

So how do you design a better place to work that will boost employee wellbeing and efficiency? Carlo Caponecchia, Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at UNSW Science and an expert in psychosocial safety at work, breaks down the key elements every organisation should focus on for a safer, more productive environment. 

This episode is hosted by Dr Juliet Bourke, with insights from Professor Barney Tan.

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For the latest news and research from UNSW Business School and AGSM @ UNSW Business School, subscribe to our industry stories at BusinessThink and follow us on LinkedIn: UNSW Business School and AGSM @ UNSW Business School.

Transcript

Dr Juliet Bourke: Leading a business means leading people. And people... well, they can be complicated. People want to feel valued at work like they belong. 

Carlo Caponecchia: Many people are familiar with the notion of psychological safety, which is relating to the idea of feeling safe at work to raise issues or concerns. So it's about feeling safe enough to do that. It's also related to that idea of feeling safe to bring your whole self to work.  

Dr Juliet Bourke: That’s Carlo Caponecchia – the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Faculty of Science at UNSW. He's an expert on psychosocial safety at work and says business leaders should be thinking about the way the workplace itself is structured. 

Carlo Caponecchia: The way work is organised, the way work is done, the culture of the organisation, and the physical environment that can have a harmful effect on your health. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: Earlier this year, updated health and safety regulations came into place putting the psychosocial safety of employees firmly in the spotlight. Today, Carlo is going to help us understand what that means and what our responsibilities are as employers. I'm Dr Juliet Burke, a professor of practice in the school of management and governance at UNSW. This is The Business Of.  

So Carlo, let’s just set the scene – people talk about psychological safety, but you talk about psychosocial safety. Can you help us understand what that means? 

Carlo Caponecchia: Many people are familiar with the notion of psychological safety, which is relating to the idea of feeling safe at work to raise issues or concerns. It's also related to that idea of feeling safe to bring your whole self to work. That's quite different to psychosocial hazards and risks, which are about the things that are going on at work – the way that work is structured, the way work is organised, the way work is done, the culture of the organisation and the physical environment – that can have a harmful effect on your health. So they're aligned, but different. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: Let's start with the hazards themselves. What does that mean?  

Carlo Caponecchia: A hazard is a source of harm and when we're talking about psychosocial hazards we're talking about sources of harm that exist in the work system that can have a negative effect on your physical and psychological health. We're talking about things like how the work is organised, how the work is done, how it's supervised, how it's managed, where it's done, what environment it's done in, and the broader organisational context in which it's done. So in terms of examples of some of the hazards, we're talking about things like workload (so work overload), the nature of the tasks – their frequency, when they're being done. It also includes things like job control, so the level of control that people have in what they do, when they do it, who they do it with. Role ambiguity, so not being clear about where your role starts and stops. Role conflict – having elements of your job that are essentially in conflict with one another. We're also talking about job insecurity, remote and isolated work and, of course, bullying, harassment, violence and discrimination as well. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: So I can understand that all of those create psychosocial risk for people, but it seems like some of those things are just part of doing work. Your role's a little bit ambiguous, that you might have a little bit too much to do. Where do we find the boundary? 

Carlo Caponecchia: Well, the boundary is meant to be in terms of understanding when it's going to have a negative effect on your health. And so I think you're right many jobs will have elements of those things, what we're wanting to better identify and then control is when that becomes too much.  

Dr Juliet Bourke: So does that take us to work design? Because I think about work redesigns so that we're not overworked. That might have an implication for resourcing for example, ‘Let's just have more people so we're not overworked’, but then you're in a business that, ‘You know what? We don't actually have any more money.’  

Carlo Caponecchia: Of course.  

Dr Juliet Bourke: So how do you redesign work so that you make sure that you're balancing the balance sheet, as well as not harming someone's health? 

Carlo Caponecchia: Of course. So the obvious one for a high workload that's having an effect on people's health is ‘Let's hire more people.’ Not a very practicable control, right? And we've got to take into account what's feasible and what's practicable, and just getting more staff – while that sounds like a lovely blue sky, solution – it's not going to work in most situations. You know, I talk a lot to people in healthcare – sure let's get more nurses. That'd be great. It's not a short or even a medium-term solution, though. So with work design, what we try to do is think about all the small elements of jobs that have the potential for some change that's beneficial so that, in concert, they might be able to make that job less harmful. So we may not be able to hire more people, but perhaps we can look at the timing of particular tasks, perhaps we can look at cross skilling of our teams to know how we might be able to better support and offer supervision to particular people, how we might offer opportunities for professional development such that we have teams that are sustainable, that have that succession planning and also have better opportunities for individuals in those roles to see themselves moving on in their career to new and more exciting and more challenging roles. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: So it's about how all the little things interact with each other. Do you have an example of what that might look like for an individual worker? 

Carlo Caponecchia: One example I'm familiar with concerned a construction worker who is really quite a skilled construction worker in his 50s, worked for a long time across a range of jobs. Lived in Queensland and his organisation sent him to do some work in New South Wales. It was originally scheduled for a two month role, but of course, as most people know, construction jobs blow out in terms of time. So he went down to this job, but he found that his accommodation that the organisation had provided for him was an hour's drive away and so he was driving an extra two hours a day more than he really needed to. He was staying in a really remote part of Sydney in a cabin – there was no one else around, the internet was patchy, there was no supermarket, there was no restaurants, there was no pubs, there was no entertainment. There was nothing to do. The people that he was working with on the job site were labor hire workers, so they kept changing. He felt really isolated and really unsupported. He got the occasional call from his supervisor just to check in on how things were going, but it wasn't regular and it, sort of, didn't really help him much. The job continued for five months instead of two and during this time he put on weight, he started smoking again, he started drinking some more. Now that seems like a really simple scenario and the redesigns that that business could have thought about were many. For a start, one of them that would have solved a lot of things was to think about how their policies and processes around travel and accommodation might have been amended such that they could put him up somewhere close to the job, because then not only would he have access to leisure and food and entertainment and social interaction, but he wouldn't be driving an extra two hours a day. They also could have thought about, well, what was that supervisor doing in terms of checking in more regularly and maybe taking further actions? Did they need this person to be there for five months when they figured that it wasn't going to last for two but it was going to go for longer. Could they have switched someone else out? And this one sounds, you know, a little bit heretical, but could they have thought about not taking that job? This is a company in Queensland, did they have to take that work in New South Wales? Was there something special about it? Did they even consider that idea of this is going to put our people out of their social world, where they're unsupported, where we can't support them really well? So did they consider that as part of the decision process of even tendering for this work. So lots of different designs and not just for things that happened to that individual, but for lots of different roles in that business. For the people who were writing the travel policy, for the accountants, for the finance people thinking about, how do we spend money so that we don't unnecessarily endanger people?  

Dr Juliet Bourke : Presumably, there was a payout to him. Or was there a Disney ending? Is there a happy ending to that story? 

Carlo Caponecchia: No, there's not. He left. He resigned. So they lost him. They lost his expertise. I mean, part of the reason that they put him in that role is that he was an expert, he could do lots of things. So ultimately... 

Dr Juliet Bourke: Financial cost.  

Carlo Caponecchia: They lost out. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: Can you think of other examples in white collar or pink collar that also demonstrate that need to take into account people's psychosocial health?  

Carlo Caponecchia: So legal in particular is one that's focused on in terms of having really high workload, really high pressure work; where there's a culture of having to do the hours, work the hours in order to work their way up to a more senior position. So there's a lot of risk there. Also you have people exposed to potentially traumatic material, and you have a lot of junior staff – so graduates coming through – trying to learn and needing to be seen to be able to deal with it. So I think that some of the strategies that are used there are not always great. And those strategies that people use in those organisations show an awareness that they know that these things are a problem. For example, if you're working really late in a law firm, you know, there's probably a system of covering your meals and getting your taxi home so that you're not driving and you're not going on public transport that may not be there or maybe unsafe. So there's an implicit awareness that these things are unsafe, but they're kind of band-aid solutions, and that's not work redesign. So thinking about how you actually change how the work is done.  

Dr Juliet Bourke: But this could go to the very heart of the business model, if we just stay with legals for a minute, because that's built off the leverage model, which is that you're getting your most junior staff – whom you don't pay a lot of money – to do the most number of work hours because that's where the profit is. And everyone knows that when they go into one of these large firms, that they're going to be working excessive hours, but the carrot of partnership is held out there. This would be, surely, challenging now the very way that those businesses operate. 

Carlo Caponecchia: Absolutely, it's about the whole organisational structure. And that's one of the things that we consider when we think about psych hazards – what are the psych hazards in the way that the organisation is structured. The system of work is what you've just described.  

Dr Juliet Bourke: But if sectors like law don't change, they could be at risk because there's new regulations, right? 

Carlo Caponecchia: Sure, in most states in Australia, all except Victoria, we now have new work health and safety regulations, or a new element of the existing work health and safety regulations that's related to psychosocial risks. It's important to say that these are not new requirements, they've just been emphasised or elevated. So it was always the case for some decades in fact, in the health and safety regulations, that organisations had to prevent harm to the psychological health of their employees. So it's not a new duty, but the fact that it wasn't happening, the fact that psychological health and safety wasn't being protected, has meant that it's been elevated in the regulation. The regulations essentially say this is what psychosocial hazards are., you have to identify those hazards and the risks that could come from them, and you have to manage them in exactly the same way as you would manage any other risk. And if you're looking for help on how to do that, it points you back to the earlier parts of the reg and says, do what you do for everything else. In most of the states there's also now a code of practice. So codes of practice are there to help you understand what to do in order to meet the regulation. There's also a new international standard in this area, and that's something that I was involved in developing. That standard is about how to structure your health and safety management system – which you should already have, which most large organisations already have – so that it takes account of psychosocial risks. They're all saying that psych risks are part of health and safety and should be managed using a risk management approach like all other hazards. So very firmly placing this within health and safety practice. Secondly, they're saying that hazards interact, and you've got to take account of how they interact, not just with each other but with all kinds of other hazards. And thirdly, that you've got to look at how work is designed when you're looking for these hazards and when you're figuring out what to do about them, you look at the design of work.  

Dr Juliet Bourke: So it sounds like this legislation is rebalancing whose responsibility work health and safety is, and employers really have to take into account that whole person in front of them.  

Carlo Caponecchia: Sure. But you've always had the whole person in front of you and you've had to take the person as you found them always. But absolutely, that's one of the major fears that organisations have, that this means that suddenly I'm responsible for people's mental health and the stuff that they bring with them to work. That's not the case. What these changes really mean is that you have a duty to control the things within your control, the things in your system of work – the way the work is organised, supervised, managed, where it's done, how it's done, for example. But this is not about managing people with mental ill health. It's not about managing mental ill health. It's about managing the things in your business that could create those outcomes in future.

Dr Juliet Bourke: All right, so I'm going to be challenging here. What about if you have an employee who says, ‘You know what? It's causing me psychosocial harm to do my two hour commute every day, and so I want to work at home full time’. What rights does the employer have to say ‘This is a conversation, not a demand’. 

Carlo Caponecchia: It's a tricky one. And absolutely you're right, it's a conversation. In that situation, you'd be looking at what happens with others in your business? What is a typical pattern of work? Are there justifiable reasons why you need that person to be there for X number of days in person, as opposed to working from home every day? So you'd be looking at the conditions of what was necessary in that work, and having that conversation about what was reasonable. And importantly, thinking about how that works if that person's working in a team – how that arrangement of flexible work or working from home might affect the workflow and tasks and supervision arrangements for that whole team that they slot into. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: But we've just done a worldwide experiment that showed that we could all work from home for extended periods of time and do teamwork. So, you know, what legs does the employer have to stand on then to say, ‘Actually, it would work better if you came into the office 1-2-3-5 days a week?  

Carlo Caponecchia: Well, I think it's about having that conversation about what's reasonable. I mean, most organisations are making arrangements of some pattern of flexible work, not necessarily five days a week. That seems to work and works not just for individuals, but for the teams that they're part of. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: What about role, clarity and control? I can only see upside when staff are clear about their role and the tasks they're supposed to be doing. How can employers give staff more individual control? 

Carlo Caponecchia: That can sometimes be a bit scary too, because it doesn't mean just giving employees all the control that they want. The old term we used to use for this one was decision latitude – so giving people a little bit of leeway to make some decisions about what they do and how they do it and when they do it. So, you know, ordering of tasks and how you work with different people, and how you might organise a workflow. I think that's one where there's pretty clear benefits, because in addition to getting the work done more efficiently, more effectively, you're also showing people that you trust them by giving them that control. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: What do you think is going to happen in the next 12 months as organisations lean into this new regulation? 

Carlo Caponecchia: A lot of medium and larger businesses are sort of at the midpoint of their journey, of their plans for what they're doing here. So many of them are already having completed an investigation of what risks they have, and then moving to ‘What do we do about it?’ So I think in the next 12 months it's really going to be about implementation of... hopefully redesigns, hopefully not strategies that just address individuals getting better at dealing with bad stuff. What we used to do. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: More yoga classes. That kind of idea? 

Carlo Caponecchia: I mean, as great as yoga classes are that's not where organisations should be spending their money. That's treating individuals and hoping that they deal with sources of harm. No, no, no, that's not what your duties are. Your duties to control the sources of harm in your business. Hopefully for many large organisations that will involve some of that participatory approaches, where they're actually going out and asking people how do we work on this together? Which gives people a sense of control, develops trust, as well as getting the best redesigns that you can get for your place, because remembering that it's all about being tailored to your organisation. You can't just pick this off the shelf – it's got to be real, it's got to be authentic. It's controlling risks inherent to your business. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: As Carlo just mentioned, offering band bid solutions like yoga classes won't solve psychosocial risks in your business. Instead, leaders should look at bigger picture changes. The UNSW Business School is doing just that in an effort to be the employer of choice in the education sector. The Head of School of Information Systems and Management, Professor Barney Tan, can walk you through what that looks like.  

Barney Tan: So superficial and tokenistic measures like yoga sessions and wellness programs often fail to actually address the root cause of the problem, because they don't tackle the underlying cause related to how work is structured and managed. So while these activities may provide temporary relief and improve morale for that moment, they do not actually change the systemic factors that contribute to stress. There are a number of systemic changes that we can actually undertake to ensure psychosocial safety, for example, streamlining workflows to eliminate unnecessary complexity. This could involve automating routine tasks with technology, with artificial intelligence. We try to automate approval flows, for instance, It's about delegating responsibilities more effectively and really allocating resources to ensure that teams, our colleagues, our staff, are adequately supported. So ultimately, it's all about employee wellbeing and satisfaction. So what we try to do with these systemic measures is really address the root cause of the problem. So what is causing the stress? What is causing the unhappiness? What is contributing to a sense of detachment, alienation within the workplace – we want to address those. And often organisations can also try to lead by example, by instituting and improving leadership practices that actually address psychosocial hazards. So leaders should be equipped, for instance, to provide clear communication, set realistic expectations and support their teams in managing workloads and resolving conflicts and a lot of large organisations, including UNSW, in today's world, we have a mandatory training for business leaders, for middle managers to senior managers to actually undertake leadership training so that we are better able to manage psychosocial hazards. In addition to systemic changes, I think organisations can also adopt other measures to promote psychosocial safety, which include regular psychosocial risk assessments, because this can help to identify potential hazards before they actually become significant issues. There could also be a thorough review of role definitions and requirements, ensuring that employees have clear and well-defined sets of responsibilities that can actually reduce role ambiguity and conflict. These have been found in research to be significant sources of stress, so we just want to make sure that, you know, when a colleague or an employee is put into a role they know what their scope of responsibilities are. Updating job descriptions as we move along, this can actually help to maintain clarity and give employees a certain sense of certainty in terms of what their work performance targets are. I think it's also important in strategy making or policy making to adopt a very participatory approach. So we invite employees to participate in the development of policies and procedures, especially those that affect their work. It's important to be open and consultative because this participatory approach can actually help to ensure that the changes are practical, feasible and sense checked almost with the people who will be affected by these policies. 

Dr Juliet Bourke: The Business Of podcast is brought to you by the University of New South Wales Business School, produced with Deadset Studios. To stay up to date with our latest podcasts as well as the latest insights and thought leadership from the Business School, subscribe to BusinessThink at www.businessthink.unsw.edu.au.