When Victoria’s psychosocial safety regulations took effect in December 2025, most small-business owners I spoke with had no idea the rules existed. That’s understandable. There was no media storm. WorkSafe didn’t call every practice owner. The changes landed quietly.
They’ve been quietly changing the rules of your business ever since.
What actually changed
Under the Occupational Health and Safety Amendment (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025, psychosocial hazards are now treated the same way as physical ones. You have a legal duty to identify them, assess them, and eliminate or reduce them so far as is reasonably practicable.
A psychosocial hazard is anything in the way work is designed or managed that can harm a person’s mental health. Think: job demands that never let up, role ambiguity, poor support from a manager, exposure to conflict, inappropriate behaviour that goes unaddressed.
The regulations don’t require you to run a Fortune 500 wellbeing programme. They require that your work isn’t quietly grinding people down. The standard is what a reasonable person in your position would do, not what would be ideal.
Why this matters for a 10-person firm
Small businesses often assume these rules are aimed at large organisations. They aren’t.
A principal running a five-broker practice has the same duty as a hospital executive. The scale of the obligation is calibrated to the scale of the business, but the obligation itself doesn’t move. And in a small team, psychosocial harm often shows up faster and louder than in a big one, because there’s nowhere to hide.
The biggest gap I see in small practices is that the founder has never been trained as a manager. They got promoted because they were excellent at the work. Nobody taught them how to run a 1:1, how to give feedback that lands, or how to notice when someone’s quietly drowning. That’s not a personal failing. It’s a training gap. (I’ve written about the version of this that bites hardest, promoting your best technical person into management, separately.)
Five things a manager does differently from Monday
None of these requires new tools. They require attention.
1. A real 1:1 every fortnight. Not a status update. Thirty minutes, structured, where you ask what’s in the way and you listen. If the only time you talk to your team member is when something’s wrong, you’re not managing. You’re reacting.
2. Notice workload, don’t wait to be told. The people most at risk are often the ones who never complain. They’re also usually your best performers. If someone’s working at the weekend, check in. Don’t thank them.
3. Shut down inappropriate behaviour the first time. Not after the fourth complaint. Not when HR gets involved. The first time. Tolerating it once signals it’s acceptable. That signal is hard to unsend.
4. Clarify who decides what. Role ambiguity is one of the most common psychosocial hazards. If your team isn’t sure whether a decision is theirs to make, they’re carrying anxiety you can eliminate with a ten-minute conversation.
5. Write down the basics. Leave policy, escalation path, how to raise a concern. Not because regulators will ask (they will, but that’s not the point). Because your team shouldn’t have to guess.
Where a WorkCover claim actually starts
It almost never starts with a crisis. It starts with friction that nobody addressed.
The pattern I see: someone raises a concern, the manager handles it badly or ignores it, the person goes quiet, performance slips, they get a hard conversation instead of a supportive one, and eventually they see a GP. By the time a claim is lodged, there is usually a trail of small moments where someone with authority could have intervened and didn’t.
That trail is now evidence.
What “reasonably practicable” looks like
The regulations use the phrase “so far as is reasonably practicable”, meaning what a competent person in your position would do, considering cost, time, and the severity of the hazard. The full text is published by WorkSafe Victoria at worksafe.vic.gov.au and the regulation itself is on the Victorian Legislation register.
For a ten-person firm, that looks like:
- Managers who can run a structured 1:1 and know how to respond if something comes up
- A simple, written process for raising concerns that isn’t “talk to the founder”
- Clear escalation when behaviour is out of line
- Workload visibility, so you know who’s stretched before they break
It does not look like a six-figure consulting engagement or a 50-page policy document.
Where to start
If you’ve never trained your managers on any of this, that’s the gap to close first. Policies matter, but a policy doesn’t sit across from someone and ask how they’re going. A manager does.
I spent 14 years at CSIRO, the last four leading its automation team through significant organisational change, with 100% retention across that period. The work was much less about frameworks and much more about what I’ve described above: attention, honest conversations, and catching small things early.
If that’s where your practice is, managers promoted into the role without a map, let’s talk about your team.