Psychosocial safety, and what a small business actually has to do

What changed

The Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 commenced on 1 December 2025, with no transitional provisions. They applied in full from day one, and they apply whether you have three staff or three hundred.

In practice the duty is a sequence. Identify the psychosocial hazards in your workplace. Eliminate the risk from each one so far as is reasonably practicable. Where you cannot eliminate it, reduce it by altering the management of work, the plant, the systems of work, the work design, or the workplace environment. Then review your controls, and review them again when something changes.

The eleven hazards WorkSafe names

Most small businesses find three or four of these live in their business, and are surprised by at least one.

• Low job control. People have little say over how or when they do their work.
• High or low job demands. Chronically too much to do, or too little that is meaningful.
• Poor support. Practical or emotional support from supervisors or colleagues is missing.
• Poor organisational change management. Change lands on people without consultation or explanation.
• Poor organisational justice. Decisions feel inconsistent, unfair, or applied differently to different people.
• Low recognition and reward. Effort routinely goes unnoticed relative to what it costs people.
• Low role clarity. People are unsure what they are responsible for, or get conflicting direction.
• Poor workplace relationships. Unresolved conflict, exclusion, bullying, or harassment.
• Poor environmental conditions. The physical environment itself is a source of psychological strain.
• Remote or isolated work. People work alone or away from support, including from home.
• Violent or traumatic events. Exposure to aggression, violence, or distressing material.

The mistake worth avoiding

The common assumption is that running a training session discharges the duty. It does not. Under the Regulations, information, instruction or training can only be your sole control where other controls are not reasonably practicable.

The duty asks you to change the work first. If the honest answer to "what did we change?" is "we ran a workshop", that is worth a second look.

Why this is usually an operations problem

Read that hazard list again with a business owner's eye rather than a safety officer's. High job demands are what happens when a process that should take twenty minutes takes two hours because three systems do not talk to each other. Low role clarity is what happens when nothing is written down and the answer lives in one person's head. Poor support and unresolved conflict are what happen when a manager was promoted for being good at the work and never trained to lead people.

None of those are fixed by a policy document. They are fixed by changing the work and by training the people running it. That is the same job NUDG does under its two pillars, which is why psychosocial safety sits inside the practice rather than beside it.

Where small businesses get caught out

The founder is the hazard, and nobody can say so. Low job control and poor organisational justice very often trace back to the owner. There is rarely a safe way for staff to raise that, which is exactly what makes it a hazard rather than a personality trait.

The promoted manager. Someone excellent at the work is put in charge of people, given no training, and becomes the single biggest determinant of whether their team experiences poor support, low role clarity, or unresolved conflict. This is the most common gap.

"We are like a family here." Warm cultures can be genuinely protective. They can also make it very hard to raise a problem, because raising it feels like disloyalty. Both are true at once.

What NUDG does about it

• Walk the eleven hazards with you and work out which are actually live, by talking to the people doing the work rather than filling in a form.
• Fix the work that creates them. Process redesign, automation of the manual load, documented procedures so knowledge stops living in one head.
• Train your managers to recognise a hazard in their team and know what to do when someone raises a concern.
• Leave you with something written down, so what you did and when you did it is on the record.

Common questions

Do the psychosocial regulations apply to small businesses in Victoria?

Yes. The Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 commenced on 1 December 2025 with no transitional provisions, and there is no small-business exemption. If you employ people in Victoria they apply to you, whether you have three staff or three hundred.

Is a written prevention plan mandatory in Victoria?

No. A mandatory written prevention plan appeared in the exposure draft of the Regulations but did not make it into the final version, and plenty of published articles still say otherwise. WorkSafe Victoria publishes a voluntary template. Documenting what you found and when you acted is still worth doing, because if a claim or an inspector arrives the question becomes what you actually did.

Is running a training session enough to meet the duty?

Usually not. Under the Regulations, information, instruction or training can only be your sole control measure where other controls are not reasonably practicable. The duty asks you to change the work first: how it is managed, how it is designed, the systems around it, and the environment it happens in. Training supports those changes rather than replacing them.

What does "so far as is reasonably practicable" mean for a small business?

It weighs the likelihood of harm, how serious that harm would be, what you knew or ought to have known, what controls are available, and the cost of those controls. Being small does not lower the standard, it changes what is available to you. A three-person practice is not expected to run an employee assistance program, but it is expected to notice that one person is carrying every difficult client and do something about it.

Does NUDG provide legal advice on compliance?

No. NUDG is not a law firm. I help fix the work that creates psychosocial hazards and train the managers closest to them, which is an operations and management problem rather than a legal one. For a definitive view on whether you are compliant, speak to WorkSafe Victoria, a workplace relations lawyer, or a qualified OHS adviser.

Related reading

• Victoria's psychosocial safety regulations: what small businesses need to do
• Your best technical person just became a manager
• People Leadership and Team Development