Psychosocial risk assessment for local government

Summary/overview

Given the changes in work health and safety legislation and a new focus on safety across the City, this local council wanted to take a proactive approach to understanding the pattern of psychosocial risk across their organisation and how they could better support the mental health and wellbeing of their workforce. We conducted a thorough risk assessment process for them and provided tailored recommendations for both the organisation as a whole, and for each unique business unit.

Situation & Challenges

This local council was going through a period of rapid growth, both in residents and workforce, with a lot of associated changes. They had also recently launched a new health and wellbeing plan, with a focus on identifying and managing psychosocial hazards. To assist them in implementing this part of the plan and to ensure a thorough and confidential approach, they sought the assistance of organisational psychology subject matter expertise.

We had several early meetings with key stakeholders to understand the City’s current approach to identifying and managing psychosocial risk, to better appreciate their key concerns and challenges, and to determine the most appropriate approach to conducting the risk assessment.

Given the incredibly diverse nature of the roles that make up local government (from rangers, to librarians, to planning and building approvals, to communications and community engagement) and the associated unique challenges that each employee faces as part of their jobs, it was important to ensure that each role level and business unit was represented in the assessment process, and that every employee felt that they had a chance to have their voice heard.

We also wanted to make sure that we balanced taking a tailored approach with assisting the City to meet its legislative requirements for a psychosocial risk assessment.

Our Solution

Once the project scope had been agreed upon, our approach began by running a briefing session in person with the executive leadership team as part of one of their regular monthly sessions. In this briefing, we introduced ourselves, provided some background to psychosocial risk and why it is important to assess and manage psychosocial risks (from a business, legal, and ethical perspective). We also provided them with an overview of the project and proposed timelines, and outlined their role as a leader throughout the process and as well after the psychosocial risk assessment.

The following week, we ran a one-hour online educational webinar with the broader leadership team to accommodate leaders across a variety of locations. In this webinar, we provided a more detailed overview of psychosocial safety, the respective roles of both employees and leaders when it comes to psychosocial risk management, common psychosocial hazards and how to identify them, an overview of the project and different data collection approaches we would be using to assess hazards across their organisation, and how they could support the process moving forward. We communicated with leaders early about the purpose and intent of the project to ensure they had a sense of ownership of the result.

We then began the assessment process, which utilised four data collection methodologies:

1. A desktop audit of relevant policies, processes, systems, and data
2. A survey that was open to all employees to complete
3. Interviews with leaders from across all business units (from manager to C-suite level)
4. Focus groups with staff representing all business units and work areas

The desktop audit was conducted to evaluate the different systems and processes for managing psychosocial risk assessment and management. It aimed to identify any gaps as well as analyse trends from EAP and incident data that could reveal additional insights or indicate areas to further investigate.

We supported the City to configure and roll out a companywide survey using the People at Work tool, to measure the level of psychosocial risks. The People at Work tool is well-validated and established measure designed to help workplaces identify, assess and manage risks related to the psychological health of workers, as well as providing industry benchmarks for comparisons.

Interviews and focus groups with employees were held alongside the survey. For both the interviews and focus groups, we asked participants to identify the psychosocial hazards they felt were most relevant to themselves and their team, focusing on what these looked like in their context, the impact of these, how they interacted with other hazards and the frequency, duration, and severity of exposure. We also captured ideas from employees about the improvements they would like to see to help reduce or manage risk exposure.

All results were synthesised into a comprehensive report for the organisation. The report provided a heat-map of the different psychosocial risks and associated risk level, a detailed overview of findings from each assessment method, a breakdown by business unit to outline unique patterns in risks and strengths, and recommendations for managing and mitigating psychosocial risk across the City (both overall and for each specific business unit). The key results were visualised into a two page infographic designed to be used to communicate to all staff the overview of the findings and indicative next steps.

We shared the assessment results first with the project sponsors and then presented them to the executive leadership team.

Result

As a result, the City received a comprehensive report based on the collected data and tailored recommendations. Executives were thoroughly debriefed on the findings, leading to the development of action plans and targeted interventions at both the organisational and business unit levels. Each department was provided with tangible, practical actions linked to identified hazards, ensuring that recommendations were directly applicable and actionable. The final report also highlighted existing protective factors, such as co-worker support, that were already mitigating psychosocial risks. Additionally, employees contributed bespoke recommendations, which were incorporated into the report, and a small infographic was created to visually summarise key findings and recommendations which was shared with all staff.

The report included detailed action plans and a prioritised list of recommendations to help the City focus on the most critical areas first. It also provided the ability to compare scores in the future, allowing the City to track progress over time. The City gained awareness of protective factors to strengthen within the organisation and identified high priority areas that required immediate attention and change. People Solutions will be further working with the City to create department specific actions and a clear roadmap for addressing psychosocial risks and enhancing overall organisational well-being.