Siobhan Kennedy

Psychosocial hazards describe any aspect of the work environment, working conditions or work design that could potentially harm the psychological health and well-being of workers. The management of psychosocial hazards is compounded by the intangible and interactional nature of these factors, which presents challenges in terms of diagnosis and subsequent (re-)design of the work environment to eliminate, mitigate or buffer these risks at source.  As per The Health and Safety at Work Act 2005, ensuring both the physical and the psychosocial safety of workers is the responsibility of employers.

Safe-guarding employee health and well-being is linked to higher levels of job satisfaction, work engagement, job performance and worker retention, which positively impacts organisational performance. Many employers manage psychosocial risks by providing supports which help workers to cope with the work environment, such as Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP’s) and self-development education.  Although valuable, these are analogous to personal protective equipment (PPE) in traditional health and safety approaches, providing a re-active and individualistic approach to health and well-being by placing the focus on the worker rather than the work environment.The release of the ISO45003 standard in 2019 provides guidance on assessing workplace psychosocial risks. This important development signals that psychosocial well-being is a critical Occupational Health and Safety concern as well as a HR and Management concern, which needs to be understood from an inter-disciplinary risk perspective.

This research will adopt this systems approach to develop and validate a multi-level framework to map how organisational practices, policies and methods contribute to psychosocial strain in the workplace. This framework will provide an evidence-based route map for organizations to diagnose sources of psycho-social risks and provide guidance on where to intervene to reduce such risks.