Mining companies across Australia are being urged to accelerate their approach to psychosocial risk management after the federal government confirmed it will retire the country’s most widely used workplace psychosocial assessment platform, just months after strengthened workplace health and safety obligations took effect.
Since 1 July, Australian organisations, including those operating in mining, have been expected to demonstrate how they identify, assess, control and review psychosocial hazards under strengthened workplace health and safety requirements.
The People at Work survey, the free, government-backed assessment platform used by around 5,000 organisations and more than 160,000 workers since 2020, will permanently close on 2 October.
Developed jointly by Safe Work Australia and state and territory regulators, the platform played an important role in bringing psychosocial risk into the mainstream of Australian workplaces, including high-risk industries such as mining, where fly-in fly-out rosters, remote site work and high-pressure operational conditions have long been recognised as sources of psychological strain.
Its retirement leaves mining operators facing a higher legal bar while losing one of the most widely used tools for understanding those hazards.
One of Australia’s leading researchers in organisational culture and psychosocial risk, Dr Anna Kiaos, said many organisations, mining companies among them, are still working through what the strengthened framework means in practice.
Dr Kiaos said the conversations she is having with boards and executives have changed noticeably since the changes came into effect.
Regulators have made clear that psychosocial risk management is no longer a point-in-time survey exercise. Mining operators, like organisations in other sectors, are expected to identify, assess, control and review psychosocial hazards on an ongoing basis, while maintaining evidence of the actions they have taken.
Affiliated with the University of New South Wales’ Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health, Dr Kiaos researches how organisational culture affects psychological health.
Her advice extends across nearly every sector, including government, financial services, health, professional services and hospitality, and is grounded in her own peer-reviewed field research into organisational culture and psychosocial risk.
That evidence base is increasingly relevant to mining, where regulators have signalled greater scrutiny of how operators manage fatigue, workload and site culture.
Her latest peer-reviewed study, published this year in the Journal of Organizational Ethnography, examined organisational culture inside Service NSW over eight months through 74 interviews across six organisational levels.
It found organisations can be genuinely well-intentioned yet still misread psychosocial hazards, responding to exhaustion, increasing errors and declining morale with engagement and culture initiatives rather than addressing excessive workload and working conditions, a dynamic mining leaders will find familiar given the sector’s long-standing fatigue and workload challenges.
It was this gap between measuring employee sentiment and understanding psychosocial risk that led Dr Kiaos to develop the Culture Pressure Map, an organisational diagnostic informed by her research.
Unlike traditional organisation-wide surveys, the diagnostic examines shared culture, subcultures and microcultures to identify where psychosocial pressure is accumulating, helping leaders, including those overseeing dispersed mine sites and shift-based crews, prioritise action and create documented evidence to support governance and regulatory compliance.
Dr Kiaos said the retirement of the People at Work survey marks the end of one chapter in how organisations think about psychosocial risk, with the next chapter centred on demonstrating action.
“Organisations that can identify hazards, act on them and evidence those decisions will be in a much stronger position than those relying on a survey alone,” Dr Kiaos said.
For mining companies managing dispersed workforces and safety-critical operations, that shift from measurement to demonstrated action is likely to shape how psychosocial risk is governed at board level in the months ahead.
