Employers and employees want mentally healthy workplaces; but they don’t necessarily know what steps they can take to create a psychologically safe work environment. Nationally and internationally the nature of modern work has shifted away from physical and routine based tasks towards more psychologically demanding and complex roles.

Since 2006 non-routine and cognitive demands became the greatest percentage of skill required by Australian workers (Healy, Nicholson, Gahan, 2017). As the shift towards more cognitively and emotionally demanding work continues to rise, so does the risk to worker mental health.

This presentation will draw upon the research and applied practice experiences of Dr Tessa Bailey utilising the results from an intervention-based article published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Dollard & Bailey, 2021) where participants successfully reduced risk to worker psychological health.

Although awareness of the impact of work-related psychosocial factors is growing, and employer initiatives to create mentally healthy workplaces are increasing, symptoms for mental ill-health continue to rise across the Australian working population (BDI, 2021). However, we can learn from these experiences to better understand how to integrate evidence-based best practice for psychosocial risk management into existing systems for worker health and safety.

- Understanding the benefits of implementing systems for psychosocial hazard management

- Understanding how to implement best practice psychosocial risk management principles in an applied practice setting

- Utilising psychosocial risk assessment to identify priority targets in an organisation

- Developing evidence based psychosocial risk interventions to prevent and manage psychosocial risks and work-related stress

- Exploring best practice strategies for evaluating your psychosocial hazard management strategies

- Managing psychosocial stressors and risks holistically during a global pandemic

Dollard, Maureen F.