Across the legal profession, psychosocial hazards arise for many reasons, whether it be associated with the nature of the work, the quantity of the work or the workplace environment. 

The panellists included Nicole Vernon, manager of safety, health and wellbeing at Legal Aid; Emma West, psychologist and mediation coordinator at Altius Group; and Michael Barnes, partner at Carroll & O’Dea Lawyers. 

They unpacked why it is important for workplaces to consider the unique risks emerging from each workplace, practice area and role. They also outlined steps that can be taken to imbed meaningful measures that protect against psychosocial risk. 

“You can’t just wait for someone to demonstrate something that might alert you to the fact they are psychologically vulnerable,” said Mr Barnes, “employers have a legal duty to deal with risk”.

“Under sections 17 and 19 of the PCBU, there’s a positive primary duty to eliminate all risk, or as much as possible, as far as is reasonably practical,” he said. 

Mr Barnes noted the recent court cases that see this duty being enforced and highlighted the growing need for workplaces to ensure employees are protected from psychosocial risk. 

Psychosocial risk is a broad term referring to anything in a workplace that can cause psychological harm, said Ms West.

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Due to a range of potential harms, it is important that employers consider individual work contexts when developing measures to protect against risk, she said.

“What we do has to be evidence-informed. You need to talk to the people that are doing the work to determine what they see as the risks so that you can target your intervention to match those risks,” said Ms West.

“You must look at multiple psychosocial risks, risks across the board, and discover what the risks actually are instead of making assumptions,” added Ms Vernon.

She noted that a tailored, whole-of-organisation approach is necessary for addressing risk in each organisation. 

She outlined the processes undertaken at Legal Aid to develop its risk mitigation measures.

Firstly, it established psychosocial risks workshops, focusing on individual practice areas, and spoke to people throughout the practice area working in various positions across the board to understand their perspectives on the psychosocial risks present. 

It created key project pieces to address the risk, such as internal and external support services, education programs for staff, and training with the executive on identified areas of risk, and risk management strategies. 

It began implementing measures to track the file loads of individuals, along with determining risk ratings for files, to monitor the demands placed on employees. 

It placed emphasis on having conversations about risk in supervision sessions.

“Training and education aren’t a set and forget piece,” said Ms Vernon, “you need to come back to it, have it consolidated, revisited and implemented into the organisation”.

Other measures were outlined by Ms West, including fostering mental health literacy so teams know what to look for to spot when someone isn’t doing well and are aware of how to support them.

She also noted the importance of cultivating cultural norms that make it an accepted and encouraged practice to check in on people. 

Ms West spoke about how leaders play an essential role in ensuring risk programs and new cultural norms are adopted within the organisation. 

“We need a top-down buy-in of leaders managing those psychosocial risks,” she said. “Behaviours of leaders that don’t buy into the program can unintentionally derail the program — getting that buy-in is critical.”

Measuring the effectivity of the program is another essential step, noted Ms West; this can include cultural surveys and team surveys on the effectivity of the programs. 

Organisations can also monitor for positive or negative changes, in areas like productivity, retention, absenteeism, and presenteeism (turning up and not being effective at work).

Ms West and Ms Vernon noted that it could be particularly challenging to implement risk management in the legal industry since those in the profession are often time-poor. 

Because of this, messaging may not always get across, noted Ms West, “so it’s a continual repetition of the message”.

“Risk management is a collective responsibility,” added Mr Barnes. “It’s not the CEO and board who are wholly responsible; there are responsibilities all the way down.”