Psychosocial risk management

Step three: How to control psychosocial risks

By implementing best practice risk controls, organisations can safeguard themselves against enforcement actions and proactively foster a safe, supportive and healthy workforce. Check out our risk control examples and interactive control effectiveness estimator to help you with this step.

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The four steps to managing psychosocial risk

Step one: Identify hazards

Understanding the risks that exist within your organisation is the first step towards managing them and creating a safer environment for your workers. This step often involves reviewing existing data and seeking new information, by talking and listening to your employees. Take me to this step.

Step two: Risk assessment

Next, you will consider the severity and likelihood of harm from exposure to the hazards you have identified in step one. This will help you assess the risk. Often this is achieved via a risk matrix. Take me to this step.

Step three: Control risks

In this step, you will either eliminate the risk, or put every possible measure in place to minimise the risk. This can be done through a mix of planning and preventive controls, which all should be measurable.

Step four: Review control measures

It's important to maintain, monitor and review control measures periodically. This step ensures your efforts in psychosocial risk management remain effective, and allows employees to provide feedback. Take me to this step.

Implementing proactive risk controls

With recent changes in legislation, it is no longer acceptable to be simply reacting to workplace incidents and identified hazards. 

Wherever possible, you should eliminate the risk. If this is not possible, focus on implementing proactive control measures that'll help you get ahead of psychosocial risks.

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Tailoring risk controls to your industry

While you'll find some handy examples below, tailoring your risk control strategies to your specific industry, and needs of employees, will give you the best chance to improve control effectiveness - and demonstrate the businesses commitment to employee wellbeing.

Try out our free tool below to help you estimate how effective your control measures might be.

"It is very important that an organisation understands the effectiveness of their controls because, from a legal point of view, it is part of demonstrating satisfaction of their duties and it is required by regulators."

Katherine Morris

Katherine Morris

Health and Safety Specialist and Partner at Norton Rose Fulbright

Try our risk management tools and templates

Fast-track your psychosocial risk management process with our free-to-use resources.

Tool

Control effectiveness estimator

If you want to estimate the effectiveness of your controls, try out our interactive tool. It's designed to help you with this all-important step of the psychosocial risk management process.

Template

Risk control examples

These hypothetical examples show which kind of risk controls might be put in place to manage five common psychosocial hazards.

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