From Service to Safety: Addressing Psychosocial Hazards in the Workplace
Delivering exceptional guest experiences depends on the well-being of the people who make them happen. Yet behind the scenes, employees often face unique stressors and psychological risks that can affect their health, performance, and the quality of service.
Building a truly safe and supportive workplace means going beyond physical safety to proactively address mental and emotional well-being. One simple way to start is by including questions about psychosocial hazards in your regular inspections.
Why Inspect for Psychosocial Hazards?
Traditional safety inspections often focus on physical risks. However, psychosocial hazards — elements of the work environment that can impact mental well-being — are equally important. Psychosocial hazards can include things like excessive workload, low role clarity, lack of support, bullying, and exposure to traumatic events, just to name a few.
Proactively identifying and addressing psychosocial hazards comes with many benefits to worker safety and well-being, as well as your bottom line.
The Psychosocial Hazard Inspection Checklist
This Psychological Health and Safety Inspection Checklist template, aligned with WorkSafeBC’s Psychological Health and Safety Framework, provides a practical and structured approach to identifying potential hazards within your business. It’s designed to be integrated into your regular monthly inspections, adding a crucial layer of insight into the psychological well-being of your team.
Five Psychosocial Hazard Categories:
The checklist is divided into 5 key categories to help you assess different aspects of the work environment:
- Interpersonal Environment: Explore team dynamics, addressing issues like bullying, harassment, disrespectful behaviour, and communication challenges.
- Job Design: Examine workload and job demands, ensuring realistic deadlines, manageable workloads, and fair distribution of tasks, as well as encouraging workers to take breaks.
- Workplace Conditions: Evaluate communication practices and identify signs of disengagement, stress, or overwhelm among employees.
- Need for Employer Support: Assess the availability and awareness of mental health resources, EAPs, and psychological health and safety policies.
- Exposure to Traumatic Events: Ensure readily available mental health resources, clear understanding of First Aid procedures, and protocols for managing traumatic events in the workplace.
Tips for Success:
- Integration: Make asking questions about psychosocial hazard questions an integral part of your safety inspections, risk assessments and communication.
- Engage Workers: Involve workers in the inspection process to gather diverse perspectives and ensure accuracy.
- Take Action: Use the inspection findings to develop targeted corrective actions and policies that address identified hazards in a systematic and meaningful way.
- Communicate: Share the results of the inspection with your team and outline the corrective actions planned to improve psychological health and safety.
- Adapt and Customize: Remember that every workplace is unique. Add questions or modify the tool to reflect the specific hazards and risks present in your workplace.
Take your inspections to the next level! Download the Psychological Health and Safety Hazard Inspection Checklist and get started today!