Difficult conversations are critical for psychosocial risk management

With the introduction of the new WHS regulations around psychosocial risk management, many if not most organisations are grappling with how to ensure they are fulfilling their positive duty, not just around bullying, discrimination, and harassment, but now also work design factors, job demands, job control, change management, and ensuring people feel supported by their leaders and their teams. Getting out in front of the curve on these myriad factors can easily feel overwhelming.

Building an effective psychosocial risk management system provides an essential formal framework for identifying, assessing, and mitigating psychosocial risk. Regular risk assessment surveys, reporting frameworks, and risk workshops or other means of implementing controls where risks are identified are essential. Yet, while these formalised approaches provide an important safety net, enabling the capacity to identify, address, and respond to psychosocial hazards and risks within a business-as-usual environment is essential to remaining proactive.

To remain agile and responsive to psychosocial risk, organisations need to equip people to have candid, direct, sometimes uncomfortable and often difficult conversations around workplace factors that may be creating psychosocial risk. This means leaders need to have direct conversations with their staff around job demands, whether they have a sense of mastery and agency in their work, whether the team culture is supportive and psychologically safe, and about their own leadership practices and whether they are providing sufficient support. They also need to know how to have those critical conversations around workplace behaviour and team dynamics to nip interpersonal issues in the bud, or perhaps how to encourage their team members to have these open and honest conversations with each other.

Effective communication is also about listening and being able to create a psychologically safe space for team members to raise issues and concerns. While this may be related to team dynamics, workload, or work design factors, it also needs to be about how they are supported by their leaders and whether there may be things leaders are doing which make it harder for them at work. If leaders really want to know if they are creating sufficient psychological safety for difficult conversations to take place, they should ask themselves, ‘could a person on my team come into my office and raise a concern about my own leadership style, and how it is impacting on them or the team’. This may be a bit of a north star – it is perhaps one of the more difficult conversations you might step into in a workplace – but if leaders are not able to hear this type of feedback, how can they expect to be aware of the psychosocial risks that exist within their teams.

Leaders also need to know how to have those risky, challenging, and difficult conversations with senior management when it comes to systems, aspects of work design that our outside of their control, or work demands. When leaders see their teams cracking and creaking under pressure, or impacted by poorly designed job roles, they need to have the confidence and capabilities to elevate their concerns through the organisational hierarchy, to push back on unrealistic targets, and to know how to employ the language of risk to ensure their message is heard. Formal reporting systems, annual surveys, and other forms of organisational data can provide for this, but they can easily become lag indicators if proactive and business-as-usual conversations are not also making issues salient in real time.

Of course, leaders also need to know how to step in and ask direct questions when they can see their staff have been impacted, are not their usual selves, and may need additional support. Having a framework for managing these conversations is essential as many leaders don’t feel they have the tools to open up conversations around mental health or understand what are the appropriate boundaries they can put in place when issues are identified.

Difficult conversations are the cornerstone of proactive, agile, and effective psychosocial risk management, and without building the confidence and capability for having these difficult conversations into leadership capabilities and team culture, organisations will not only struggle to manage risk, but will also fail to take advantage of the many retention, performance, and reputational benefits that come with a workplace where people feel they can communicate effectively at all levels. Put crudely, doing this well comes with considerable cost savings, even before considering the regulatory implications.

It is fair to say that the most important conversations, that ones that contain critical and actionable information, the ones which identify where things need to change, and the ones that we grow and develop from, are by their very nature never comfortable. Comfortable conversations are good – they provide positive reinforcement for people, let people know where they are doing well, and serve as a mechanism for recognition and reward. However, when feedback is focused on the need for change, highlights problems that need to be fixed, or identifies that things are not going as well as we had hoped they would be, they tend to elicit a raft of uncomfortable emotions, and without these emotions we would not be compelled to act or to find solutions.

Discomfort is not the enemy, it is a signal for change, and we need to know how to step into candid, difficult, and uncomfortable conversations safely without people worrying that their self-image, status, or career are on the line.

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