South Australia’s 2023 amendments to its work health and safety (WHS) regulations changed how psychosocial hazards must be managed at work. The changes are measured and practical, and their impact is profound. What arrived through the 2023 amendments now shapes compliance from 2025 onward.
South Australia has made it clear that psychological health is part of workplace safety. It is not an HR issue or something you deal with only after someone gets hurt. It sits at the centre of WHS, shaped by how jobs are structured, how workloads are set, and how people are managed every day. For business leaders, safety professionals, supervisors and workers alike, this creates both an obligation and an opportunity.
The Legislative Foundations: What Changed and Why It Matters
Psychosocial safety has been part of South Australia’s WHS framework for a while already. The Work Health and Safety Act 2012 (SA) places a primary duty of care on people conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs) They must ensure health and safety so far as is reasonably practicable, including psychological health. What changed in 2023 was not the principle, but the clarity of what this means for them.
Through amendments to the Work Health and Safety Regulations 2012 (SA), South Australia introduced provisions that removed any doubt about whether psychosocial hazards must be treated like physical hazards. The same consultation and prevention duties apply.
The amendments did four things. First, they defined what a psychosocial hazard is, so there is no longer room to argue about whether something counts. Second, they placed psychosocial risks inside the same risk management process already used for physical hazards, so employers cannot treat them as a separate or lesser concern. Third, they set out what employers must think about when deciding how to address a risk, including how long workers are exposed, how severe the harm could be, and how hazards interact with each other. Fourth, they made worker consultation a legal step in the process, not a courtesy.
This was not about creating a new WHS system. It was about changing a situation where psychological harm could be treated as vague, personal, or unavoidable. In South Australia, that door is now firmly shut.
Psychosocial Hazards: Beyond the Individual
Under the regulations, a psychosocial hazard is anything in the workplace that can cause psychological harm. That includes how jobs are set up, how work is managed, the physical environment, the equipment people use, and how people treat each other at work.
This framing matters because it shifts attention away from individual weakness and toward how work is structured. High workloads, poor role clarity, constant time pressure, exposure to aggression, low job control, poor supervision and unresolved conflict are not personal failings. They are the result of choices made about how jobs are set up and run.
Psychosocial hazards tend to show up together and make each other worse. A heavy workload may be manageable in a supportive environment, but can become harmful when combined with little say over how you do your job, inconsistent leadership or customer hostility. South Australia’s regulations require employers to look at how hazards interact when working out what to do about them.
How South Australia Compares to Other States
Across Australia, regulators have been moving in the same direction as South Australia. Most states and territories now have some form of psychosocial risk regulation in place. Tasmania, the Northern Territory, New South Wales, Queensland and Comcare-regulated workplaces all operate within broadly similar frameworks, though timing and detail differ.
What sets South Australia apart is how it treats guidance materials. SafeWork SA has been clear that the Model Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work is not legally enforceable in SA. However, it remains highly influential as a guide to what “reasonably practicable” looks like in real workplaces.
For organisations operating across state borders, the practical takeaway is this: meeting South Australia’s expectations properly puts you close to best practice nationally, but the rules in each state still vary.
The Laws That Apply in South Australia
South Australia’s psychosocial WHS obligations come from the following laws:
- Work Health and Safety Act 2012 (SA)
- Work Health and Safety Regulations 2012 (SA), particularly Division 11, Psychosocial Risks (Regulations 55A to 55D)
- Work Health and Safety (Psychosocial Risks) Amendment Regulations 2023 (SA)
- SafeWork SA guidance on managing psychosocial hazards and risks
Everything else, including policies, training, surveys and frameworks, is there to put these laws into practice.
Responsibilities Across the Workplace: Who Must Do What
Psychosocial safety is a shared responsibility, but it is not an equal one. The law gives different duties to different roles.
PCBUs carry the primary duty of care. They must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that workers are not exposed to risks to their psychological health. This requires them to identify psychosocial hazards, work out how serious those hazards are, implement ways to control these hazards, and review those controls over time. Consulting with workers is a legal requirement at every stage of this process.
Officers, including directors, executives and senior managers, have a personal duty to take responsibility for getting this right. This means they must keep up with what the psychosocial risks in their workplace actually are, make sure the business has the people, time and budget to address them, and follow up to confirm that what has been put in place is working. Psychosocial safety must come up in board discussions, reporting and planning decisions.
Workers also have responsibilities. They must take reasonable care for their own health and safety and that of others, follow reasonable instructions, and cooperate with workplace policies and procedures. Workers are well placed to spot and report hazards because they do the work as it is actually done.
How to Manage Psychosocial Risks in Practice
SafeWork SA describes psychosocial risk management as a continuous cycle. It is laid out as four steps, but in practice it is best understood as an ongoing process that loops back on itself and starts over as work and workplaces change.
Step one: Identify hazards. This is where listening becomes a safety skill. Good organisations gather information from multiple places: conversations with workers, direct observations, surveys, focus groups, and records on absenteeism, turnover, incident reports and complaints. The goal is to understand what in the work creates strain, conflict, or harm.
Step two: Assess the risks. This involves looking at who is exposed to psychosocial hazards, how often, how severe the potential harm may be, and how different hazards affect each other. South Australia’s regulations require employers to consider how long workers are exposed, how bad the harm could get, and how the job is set up day to day. This step turns what people are experiencing into something that can be acted on.
Step three: Control the risks. The law requires risks to be eliminated so far as is reasonably practicable, or reduced where eliminating them is not possible. South Australian law requires employers to address the cause, not just the symptoms. That can mean changing how a job is set up, adjusting workloads, clarifying roles, improving supervision and setting clear expectations about how people treat each other. Programs that focus on how workers cope, such as resilience training or employee assistance programs, may have a role, but they cannot replace changes to the work itself.
Step four: Review. Psychosocial risks change as work changes. New systems, restructures, peak demand periods, staffing shortages, or incidents should all prompt a fresh look. Good organisations track both early warning signs, such as workload data and engagement results, and outcomes, such as claims or complaints, to check whether their controls are working.
What Minimum Compliance Looks Like in Practice
Meeting South Australia’s psychosocial WHS obligations does not require perfection, but it does require a genuine, documented effort. Senior leaders must be able to show that psychosocial risks are on their radar and that the business is actively doing something about them. There must be a clear record of how workers are consulted and how their input changes what the organisation does. Each hazard must then be assessed for how serious it is, how many workers are affected and how often they are exposed. The results must be written down, and the most serious risks must be addressed first.
The controls an organisation puts in place must address how jobs are set up and how people are managed, not just how workers cope. Supervisors must be trained to spot psychosocial hazards and act before things escalate. Workers must know what counts as unacceptable behaviour, who to speak to if something goes wrong, and that they can raise a concern without being penalised for it. The organisation must also have a scheduled process for checking whether the controls it has put in place are actually reducing harm, and must be ready to reassess after any significant change, such as a restructure, a spike in complaints, or a serious incident.
A Consultation-Led Case Study: When Safety Improves Work
Consider a South Australian service organisation facing rising absenteeism, angry customers, and supervisor turnover during peak periods. Instead of responding with more policies or wellbeing posters, the organisation starts with consultation.
Workers and health and safety representatives are involved early. Surveys, focus groups and operational data are used to identify the psychosocial hazards: conflicting performance measures, not enough recovery time between calls, exposure to aggression, and unclear pathways to escalate customer concerns.
The organisation works through how these hazards interact and affect each other. Controls focus on staffing rules during surges, clearer authority to pause work, redesigned KPIs, mandatory breaks, and improved supervisor coaching. Progress is reviewed at 30, 60 and 90 days. The result is fewer incidents and less sick leave. Trust builds, performance improves, and workers and managers come to see safety as something they build together.
Beyond Compliance: Learning from Edmondson and Dekker
The law sets a minimum standard, but it also points toward better ways of working.
Amy Edmondson is an organisational psychologist at Harvard Business School whose research looks at how teams learn and perform. Her work on psychological safety shows that safe workplaces are not silent ones, they are places where people can ask questions, raise concerns and admit mistakes without fear. Psychological safety is not about lowering standards, it is about making it possible for people to learn before harm occurs.
Sidney Dekker is a safety scientist whose work challenges how organisations think about accidents and blame. He pushes organisations to move away from punishing the person who made a mistake and toward asking what in the system made that mistake possible. In practice, this means involving workers in investigating what went wrong, looking at how the job was set up rather than who was at fault, and paying attention to how work actually happens day to day rather than how it looks on paper.
A Final Word on Psychosocial Safety in South Australia
South Australia’s psychosocial laws are not radical. They are measured, practical and grounded in how people actually experience work. They reflect the straightforwardness of how work can harm mental health, but how it can also protect and strengthen it. Beyond 2025, the organisations that do well will be those willing to treat psychosocial safety as an opportunity to build work that lets people do their best.
References
Legislation
Regulator Guidance
- SafeWork SA. Four steps to managing psychosocial hazards and risks.
- SafeWork SA. Helping workplaces manage psychosocial risks (news and guidance materials).
National Guidance
- Safe Work Australia. Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work.
Thought Leadership
- Edmondson, A. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.
- Dekker, S. (2016). Just Culture: Restoring Trust and Accountability in Your Organization.
- Dekker, S. (2014). Safety Differently: Human Factors for a New Era.
