October is National Safe Work Month. This year’s theme is ‘Safe work is for life’. The old way of “managing that risk” such as a brief toolbox talk and a poster in the lunchroom unfortunately will not be adequate to discharge your duties around the prevention and management of psychosocial hazards.

While those items are a great first step, we need to ensure that it is also on your meeting agendas (organisation wide) this month.

The regulators are no longer just talking about it, they are taking action.

In NSW, specialist psychosocial inspectors are out visiting workplaces right now, in fact they have hired 20 additional inspectors. In Victoria, new psychological health regulations have applied since 1 December 2025. It might be the time for you, as an employer, to ensure in the event of a regulatory review, that you would be covered in this space.

What has changed

On 22 September 2026, the NSW Government launched a Psychosocial Advisory Service, where workers and employers can speak with trained advisors about bullying, harassment, work-related stress and mental harm. It comes with a $127.7 million investment in SafeWork NSW, and that funding includes 20 additional specialist psychosocial inspectors.

It would appear that the impetus for such an investment lies in the real data. Psychosocial issues made up 20.5% of all requests for service to SafeWork NSW in 2025/26. That’s 3,145 requests and roughly double the 10% share in 2021/22.

The statistics demonstrate a worrying trend. In May and June this year, inspectors visited more than 200 workplaces and issued more than 80 improvement notices about psychosocial hazards and risk management. Then, on 9 October SafeWork NSW started a six-week compliance operation, a significant investment and stance on psychosocial harm. It covers all industries, and inspectors will go back to businesses that have received improvement notices to review their compliance status. Non-compliance means more than hefty penalties in this space with key officers of the corporation (and the employing entity) being exposed to liability.

If you run a business in NSW, that operation is underway now.

There’s a legal change in NSW that matters too. Since 1 July 2026, the WHS Act has required businesses to comply with relevant codes of practice, or to manage the risk appropriately. One of those codes is Managing psychosocial hazards at work.

In Victoria, the Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 commenced on 1 December 2025. Employers now have a specific duty to identify psychosocial hazards and to eliminate or control the risks so far as reasonably practicable. WorkSafe Victoria has published a Compliance Code showing how to meet the duties, and when the regulations began it was stated that inspectors would take an employer’s experience with psychosocial risk management into account. Now that we are 10 months in, we can assume that their expectation is that most employers should now be across psychosocial risk management.

What inspectors will expect to see in the event you are subject to a review

Whilst useful, as mentioned earlier, an EAP number on the noticeboard will not make an employer compliant. Neither will a wellbeing week. SafeWork NSW Commissioner Janet Schorer said in a media release on 9 October 2026 that inspectors will be looking for evidence that psychosocial risks are being actively managed, including risks that come from the way work is designed and managed. In Victoria, WorkSafe’s 2026–27 Statement of Regulatory Intent lists consultation and psychological health as focus areas for every workplace.

The WH&S inspector will most likely begin by asking you to produce your risk assessment. They want evidence that you’ve looked at your own workplace. Think about a customer contact centre, where the obvious hazards are abusive callers and call targets that leave no breathing space between calls. An aged care provider will have different risks again, probably including regular exposure to distressing events. Whatever your business, the assessment should name the hazards that actually apply and indicate how serious each one is.

The next question posed is what you’ve done about the identified risks. The law expects you to eliminate a risk where that’s reasonably practicable, and to minimise it where it isn’t. Usually that means changing the work itself. If a team is struggling to meet deadlines because two roles were not backfilled after people left, the fix is staffing. A resilience workshop, whilst useful from a development perspective, will not discharge the employer’s duties in this space.

Consultation is easy to overlook. Workers and health and safety representatives should help identify hazards and choose controls. Inspectors may talk to your staff directly, so your paperwork has to line up with what your people would tell them, and they need to have been adequately trained in this space. As a rule of thumb, the bigger your business is in size, turnover and so on, the more significant the efforts need to be to reach the level of compliance appropriate to your business.

Test your readiness and compliance levels

There are many ways that you can test your readiness and find out where you stand without waiting for a regulatory visit, Fair Work claim, or disgruntled employees. Expert assistance will greatly increase your chances of being prepared and compliant at the time that your company is affected by a psychosocial hazard. Having someone independent assist you or perform a review greatly reduces items being missed or not given enough attention. Many companies are now being reviewed as a result of anonymous complaints to the regulator from aggrieved employees. It is important that you do not rely on generic templates or a lay person’s interpretation of the rules in such a complex and potentially costly area of workplace regulation and law.

Your own data can provide valuable insight. Looking into complaints, exit interviews, sick leave, overtime and workers compensation claims is an excellent starting point. Say your warehouse night shift accounts for most of your bullying complaints and a large portion of your turnover. Your risk assessment should document that and assist you to stipulate what you’re doing about it.

Your risk assessment should work through each control or mitigation, and ask who owns its compliance. Support these highlights by demonstrating the control and its nexus to preventing and managing a psychosocial risk. A great example of this for an employer is organising training and implementing an EAP, all great steps for preventing some of the psychosocial hazards, but on their own they would rarely fix a workload problem.

Be honest and overt about consultation. Can you demonstrate when you spoke to workers and health and safety representatives or leaders, and what changed because of it?

If you have sent out a survey to your workers, have you followed up from it? Have you actioned anything?

This is where an independent review is very helpful. Our consultants will review your documents and prepare your managers and staff, the way an inspector would. Then we report and explain where the gaps are and your priorities for remediation from a risk perspective.

Where to from here?

Psychosocial risk used to sit quietly in the HR folder. Now inspectors are checking on it, and directors, managers and employees are expected to know how it’s being managed.

We can assist wherever you’re starting from. That might be a full review of your current approach, or building a risk assessment that reflects the scope of your business activities.

If you are in the middle of a process, or being audited or inspected, we can also greatly add value and partner you through the journey.

How MMA Assists

If you are concerned that your organisation may not be compliant, especially considering the changes in laws and regulations and the increase in enforcement, then please reach out and seek help from MMA to guide you through the process and futureproof your organisation for compliance.

Our team are not only highly qualified, but we have extensive experience in dealing with these types of matters.

Even if you feel you may have some areas of exposure, having MMA on foot fixing any potential issues is, in and of itself, a valued protection.

Sources

• SafeWork NSW: Psychosocial Advisory Service launch (22 September 2026)
• SafeWork NSW: Largest-ever psychosocial compliance operation (9 October 2026)
• HRD: Victorian employment law reforms (28 September 2026)
• WorkSafe Victoria: New regulations make psychological health a priority (1 December 2025)
• WorkSafe Victoria: Statement of Regulatory Intent 2026–27
• Safe Work Australia: National Safe Work Month
• DLA Piper: Victoria’s final regulations (prevention plans and reporting removed)