Australian construction and building companies are being urged to reassess how they manage psychosocial risk after the federal government confirmed the retirement of the country’s most widely used workplace psychosocial assessment platform, just months after strengthened workplace health and safety obligations came into force.
Since 1 July, organisations across all sectors, including building and construction, have been required to demonstrate how they identify, assess, control and review psychosocial hazards such as excessive workload, poor job design and workplace bullying.
The People at Work survey, a free, government-backed assessment tool used by around 5,000 organisations and more than 160,000 workers since 2020, will permanently close on 2 October.
For the building sector, where long hours, tight project deadlines and high-pressure site environments are common, the loss of the platform comes at a difficult moment.
Developed jointly by Safe Work Australia and state and territory regulators, the survey played a significant role in bringing psychosocial risk into the mainstream of Australian workplaces, including construction firms that had traditionally focused safety efforts on physical hazards.
Its closure leaves building companies facing a higher legal bar while losing one of the most established tools for understanding psychological risk on site and in head office alike.
Dr Anna Kiaos, one of Australia’s leading researchers in organisational culture and psychosocial risk, said the shift in regulatory expectation has changed the nature of conversations she is having with company boards and executives, including those in construction and property sectors.
Dr Kiaos, who is affiliated with the University of New South Wales’ Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health, advises organisations across nearly every sector, including government, financial services, health, professional services, hospitality and increasingly the building industry.
Her guidance draws on her own peer-reviewed field research into organisational culture and psychosocial risk.
Her latest study, published this year in the Journal of Organizational Ethnography, examined organisational culture inside Service NSW over eight months, drawing on 74 interviews across six organisational levels.
The research found that organisations can be genuinely well intentioned yet still misread psychosocial hazards, responding to exhaustion, rising error rates and declining morale with engagement or culture initiatives rather than addressing excessive workload and working conditions, a pattern building sector leaders are being encouraged to watch for on high-pressure projects.
That gap between measuring employee sentiment and understanding underlying psychosocial risk led Dr Kiaos to develop the Culture Pressure Map™, an organisational diagnostic informed by her research.
Unlike traditional organisation-wide surveys, the tool examines shared culture, subcultures and microcultures to identify where psychosocial pressure is accumulating.
For building companies with dispersed project teams and site-based crews, this approach is designed to help leaders prioritise action and create documented evidence to support governance and regulatory compliance.
“Cultural pressure doesn’t sit evenly across an organisation,” Dr Kiaos said.
“It accumulates in particular teams, under particular leaders and in the gap between what an organisation says it values and what it actually rewards.”
With the People at Work survey closing, building sector leaders are being reminded that psychosocial risk management is no longer a point-in-time exercise.
Regulators expect ongoing identification, assessment, control and review of hazards, supported by clear evidence of action taken.
As boards across the industry weigh up what tools will replace the outgoing platform, the broader message from researchers is that understanding where pressure builds within an organisation, not just whether it exists, will be central to meeting the new compliance standard.
