Dr Audrey Fleming, head of culture change & psychosocial safety at the British Safety Council sets out how organisations can support their staff to better wellbeing at work
Workplace wellbeing is no longer simply offering employees a wellbeing app, resilience training or access to an employee assistance programme to ‘fix’ people. Increasingly, the focus is shifting towards psychosocial safety and fixing the workplace environment: specifically, how we design, organise and manage work affect people’s health and performance.
These can no longer be considered intangible and organisations will be increasingly expected to adapt. Australia has already embedded explicit duties to manage psychosocial risks within its work health and safety framework across all states, territories and the Commonwealth. Under the model Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) regulations, employers must manage psychosocial risks, with specific consideration given to factors including job demands, systems of work, workplace interactions and how work is managed, organised and supported.
The UK is also currently developing a clearer regulatory focus. In December 2025, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) issued a Notice of Contravention to the University of Birmingham following an investigation into its arrangements for managing work-related stress. The HSE identified shortcomings including generic stress risk assessments, insufficient employee involvement and control measures that had not been effectively implemented.
The UK courts are sending a similar message. In March 2026, a former Jockey Club Racecourses employee was awarded £990,000 after the High Court found that the organisation had failed to respond appropriately to repeated warnings about duty of care towards the employee, which resulted in severe workplace stress.
The wider evidence is stark. The International Labour Organisation’s 2026 global report estimates that psychosocial risk factors are linked to more than 840,000 deaths each year, nearly 45 million disability-adjusted life years and economic losses equivalent to 1.37 per cent of global GDP annually. The report highlights the relationship between health and the way work is designed, organised and managed.
The direction of travel is clear: psychosocial risk is increasingly being treated as a health and safety issue, not simply an HR or employee wellbeing issue indicating that collaboration between internal functions is required.
Psychosocial hazards are a workplace risk
‘Psychosocial safety’ is sometimes considered as a complicated term for something fundamental: how the work environment affects our psychological, physical and mental health.
Psychosocial hazards arise from aspects of work organisation and design, and their social and environmental context, including increasing work demands, excessive working hours, poor support, job insecurity, bullying and harassment, and inadequate recognition.
Crucially, these are not characteristics of individual employees; they are created and amplified by organisational systems and decisions.
This is why psychosocial hazards need to be identified and assessed, then managed, incorporating appropriate tools and processes, alongside other existing organisational risks.
The ISO 45003:2021 standard provides guidance for managing psychosocial risks within an occupational health and safety management system. Designed to complement ISO 45001, it provides a systematic approach to preventing work-related injury and ill health while promoting psychological health and wellbeing. However, this guidance standard does not provide any suggested tools and is not legally binding.
A holistic approach to creating a healthy workplace
A holistic approach towards a healthy workplace recognises that for people to thrive and perform requires creating the optimal environment. This includes strategically identifying and managing the hazards, consulting with people and leadership and providing the resources required. It also involves promotion through awareness, competency and having access to work/life balance options, flexibility and health screening and surveillance provision. And when people need to be protected, access to external professional support and resources.
Designing the conditions for success
So, what does this mean in practice?
Firstly, organisations need to identify where their risks are. Employee surveys and wellbeing data will likely provide useful insight, but they need to be combined with organisational information and meaningful conversations with workers. Absence, turnover, working hours, grievances, incidents, workload and employee feedback can all contribute towards revealing themes and trends.
Secondly, organisations need to look upstream. If employees are reporting stress due to workload, the solution should not be a wellbeing webinar or wellness initiative. The organisation should ask whether staffing, deadlines, priorities, resources, job design and management practices are contributing to the problem.
If people are experiencing burnout, identify what is driving sustained exposure to excessive demands.
If employees feel powerless, examine levels of control they have over their work and whether decision-making structures support autonomy.
If organisational change is causing confusion and anxiety, examine how change is communicated, planned and implemented.
Moving from intention to action
A policy is not a systemic change; a training course is not a control measure of a risk assessment. For many organisations, the biggest challenge is not realising that workplace wellbeing matters, the challenge comes from converting intention into improving the working environment through leadership commitment, functional collaboration and work redesign; empowering people to thrive.
The emerging regulatory landscape reinforces the urgency, but the opportunity needs to be more person-centric than compliance.
This is where healthier workplaces begin.
